An excerpt from a New York Times article, titled Race in the South in the Age of Obama. It covers a black politician, James Field, who is a representative of Cullman, Alabama.
Versions of Cullman’s old sundown sign hung beside county roads well into the 1970s, and all of them repeated the message that the travel writer Carl Carmer saw when he visited Cullman in the late 1920s: “Nigger Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town.” The sign was notorious all over Alabama, and coupled with Cullman’s powerful Ku Klux Klan, it created a racial deterrent so effective that even today, Cullman’s are exits off the Interstate that most African-Americans avoid.
You can find the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28Alabama-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
Once, when I visited Peek’s shop alone, Peek told me: “James is not like any black man that I know. He’s just different. He just don’t have that mentality, anybody owes him anything. He just gets out and works and helps people, earns what he gets. If James wasn’t black, you’d think he was white. That doesn’t sound right, but you know what I mean.”
Everybody in Cullman knows what he means, perhaps most especially the men who gather weekday mornings at a round table at the All Steak restaurant, where many of them spent much of this past year not getting over the fact of an African-American president. The group fortified themselves with daily doses of rue — “Thought I’d never see it”— dared one another to use “the N-word” in front of a Yankee and shared memories of how Cullman used to be — “They were afraid to come to town.” One day in September, a retired Alabama state trooper named Charlie Shafer leaned back from his eggs and asked, “Have you all ever stopped to consider how much better off the country would be if Obama’d been. . . . ” Quick and fast came the replies:
“White.”
“Died in childbirth.”
Periodically, Fields’s name came up, and people leapt to describe what “a hard-working, down-to-earth person” he is. It was recurrent. Harsh expressions of disdain for blacks in general would smoothly give way to admiration for the black individual in their midst. The dichotomy was expressed in a particularly blunt way by a jeweler named Richard White. “Cullman’s the best-kept secret in the South,” White said. “Low-key. Everybody gets along. And the three-tenths of 1 percent might have something to do with it.” Then, without any kind of transition, he added: “James is a good friend of mine. He’s a good man. He’s straight. He’s honest. He’s well educated.”
When I asked Rozalyn Love, the medical student, about the daily scene at the All Steak, she said that in Cullman, “there’s almost to some degree pride about being a little bit notorious.” Then she added, “They’re a lot less racist there than some of them would like people to think they are.” This is undoubtedly true; it’s not 1964 anymore. Many older white people from Cullman also believe that attitudes toward race are slowly shifting. “My children have a different view of racial makeup than I had,” says Judge Chaney. “From my father’s generation — extremely prejudiced — to mine — we’re working through it — to my children, race is a nonissue. That’s not to say there still aren’t racial tensions, whether it be black or Hispanic.”
The owner of a classic-car rebuilding shop, Jerry Burgess, made a similar generational point one day at his garage when he described something he saw in the 1960s and has never forgotten. Burgess is a bootlegger’s son with long, stringy hair under a dirty cap, a ZZ Top beard, an arm sleeved in tattoos and friendly eyes. “I can remember when the sign was on the edge of Cullman, down on Highway 31, close to the tracks,” he told me. “It said ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on a Nigger at Night.’ I can’t hardly say the word. My kids raise Cain about it. A lot of old-timers still use the word. My uncle does. Don’t think a thing about it. He’s a little old-fashioned. To me it seems like a very different time. Now most people would be O.K. with black people.”
Still, when Cecil Parker, a retired African-American construction worker who grew up near Colony, thinks about race relations in Alabama, he says: “It’s better, but it’s not great. Some know better. Some don’t care. Same people who did all the hanging and burning are still alive. They were taught against us. That we weren’t human. Alabama do not like black folk telling him what to do.”
That Fields evaluated this situation and sensed he could win an election remains a source of wonder among Alabama political insiders. “Other legislators,” he says, “still ask me, ‘How’d you do that?!’ I look at them, ‘How’d I do what?’ It’s not like I woke up and hoped people would vote for me.” But of course he was aware of what he was up against. The famous phrase that V. O. Key invented to describe the intensely localized, almost tribal nature of Alabamians at the polls is “friends and neighbors” voting. Key’s insight was that Alabama voters prefer political representatives who lived close by, even when the more distant figure might better speak to issues of common concern. A result, according to Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, is that “I haven’t seen a lot of coming together in a shared cause.” Thus, the enduring importance of some feeling of personal connection: of a handshake, of being able to say a candidate embraces my values, if not my plight. In small communities like Cullman, there is an aversion to the intensely mediated sense of experience that the Internet has brought to so much American life — and to American politics. Fierce Southern resistance to political messages of change has a lot to do with belief in the value of immediate encounters and a primary fear of strangers and outsiders — especially black or Northern ones — who may bring harm. “Folks down here kind of like to touch and feel the merchandise” is the way a Cullman banker named Dan W. Mann puts it. So the problem for Fields as a candidate amounted to a fundamental, transformative question about race in the white South: could a black man be considered a friend and a neighbor?
The candidate who ran against Fields in the special election was Wayne Willingham. The difference between Fields’s devoted life of public service and his opponent’s sparser record was stark. Further, a Cullman relative of Wayne’s, Joe Willingham, is a reputed Klan leader. At some point, Fields says, in the Deep South, the race card “always comes up when there are African-Americans running against whites.” At the campaign’s outset, people told Fields: “James, it’ll be hard to beat him. He’ll bring out the worst in folks.” In recent years, racial and sexual innuendo helped North Carolina’s Jesse Helms and Tennessee’s Bob Corker defeat black Senate opponents, and of course, race-baiting also happens locally. In 1992, Selma’s white incumbent mayor, Joe T. Smitherman, prevailed against his black challenger, James Perkins, in part by renting a room, filling it with rows of elderly white women and just as many telephone lines and instructing the women to make white voters aware of what was at stake. Fields understood that to win he especially would need to neutralize resentments, fears and prejudices by blurring his color into the background where it was subordinate to his character. His life was his case, but his means of expressing it would have to be his personality.
To explain his thinking about elections, Fields talks about Charlie Shafer. Fields says that Shafer was on active duty in 1965 in Selma, during the seminal civil rights movement demonstration that became known as Bloody Sunday after lawmen carrying clubs and tear gas attacked unarmed protesters. “When they marched to Montgomery from Selma, he was one of the troopers,” Fields says. “But if he lived in my district, I think he’d vote for me. I truly believe that. Because he’s gotten to know me. But then again he may not, and that’s O.K.” Fields’s point was not that he was irresistible, just qualified, and that voting for him didn’t have to be a big deal. The more normal it could be made to seem, the better.
Normal in Cullman means Christian. Conspicuous displays of faith by politicians are so common that it’s a surprise when one doesn’t have the Ten Commandments posted on his office wall. Accordingly, Fields began his last competition by placing a newspaper advertisement challenging Willingham to “a race that is God-driven and Christ-centered.” This was the only election on the ballot in the state at the time, and a black man running in Cullman was a big deal. Dozens of idealistic volunteers, most of them young and white, joined the campaign. Fields says: “I told the outsiders, ‘Don’t go out in the county. Just work the city.’ Out in the county there are people I grew up with, played ball with. If they went out there, some people would say, ‘Who are you, boy?’ ” Fields himself traveled door to door with his handshake and a message that, he says, boiled down to “vote for me for no other reason than you know and trust me.”
He continued: “I sat beside you in churches, restaurants, parks, at funerals, on the streets of Cullman, on hospital beds.” There were, he says, no soaring pulpit elocutions: “I don’t say anything profound. Just common, everyday things.”
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