Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History

9 New Battlegrounds, Old Strategies

9 New Battlegrounds, Old Strategies In the South, we are two cultures, one black and the other white, and yet we are one culture. That is the essence of our southern lives, a tension-laden contradiction, an apparent impossibility which is the root of our being. —Joel Williamson, ‘‘The Oneness of Southern Life’’ Reminiscent of the hopeful freedmen who lined up by the registration desks in the tumultuous days following the Confederacy’s surrender, African Americans after the Voting Rights Act passed stood in registration lines, carefully filling out forms with whatever writing implements they had at hand. One hundred years had passed, and nothing, it seemed, had happened. But 1965 was not 1865; there would be no hooded hooligans roaming the night, no extralegal legislatures sealing off blacks from the ballot box, and no creative accounting of votes or voters. Maybe. The immediate results of the 1965 Voting Rights Act sufficed to stifle thoughts that the second Reconstruction would unfold as the first—an initial ray of hope followed by darkness and despair. Changes were especially notable in the Deep South, where the most egregious restrictions on the voting rights of black citizens existed. By 1967 black registration had jumped from 19 percent to 52 percent in Alabama and from 7 to 60 percent in Mississippi.1 By the mid-1970s African Americans accounted for one-fifth to one-fourth of the electorate in the Deep South, and politicians responded accordingly. The open race-baiting of the one-party era subsided. Andrew Young spoke 256 New Battlegrounds, Old Strategies 257 about the new political arithmetic in 1976: ‘‘It used to be Southern politics was just ‘nigger’ politics—a question of which candidate could ‘outnigger’ the other. Then you registered 10% to 15% in the community, and folks would start saying ‘Nigra.’ Later you got 35% to 40% registered, and it was amazing how quick they learned how to say ‘Nee-grow.’ And now that we’ve got 50%, 60%, 70% of the black votes registered in the South, everybody’s proud to be associated with their black brothers and sisters.’’2 Election results reflected the new political era as Dale Bumpers, touting a race-neutral populism, became governor of Arkansas in 1970, handily defeating Orval Faubus. The following year, William Waller won election as governor of Mississippi on a platform of racial moderation. In Georgia, Jimmy Carter replaced rabid segregationist Lester Maddox in the State House. As Carter’s successor in Georgia, George Busbee noted in an appropriate metaphor : ‘‘The politics of race has gone with the wind.’’3 Voting Rights and Wrongs If the history that prevails reflects the power that is wielded, then black southerners have become important players in shaping the South’s new historical context. The congressional roll call on the voting-rights extension in 1975 revealed the impact of black enfranchisement on southern congressmen . In the House, the 1974 class of southern Democrats voted twelve to one in favor of extension; the 1972 group supported the measure by a ten-totwo margin. In the Senate, southern Democrats voted for the extension nine to six. Those Democratic senators elected after 1966 supported the bill by a vote of eight to one; those elected prior to 1966 opposed the extension by a margin of five to one.4 By 1995 African Americans held 16 percent of all seats in southern state legislators while constituting 16 percent of the total population. In the thirty years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, black representation in southern state legislatures increased more than sixteenfold, surpassing the rate of increase in the North (35 percent), where only 4.7 percent of the legislators are black, compared with a black population proportion of 9 percent.5 There is also evidence that the extreme racial polarization in southern voting is moderating somewhat. In the 1998 congressional elections, after court reversals reduced black congressman Mel Watt’s thin black majority to a decided minority of 34 percent, he won reelection with 56 percent of the vote 258 Still Fighting the Civil War over a white Republican opponent. Similar results occurred in redrawn congressional districts in Georgia, where black representatives Cynthia McKinney and Sanford Bishop easily won reelection in 1998. The black electorate in their districts accounted for roughly one-third of the eligible voters. All three incumbents achieved relatively easy victories in the 2000 elections as...