Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South

Epilogue

Epilogue New South, Old South In 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing “to the victims of lynching for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation.” Cosponsored by North Carolina’s senatorial delegation, the largely symbolic measure acknowledged the nearly five thousand persons known to have been lynched, and promised to remember “the history of lynching, to ensure that these tragedies will be neither forgotten nor repeated.” In the following year, a state-commissioned report was published on the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup, challenging the white supremacist narrative that had downplayed the violence and injustices visited on the black community of New Hanover County. While the document offered only a general endorsement of reparations for the damage wrought by the attack, this official recognition of the wrongs committed was perhaps cathartic for descendants of survivors.1 In a truly historic turn of events, North Carolina joined four other southern states—Virginia, Florida, Maryland, and Delaware—in electing Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States during the 2008 election. The son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, Obama would become the first African American to hold the office. In North Carolina, Obama had bested Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate, by a mere 14,177 votes out of the more than 4.2 million ballots cast. It was enough to place the state in the Democratic column for the first time since 1976. According to exit polling, 35 percent of the state’s white voters—compared to 43 percent nationally—voted for Obama. Similar postelection polls suggested that an astounding one hundred percent of black women in North Carolina had voted for the African American candidate. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, along with the reenfranchisement i-xx_1-228_Cleg.indd 177 9/15/10 11:36:48 AM 178 Epilogue of southern blacks, had facilitated this most improbable victory. Moreover, Jesse Jackson’s historic runs for the presidency in 1984 and 1988 had made the Obama campaign conceivable, as had the election and appointment of African Americans to an array of federal, state, and local offices. Shifting demographics brought more young people and Democratic-leaning Hispanics into the electorate, and robust voter registration efforts supplemented savvy employment of the Internet for organizing and fundraising purposes. Still, against the backdrop of the country’s history, the election of a black northern Democrat to the highest office in the land could not avoid evoking both widespread wonderment and incredulity among many. Notwithstanding the formidable oratorical powers of Obama and his enticingly packaged liberalism, his election triumph was one of the most momentous events in the history of American politics.2 Obama’s narrow victory in North Carolina during the general election—he carried the state handily during the Democratic primaries—can be viewed as part of the ongoing remaking of the New South. No longer politically solid, overwhelmingly poverty stricken, and educationally backward, the region had birthed significant metropolitan areas by the late twentieth century, with first-rate universities and a growing number of high-tech jobs complementing this development. Burgeoning Hispanic populations in states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas confounded the biracial paradigm that Presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigning in Raleigh in October 2008 (courtesy of Tim Ayers) i-xx_1-228_Cleg.indd 178 9/15/10 11:36:48 AM Epilogue 179 had governed social relations for centuries. Additionally, the symbolism of the election of a mixed-race president was not lost on anyone who noticed the increasing racial and cultural diversity of American life. In notable instances, this iteration of the New South was sometimes bold enough to confront the racial ugliness of its past, though much has yet to be resolved or addressed. If Obama’s victory revealed the willingness of some southerners to confront and surmount their history, it certainly did not conclude the country’s ongoing struggle with race, notwithstanding flowery talk of a “postracial” America. Only days before the election, the soon-to-be president was lynched in effigy in Tennessee, Indiana, and California. On November 1, a coffin with his picture affixed to it turned up at a polling place in Craven County, North Carolina. Despite this new era of American democracy, some minds had simply not been changed regarding matters of race.3 Having not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, Rowan...