Former North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms has died at the age of eighty-six. During the 1960s, he was a vocal critic of the civil rights movement. He once wrote, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.” In 1983, he opposed the Martin Luther King Day bill. Helms was also a longtime opponent of AIDS research and treatment. In 1988, Helms said, “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.” On foreign affairs, Helms was a supporter of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and was linked to backing right-wing death squads in El Salvador. In 1996, he co-sponsored the Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened the US embargo against Cuba. Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, praised Jesse Helms. He said, “Along with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, [Helms] helped establish the conservative movement and became a powerful voice for free markets and free people.”