Helms, as a prominent TV editorialist, repeatedly criticized what he called "the so-called" civil rights movement, attacked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and portrayed the white South as a victim of a national smear campaign.

"The civil rights struggle is now no more than a political gambit leading to anarchy," Helms said in a WRAL editorial in April 1964. "It is time for politicians to stop thinking of the minority bloc votes of the next election and start thinking of the next generation. Otherwise America will be destroyed from within -- just as Karl Marx forecast."

But in his forthcoming memoir, Helms suggests he favored voluntary racial integration -- but only if was not done through pressure by the federal government or by civil rights protests, which he thought would worsen race relations. It was a view expressed by a number of conservative Southerners at the time.

"I did not advocate segregation, and I did not advocate aggravation," Helms writes in the memoir, called "Here's Where I Stand," which is scheduled to be published by Random House in September. "By that I mean that I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, and who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built those communities in the first place. I believed right would prevail as people followed their own consciences."

Some see a disconnect between Helms' memoir and his role as a leading North Carolina critic of the civil rights movement.

"He is up to his old tricks," said Ernest Furgurson, Helms' biographer and a historian who lives in Washington, D.C. "I can't recall anything in his career that suggested he was eager for any such thing to happen as volunteer integration. He's saying something now he didn't say then."

Helms' views on race relations are only a small part of his forthcoming book, which covers a wide spectrum of issues from Cuba to China. But it has always been hard for Helms to escape questions of race because it has become so intertwined with his career.

Before Helms was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, he was an outspoken figure in North Carolina -- a sort of Tar Heel Rush Limbaugh of his day. As an editorialist for WRAL-TV, Helms broadcast his "Viewpoint" commentaries across Eastern North Carolina. His commentaries were also heard on more than 50 radio stations on the Tobacco Network and published in 40 weekly and 10 daily newspapers. His columns often were reprinted in The Citizen, the monthly magazine of the White Citizens Council, a segregationist organization with headquarters in Jackson, Miss.

Status quo challenged

During the 1960s, segregation was law in North Carolina, but it was being challenged by lunch counter sit-ins by black students and street protests.

Most white North Carolinians, having been reared under the system, believed in racial segregation. A Lou Harris poll taken in April 1960 found that 54 percent of North Carolinians thought that blacks should not be served at lunch counters, while 22 percent thought they should be served. Nearly every North Carolina politician of the era voiced varying degrees of support for segregation, including moderates such as Govs. Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford.

Helms was closely associated politically with the Democratic Party's most conservative and most stridently anti-integration faction. Helms' chief political adviser would be Tom Ellis, a Raleigh lawyer who in the 1950s suggested that North Carolina's schools be closed rather than be integrated. Helms was also close to I. Beverly Lake Sr., a Wake Forest lawyer, who ran the last stridently segregationist campaigns for governor in 1960 and 1964.

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