Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley on Thursday night tried to defend herself from criticism she received over comments she made about the causes of the Civil War—that infamously failed to mention slavery—by mentioning that she “had Black friends growing up.”
The former South Carolina governor was asked during a CNN town hall about the widely mocked answer she gave to a voter at an event in New Hampshire last month. Moderator Erin Burnett asked Haley about the gaffe, which has become “a challenge” for her campaign in recent weeks, noting that Haley had since acknowledged it was a mistake not to mention slavery.
Reiterating that she should have “said slavery right off the bat,” Haley added: “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.”
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“It is a very talked about thing,” she continued. “We have a big history in South Carolina, when it comes to, you know, slavery, when it comes to all the things that happened with the Civil War, all of that.”
In New Hampshire, Haley had said she believed the cause of the Civil War “was basically how government was going to run—the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” She later claimed the man who had asked her the question was “definitely a Democrat plant.”
Explaining on Thursday how she’d come to that conclusion, Haley said: “I was thinking past slavery, and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have said slavery but in, in my mind, that’s a given that everybody associates the civil war with slavery.”
