Politics Across the Country The South
Watters, Pat
The South THE ELEVEN STATES OF THE SOUTH will be electing 7 governors, 5 U.S. senators, and 106 representatives in 1970. Whatever improvements might come in the elections of lesser...
...It is concentrated on consolidation of control in the relatively few places where black voting power is predominant...
...The inanity of this situation has long been evident and hurtful in the South with the spectacle of men like James O. Eastland, Mendel Rivers, Lester Maddox, and Wallace himself claiming allegiance to the party of Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Senator Mondale...
...And the effect on the South has been to make these debilities more pronounced...
...No more...
...Schemes for achieving this have become a common concern...
...The South THE ELEVEN STATES OF THE SOUTH will be electing 7 governors, 5 U.S...
...We see now a foundering Democratic leadership and a racist-tending Republican one, and everywhere debilities that once were exclusively Southern: racism in campaigning, irrelevance of party affiliation, candidacies based on personality rather than principle...
...Senate...
...The black vote and the emergence of in creased numbers of black elected officials are the most hopeful signs...
...Elsewhere, blacks seek statewide office, as in Arkansas and Georgia, simply as an exercise in swing-vote strategy...
...Yarborough, a weak liberal, was knocked out in the Texas Democratic primary with the help of the former President and charges that he was somehow to blame for riots and student rebellion...
...This after all was nothing new, merely a matter of degree, exemplified in the decision of one J. B. Stoner, long noted as one of the South's most rabid racist fanatics, to run for governor of Georgia on a flat antiNegro, anti-Jew platform...
...John Stennis is unopposed for reelection this year in Mississippi, as are all but one of its Congressional candidates, including Jamie Whitten, and Mendel Rivers in South Carolina...
...When an able and idealistic black candidate did oppose Rivers two years ago on an antiwar platform, he received no help from the peace movement, and lost even a chance to win for lack of funds...
...In South Carolina, the greatest hope is that blacks from among four who have survived the primary may be elected to the state legislature for the first time this century...
...Some kind of height of personality politics was the countrymusic candidacy of Tex Ritter in Tennessee for the U.S...
...In Alabama, the lack of choice between the super-racist Wallace and the sleeker-racist Albert Brewer gave rise to reports (not confirmed) that black leaders deliberately discouraged black voting in that contest...
...Where there is optimism, it is that the worst of the candidates might be defeated, as in the South Carolina gubernatorial race, or the prospect of defeating Byrd in Virginia...
...All this means a general lessening of black interest, if not influence, in statewide and Congressional offices...
...Never mind that the black candidate for governor of Georgia, C. B. King, alone among a dozen or so candidates, speaks to the real interests of most of the people, with pledges to reduce the sales tax and improve education...
...The contenders with a chance to win offer no real choice to the people, and this is true generally in the South...
...Whatever improvements might come in the elections of lesser officials, it seems a safe bet that the quality of those in higher office will not increase...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Lack of choice was akin to the meaninglessness of party affiliation...
...This seems about the only realistic hope of reviving any kind of black-white coalition in the South...
...In the past, no matter how garish or tragic our politics might be, we could always look to a semblance of governmental responsibility in the rest of the country, and feel that the few decent Southern political tendencies were thereby encouraged...
...It would correct failed past attempts at a labor-liberal-Negro coalition which was notable for a predominance of white leaders, a lack of white voters, and a continuing turnout of faithful black ones...
...The nucleus of the movement, as Bond envisions it, would be black elected officials of the South who already have an informal network of communication— but it would encourage and carry along whatever white progressive leadership it could find...
...The amateurish racism of the Nixon administration is notable not merely for its aid to the established and skilled, button-down racist Republicans of the South, like Fletcher Thompson of Atlanta, but for its encouragement to racists of both parties to keep right on with their worst practices...
...In Alabama, blacks are running for everything from governor to justice of the peace, but most enthusiasm centers on local offices where there is a chance of winning...
...senators, and 106 representatives in 1970...
...If the South had Nixon to thank for such debasement of its politics, it also had an assortment of more politespoken Democratic racists and reactionaries who for more than three decades have held it down and hindered any hope for national prog ress...
...A main purpose would be to encourage decent men to run for office and to find for them the kind of money that indecent men now get from Southern and national big business...
...Julian Bond, the popular Negro leader from Atlanta, envisions a southwide political movement aimed at reforming Southern government and influencing the faltering federal one...
...The beginnings of reform of Southern politics would have to be the funneling from the North of campaign money for such candidates...
...But this hope no longer signifies immediate promise of coalition with liberal whites or a neo-Populist movement...
...Politicians themselves acknowledged some of this in 1970, depending more than ever on personal style...
...This has nearly always been true in the South, but developments in the rest of the country make it discouraging this year...
...The assumption was that the Wallace victory assured party recognition and patronage for the black-led National Democratic party of Alabama, and that was one thing more than they would have gotten from Brewer...
...George Wallace's victory in the Alabama gubernatorial primary can be at least partly attributed to the bad influence of national politics, and this has pushed the general tone of Southern campaigning several notches downward and to the Right...
Vol. 17 • September 1970 • No. 5
