Campaign

Haley dogged by Civil War controversy: ‘I had Black friends growing up’

by Caroline Vakil - 01/05/24 2:24 PM ET

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks at a town hall campaign event, Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024, in Rye, N.H. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley is finding herself on defense again after she said “I had Black friends growing up” during a town hall as she sought to clean up remarks she made around the cause of the Civil War.

During a CNN town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Haley was asked to respond to criticism made by fellow GOP White House candidate Chris Christie after the former U.N. ambassador initially omitted slavery in her answer about the cause of the Civil War. Christie claimed she had answered the way she did because she was “unwilling to offend anyone by telling truth.”

“No one’s ever said that I am unwilling to offend. I offend plenty of people, because I call people out when they do something wrong,” Haley said during the town hall.

“What I will tell you is Chris Christie is from New Jersey. I should have said slavery right off the bat. But if you grow up in South Carolina, literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery. You grow up and you have — you know, I had Black friends growing up. It is a very talked about thing,” she added.

Haley’s response prompted jabs from fellow Republican White House hopeful Ron DeSantis’s campaign and criticism from pundits and political observers.

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“DAY 9 of Nikki Haley trying to clean up her Civil War gaffe. ‘I had black friends growing up,’” the DeSantis War Room account on X, formerly Twitter, wrote, attaching a clip of her remarks at the CNN town hall.

“Can I do a public service announcement as the Black person on the panel?” said “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin. “Non-Black people: When you are trying to convince someone that you are not racist, do not say, ‘I have Black friends.’”

During a joint interview with journalists from NBC News and The Des Moines Register on Friday, Haley defended her comments from the CNN town hall, saying she knew firsthand the pains of racism and that it was a “source of pride” to say she had Black and white friends.

“We were the only Indian family in our small Southern town. I was teased every day for being brown. So anyone that wants to question it, can go back and look at what I’ve said on how hard it was to grow up in the Deep South,” Haley said.

“What I will tell you is saying that I had Black friends is a source of pride. Saying that I had white friends is a source of pride. If you want to know what it was like growing up, I was disqualified from a beauty pageant because I wasn’t white or Black, because they didn’t know where to put me. So look, I know the hardships, the pain that come with racism,” she added later.

Her comments Friday are the latest in a series of remarks she made after initially seeking to clarify remarks she made in late December during a town hall in Berlin, N.H., when an attendee asked her what was the cause of the Civil War.

“Well, don’t come with an easy question, right? I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was gonna run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said.

“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And we — I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people,” Haley added.

The attendee later noted that she had not mentioned the word “slavery” in her reply, to which Haley responded, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

However, Haley later attempted to clean up her remarks, saying during a radio interview, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”

“We know that. That’s the easy part of it. What I was saying was, what does it mean to us today? What it means to us today is about freedom. That’s what that was all about,” she added.

The gaffes come at a critical moment for Haley, who has been seeing some momentum in New Hampshire polling, just a week out from the Iowa GOP caucus. At the same time, former President Trump continues to lead both DeSantis and Haley in both early-state and national polling.