Jesse Helms, the senator who picked at the scars of racial segregation to help turn America’s South into a Republican bastion, has died at the age of 86.

His admirers hailed him as a defender of conservative values, a champion of the common man and a scourge of communism. Others will remember him as a narrow-minded bigot who built a 30-year congressional career along racial faultlines.

Mr Helms opposed a national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King, led efforts to stop an extension of the Voting Rights Act and called young blacks “Negro hoodlums”.

Although capable of disarming charm, he appeared to relish his notoriety in the liberal media, saying: “I wasn’t interested in a popularity contest and surely didn’t care about anything the big newspapers called me. I saw how they constantly ridiculed conservative ideas and conservative people.”

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In many ways Senator Jesse Helms embodies Tarheel characteristics

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One of his most bitterly fought elections was in 1990 against Harvey Gantt, the black mayor of Charlotte, who supported affirmative action.

An advert for Mr Helms showed a white man’s hands ripping up a company rejection notice because “they had to give it to a minority”. The letter then faded into a picture of his black opponent — whose head appeared to be crushed by the white hands.

Several years later Mr Gantt said: “The tension that he creates, the fear he creates in people, is how he’s won campaigns.”

Mr Helms’s lasting legacy was in helping to engineer the transfer of white conservative support in the South from the Democrats to the Republicans, a party he joined in 1970 and helped to shift decisively to the right in the following decades.

He also played a key role in resurrecting the presidential prospects of Ronald Reagan, who described his ally as a “lionhearted leader of a great and growing army”.

Mr Helms retired as senator of his native North Carolina in 2002.

President Bush paid tribute to Mr Helms as “a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty.” He added: “Today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.

“It is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July.”

John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, hailed “a life dedicated to serving this nation”, while Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said that Mr Helms had been a courageous champion of his causes with few equals.

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