Last week, Haley Barbour, former Mississippi governor and former Republican National Committee chairman, made headlines for calling President Obama’s policies “tar babies.” While Barbour and other defenders of the term say it means “a difficult problem that’s only aggravated by attempts to solve it,” the phrase has been used as a racial slur against African Americans.

When the offensive comment was brought to his attention, Barbour continued to defend the term and issued a non-apology. He told Politico: “If someone takes offense, I regret it. But, again, neither the context nor the connotation was intended to offend.”

This is far from the first racist remark Barbour has made. That’s why professor Peter Dreier is calling on people to boycott the clients of Barbour’s lobbyist firm BGR Group. He is also urging elected politicians and government officials to stop meeting with the group.

In Talking Points Memo, Dreier wrote that in 1991, Barbour co-founded BGR Group, whose clients consist of “corporations, trade associations, cities and one labor union.” Some of these include drug company GlaxoSmithKline, casino gambling group Caesars Entertainment, oil corporation Chevron, JetBlue Airways, Toyota, the University of Florida, the labor union National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and the cities of Waukesha, Wisc. and DuPage County, Ill. Last year, these clients paid BGR Group $14.6 million to lobby Congress on their behalf.

Dreier said it’s about time to start a “Boycott Barbour” movement to condemn Barbour’s racism and hit him where it financially hurts. Dreier wrote:

Barbour has a history of making racist “gaffes,” and then trying to twist their meaning to avoid taking responsibility for his ugly remarks.

In 1982, Barbour reprimanded an aide who had made a racist remark, but his comments revealed that his staffer wasn't the only bigot in the room. Barbour said that if the aide "persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks," according to The Daily Beast.

In 2011, … Barbour refused to denounce attempts to create a special Mississippi license plate honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a confederate general, slave trader and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. …

Barbour grew up in Yazoo, Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s, during the height of the southern civil rights movement. Yazoo was a hotbed of civil rights activism. In 2010, asked about growing up in the midst of Jim Crow segregation, Barbour told the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine: “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”

Dreier also stated that Barbour has been a staunch defender of White Citizen Councils, white supremacist groups that supported segregation in the Civil Rights era. Dreier wrote: “Barbour is not a subtle racist.…He’s an outright in-your-face racist who has made a series of offensive comments.”

The Center for Responsive Politics has a full list of BGR Group’s clients here.