When Sen. Trent Lott announced he was leaving Congress, all the stories emphasized the most infamous moment in his career: his remarks five years ago that glorified Strom Thurmond and the South’s segregationist past. The furor cost him his job as Republican leader and rightly so, because it was not an isolated incident.

As a student leader at the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s, Lott fought to keep his fraternity lily-white. As a young lawyer and budding politician, he pioneered the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy,” playing on racial fears to drive conservative whites away from the Democrats.

His first job in Washington was for a rabid racist, Democratic Rep. William Colmer, but when Lott won Colmer’s seat in 1972, he ran as a Republican. His voting record on civil-rights legislation was consistently terrible, and he even admitted in a 1997 interview with Time magazine: “Yes, you could say I favored segregation then. I don’t now.”

Still, Lott’s propensity for race-baiting politics should not stand for his entire career. For one thing, he seemed truly contrite after the Thurmond incident and repudiated his past policies. “I’ve said things and done things on race-related issues that weren’t intended to be hurtful but that I now realize were hurtful,” he told Time.