OBILE,
Ala., Dec. 16 — A chastened Trent Lott told a national black television audience
tonight that he regretted his vote against a national holiday honoring the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and vowed to push an agenda that would help blacks
and other minorities if he remained the Senate Republican leader.
Fighting for his political life, Senator Lott, the Mississippi Republican who was set to reclaim the majority leader's post before a furor erupted over remarks that were widely deemed racially insensitive, acknowledged what he called his own "misbehavior" over the years.
In words that seemed sure to surprise and possibly infuriate a good portion of Mr. Lott's traditional political base, he told his interviewer, Ed Gordon of Black Entertainment Television, "There has been immoral leadership in my part of the country for a long time."
Mr. Gordon asked, "Were you a part of that?"
"Yes, I can't deny that," Mr. Lott said. "I believe that I have changed, and I'm trying to do a better job, but, yes, I'm a part of the region and the history that has not always done what it's supposed to have done."
Mr. Lott's remarks, his fifth effort to explain himself, were far more self-critical than any of his previous mea culpas and his most reflective since he mounted a drive to salvage his leadership post.
Asked if he himself had ever been racist, or prejudiced, Mr. Lott talked about his upbringing in a family of "very meager means" and in a poor and racially polarized time and place.
"You are who you are by virtue of where you're born," he said. "There was a society then that was wrong, and wicked. I didn't create it, and I didn't really understand it for many, many years."
But, he continued, addressing Mr. Gordon, who is black: "In order to be a racist, you have to feel superior. I don't feel superior to you at all. I don't think any man or any woman is superior to any other."
Mr. Lott's half-hour conversation, taped this afternoon at a CBS affiliate here, came 11 days after his remarks at a 100th-birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina.
Referring then to Mr. Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat run for president on a segregationist platform, Mr. Lott said, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
In the interview today, Mr. Gordon twice pressed Mr. Lott to explain just what "problems" he had meant.
Mr. Lott insisted he had been alluding to Mr. Thurmond's anti-Communism, his World War II record fighting Nazism, his fiscal responsibility and his emphasis on law and order — "protecting people of all races against crime."
"I understand that that was interpreted by many the way that it was," he added. "I should have been sensitive to that."
Asked when his views on segregation had changed, Mr. Lott said his shift in thinking had been "evolutionary."
"When I got out of college, got into law school, I started studying civil rights suits, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and I wrote a paper on it for my constitutional law," he said. "But I think it really happened when I started to move around statewide. I went into the poorest part of the state. I saw poverty I'd never seen before."
Reminded of reports last week that he had in the early 1960's led a successful fight to keep blacks out of his national college fraternity, Sigma Nu, Mr. Lott disavowed the episode, yet also tried to minimize his role.
"That was wrong at that time," he said. "I was wrong. At the time I was not as active a participant as some people would have said, but that's irrelevant now. That was 30, 40 years ago."
Mr. Lott, who appeared buoyant even while expressing contrition at a news conference on Friday in Pascagoula, was grim-faced throughout today's interview, particularly as Mr. Gordon recited a litany of Mr. Lott's votes and actions that have been criticized by civil rights groups.
Seeking to explain his vote against the King holiday in 1983, Mr. Lott at first pleaded ignorance. "I'm not sure we in America, certainly not white America, people in the South, fully understood who this man was, the impact he has had on the fabric of this country," he said.
"But you certainly understood by the time that vote came up, Senator," Mr. Gordon interjected.
"I did, but I've learned a lot more since then," Mr. Lott replied. "I want to make this point very clear: I have a high appreciation for him now. He's a man that was for nonviolence, a man that did change this country. I made a mistake. I would vote, now, for a Martin Luther King holiday."
Mr. Lott, who has opposed affirmative action programs in Congress, also said he supported affirmative action "across the board." But he stopped well short of embracing what he called "timetables and quotas."
Instead, he pointed to his alma mater, the University of Mississippi, as an institution that had put its difficult past behind it in reaching out to minorities. Mr. Lott was a senior there when James Meredith integrated the university in 1962, triggering riots that required thousands of troops to suppress.
Mr. Lott praised the university's chancellor, Robert Khayat, for banishing the Confederate flag, the school's old symbol, and for organizing an Institute of Reconciliation, which arose to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Ole Miss riots in September.
As recently as last March, Mr. Lott refused to say whether he supported the display of the Confederate battle flag on the beach in Biloxi, Miss., near Pascagoula. In addition, Ole Miss officials said, he did not reply to an invitation from the university to participate in the remembrances of the 1962 riots.
Mr. Lott, who said he thought he would survive his current predicament with his leadership intact, promised he would then advance an "equal opportunity agenda," though he did not say what kinds of measures he would push.
"This is an opportunity for me to do something about years of misbehavior," he said. "As majority leader, I can move an agenda that would have things that would be helpful to African-Americans, and minorities of all kinds, and all Americans, but specifically aimed at showing African-Americans that they have particular concerns and needs that we have to advance."