Interesting N&O article on Rene Dickerson, the artist who will unveil his portrait of the late Sen. Jesse Helms tonight:

In 2001, Washington Post columnist David Broder called Helms “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.”

“He was just from that era,” Dickerson, 58, said in an interview Tuesday. “One of the things I came to appreciate about Jesse Helms was that he was a man of integrity based on what he believed. He didn’t hide behind it. ‘This is what I am, take it or leave it.'”

Tonight, Dickerson will unveil his portrait of Helms, who served 30 years in the Senate and died July 4, 2008. It will hang in the Eisenhower Room of the Capitol Hill Club. Among those attending tonight’s unveiling will be GOP lawmakers, Helms’ colleagues, the senator’s wife and other family members.

“It’s an honor and an irony,” Dickerson said. “He pulled no punches about blacks in this country and where their position should be.”

The irony, of course, is that Dickerson is black, as is Brian Summers, the political consultant and former Helms staffer who commissioned the portrait. Summers adds that he “never let other people’s judgments of the senator impact the man I knew and respected and grew to love.”