As Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., faces Tuesday's runoff election against Democrat Mike Espy to decide the final Senate seat of 2018, CNN has dug up information that she once pushed a resolution praising a Confederate soldier's effort to "defend his homeland."
A state resolution to honor Effie Lucille Nicholson Pharr, then 92, co-sponsored by Hyde-Smith as a state senator in 2007, called Pharr, "the last known living 'Real Daughter' of the Confederacy living in Mississippi," per the report.
Hyde-Smith was a Democrat at the time, before switching parties in 2010.
Pharr's father was a Confederate soldier in Robert E. Lee's army in the Civil War, which the Mississippi resolution referred to as "The War Between the States."
Hyde-Smith's resolution said with "great pride," Mississippi lawmakers "join the Sons of Confederate Veterans" to honor Pharr, whose father "fought to defend his homeland and contributed to the rebuilding of the country," according to CNN.
The resolution "really seems to be an excuse to glorify the Confederate cause," Nina Silber, the president of the Society of Civil War Historians and a Boston University history professor, told CNN.
It "rests on an odd combination of perpetuating both the Confederate legacy and the idea that this was not really in conflict with being a good citizen of the nation," she added.
Attacks against Sen. Hyde-Smith have painted her as racist and perpetuated by the "liberal media," Hyde-Smith campaign spokeswoman Melissa Scallan said in a statement, per CNN.
"They have stooped to a new low, attacking her entire family and trying to destroy her personally instead of focusing on the clear differences on the issues between Cindy Hyde-Smith and her far-left opponent," Scallan added, per the report.
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