THE BLACKS

...As a result of the 1980 census and reapportionment, the South will gain six Congressional seats...

...Its initial focus is on minority candidates at the state and local level in the South...

...Black candidates in the South need help...

...The region is filled with contrasts...

...Even when pressure politics succeeds, elected officials win opportunities to trade favors with the pressure group...

...This, too, is changing...

...The Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget, presented first in 1981 and again this year, is the most telling evidence of this national, issue-oriented politics...

...A black state legislator in Mississippi, Robert G. Clark, won AFL-CIO support and the Democratic primary to run for Congress in the New Delta district...

...These included votes on anti-busing amendments, fair housing, welfare reform, and the Martin Luther King Jr...

...Conservative political action committees have raised tens of millions of dollars and spent their money to significant effect...

...Black businessmen in that small city have challenged bias in the awarding of state public works contracts...

...Michaux also carried a third of the vote in Durham, a healthy development...

...The three black legislators in North Carolina make up 1.7 per cent of the state legislature, although 22 per cent of the state is black...

...The civil rights movement led to great social change, but never ran its full political course...

...The development of a national programmatic politics has had important effects...

...John Lewis, 1981 M iberals and progressives have long viewed | the South as a kind of stepchild of American I politics...

...Until recently, the major liberal and labor PACs have devoted their support to incumbents rather than challengers, to white rather than minority candidates, and to urban races outside of the South...

...H Although 19 per cent of Virginia's population is black, only 3.5 per cent of its legislators are...

...The average pay of Virginia's black state and local employees in 1979 was 28 per cent lower than the average pay of white male workers...

...attorney during the Carter Administration, placed second with 46.2 per cent of the vote in a Democratic primary runoff this summer in a bid to become the first black to represent North Carolina in Congress...

...The only one, in Caldwell, was a considerable distance from the major black and Hispanic population centers...

...Black money has, in the main, gone to churches and community service organizations...

...They have chosen Jack Cartus, a liberal white businessman, to take on Shelby...

...In the same vein, the Caucus, along with other black constituency organizations, has been in the forefront of proposals (tax cuts, particularly) that meet the needs of low, moderate, and middle-income citizens: regional development banks and the retraining of displaced industrial workers...

...House and Senate candidates...

...Last year 76 per cent of the members of Congress from the seven Southern states covered by the Voting Rights Act voted for Ronald Reagan's key economic and budget policies...

...In Presidential elections from 1964 to 1980, white voter turnout in the South declined 2 percentage points while black voter turnout jumped 4 per cent (57 per cent to 48 per cent, respectively, in 1980...

...In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, an unprecedented coalition of blacks and whites has come together to oppose Republican Representative Richard Shelby's support of Reaganomics...

...They still have little influence over the voting behavior of their representatives in the state legislatures and in Congress...

...One sign of change is the recent court-approved plan to redraw Georgia's fifth district to inJohn Conyers, Detroit Democrat, is a member of the U.S...

...All of this means one thing for the Southern conservative establishment: As blacks continue their political organizing, tough times are ahead...

...This is far from atypical in the South...

...Organized by local leaders with PAC financing, the conference drew more than 250 candidates and campaign workers from Mississippi and neighboring states...

...Of the three Mississippi members representing heavily black districts, one had a 29 per cent pro-civil rights record and the other two had not voted for a single civil rights measure...

...In 1969, blacks held fewer than one-half of 1 per cent of all the elective offices in the Deep South...

...The black community has set about to create a serious interest-group and constituency politics of its own...

...Until now, some 550,000 blacks in the Delta were divided among three districts, which left them outnumbered—and outvoted—when combined with heavy white electorates in the eastern part of the state...

...Recent history has shown that when politically-minded blacks organize and build coalitions with labor groups and white liberals, they can win at the polls and put their stamp on government...

...North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia each have only one black judge...

...11 Only two black judges sit on the higher courts of the seven Southern states covered by the Voting Rights Act—fewer than 2 per cent of the 118 judges on these courts...

...They called for sweeping changes in national priorities—in particular, for massive cuts in military spending, for tax reform, and for full-employment planning...

...Last year, three legislative decisions in particular—the budget resolution, domestic program budget cuts, and the tax bill— marked the new shift to conservative policies...

...In Mississippi, for example, black voter registration jumped from 6.7 per cent of the voting-age population in 1964 to 60 per cent by 1968 and to 72 per cent in 1980...

...Most of the increase in the ranks of black elected officials has occurred at the local level (47 per cent of all black elected officials serve in local government...

...Only 16 per cent of the region's 800,000 workers are unionized, but the AFL-CIO has launched major campaigns in Houston and Atlanta...

...Only one black currently represents the South in Congress— Democratic Representative Harold Ford of Tennessee...

...Their political potential was evident in a 1981 special Congressional election in Jackson, Mississippi...

...Along with black elected officials, they have formed the nucleus of a more organized and resourceful black politics...

...Andrew Young, then a Representative from Atlanta, orchestrated an intense lobbying effort by black officials in Georgia...

...11 Burleson County, Texas, has a population of 12,000,22 per cent black, 10 per cent Mexican-American...

...Fifty-three per cent of black America lives in the South, and 61 per cent of all black elected officials serve there...

...Many of them have worked together in the civil rights movement...

...In North Carolina, only 7 per cent of the senior administrators are black, the great majority working at clerical, service, and maintenance jobs...

...Minorities, in particular, have high stakes in such a political coming-of-age...

...The course of political change in the South may, once again, have much to do with change in the nation as a whole, as it did during the heyday of the civil rights movement...

...Parker-Coltrane proposes to support progressive candidates, black and white, wherever they need help...

...The effort is paying off— unions are working together to target firms and organize recruiting drives...

...Parker-Coltrane is a hopeful beginning...

...Several members of the state's Congressional delegation acknowledged they switched their votes in favor of the bill as a result of demands by black officials and constituents...

...In the state's second Congressional district, centered on Columbia, Ken Moseley, a black retired Army officer, will be this fall's Democratic challenger to a sixth-term conservative Republican, Floyd Spence...

...Southerners have dominated key Congressional committees...

...With few exceptions, the black vote is overwhelming when an election offers the choice of a black candidate, no matter how modest the prospects for victory The Voting Rights Act also encouraged black candidates in the South to compete for public office...

...For a decade and more, industry has been moving south, and more recently the region's financial institutions have begun to rival the Northeast's as a result of petroleum wealth, the influx of investment capital, and population growth...

...half of them are in the South...

...House of Representatives and chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice...

...Though a gap still exists between black and white electoral participation in the South, it has narrowed substantially...

...The Southern judiciary follows suit...

...Plans are under way for a Southern political training institute designed to offer technical assistance to candidates...

...This regional ferment invites a look at the pivotal side of Southern politics...

...Alabama's unemployment rate is the second highest in the nation...

...The Caucus budget alternatives have been the most far-reaching and comprehensive progressive documents of any presented by Congressional Democrats...

...The number of black elected officials in the nation increased by 235 per cent between 1968 and 1980, and by 1000 per cent in the South...

...Alabama's population is 25 per cent black, yet fewer than 5 per cent of its high-level administrators are...

...Across the South, black communities are showing a new vitality in electoral politics...

...and Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey's Presidential loss to Richard Nixon...

...The Georgia redistricting plan could also affect an effort to create a new Congressional district in Mississippi's heavily black Delta counties...

...Economic distress is promoting a rejection of traditional conservative policies, making possible coalition politics...

...In North Carolina, a citadel of white conservative power, a significant number of black candidates are running for office at all levels of government...

...In Durham, Mickey Mi-chaux Jr., a black lawyer and businessman who served as a U.S...

...Early this year, the Congressional Black Caucus announced the formation of a second black-oriented PAC, one that will funnel support to U.S...

...The South is promising ground for a revival of progressive politics in the nation and should not be written off as a region dominated by fundamentalism and apple-pie authoritarianism...

...The new momentum is taking hold in smaller communities, too...

...They have little money to draw on, generally lack campaign experience, and have to fight hard to get press attention...

...Black underrepresentation exists at all levels of government, and these are but a few examples...

...Virtually unchallenged in their campaigns, with few blacks on their staffs, and almost wholly indifferent to the views of their black constituents, these House members have turned a deaf ear on the concerns and needs of non-white Americans...

...Structural factors—the presence on the ballot of black or responsive liberal white candidates, party competition, the willingness of Federal examiners to enforce election laws, the perception that voting can influence public policy—have begun to account for higher than average levels of black participation at the polls...

...The networking process was again tested during the 1978 debate on the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, and met with some success in the South...

...The South is a major bastion of the Defense Department and the military-industrial complex...

...Black politics in the last few years has taken two significant directions that lead beyond interest-group politics...

...H In eight Southern cities and counties where blacks are 30 to 50 per cent of the population, fewer than 4 per cent of the top-level administrators in local government are black...

...It supports political newcomers, rather than incumbents...

...The reauthorization of the Economic Opportunity Act was an early success...

...Similar coalitions have emerged in support of progressive white and black candidates for state offices...

...Seventy-eight per cent of the Southern members voted against the King holiday bill...

...The Southern Democrats, the so-called Boll Weevils, played a decisive role in the President's legislative victories...

...There is a good chance that black representation in the state legislature will double or triple as a result of the November elections (there are currently four blacks serving in the legislature in Raleigh...

...At the local level, eight out of twenty-two Mississippi counties with a black majority have no black representation on the county boards, and blacks constitute majorities on only two county boards...

...The Congressional Black Caucus was established in 1970, and in the following years a number of black constituency organizations emerged or expanded...

...Blacks already have won the top leadership posts in a number of large Southern cities, such as Atlanta, New Orleans, and Birmingham...

...The black community generally reacts to the issues and agenda set by others...

...Eighty per cent of all black elected officials in county government and 68 per cent of black mayors and local council members serve in the South...

...Blacks have been denied access to the key levers of power...

...As a result, minority voter turnout plummeted from 2,300 to 300...

...In administrative agencies the pattern holds...

...At the same time, it created a networking system that linked black members of Congress with state and local black leaders to press Congress and the White House to move on critical legislative issues...

...Because they have regarded the re-luHlgion as either hopelessK conservative or so tradition-bound as to be immunized against their brand of enlightenment, the labor movement, liberal political action committees (PACs), public interest groups, and left-of-center elements in the Democratic Party have downplayed their role in the South...

...Black constituency politics, in the main, then, has been reactive and subordinate to the established—white—political system and folkways...

...The winning candidate, Wayne Dowdy, a white Democrat, emerged from a large field only after he publicly endorsed the extension of the Voting Rights Act and identified himself with other black concerns...

...A number of election studies have revealed, however, that participation rates cannot be predicted by education, income, or job status...

...Named after two jazz artists and cultural heroes, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, the Parker-Coltrane Political Action Committee seeks to bring together the arts, grass-roots politics, and experienced professional campaign managers, to promote political change in the South...

...In the state courts, black citizens are virtually unrepresented...

...Similarly, in off-year Congressional elections from 1966 to 1978, white voter turnout declined, while black turnout increased...

...Between 1966 and 1980, black registration in the South increased by 6 per cent (59.3 per cent in 1980), while white registration rose by only 2 per cent (66 per cent in 1980...

...Only 9 per cent of Virginia's senior civil servants are black, while 19 per cent of the population is...

...Federal assistance to the disadvantaged and racial minorities, and the growth of income maintenance programs, spurred greater black political participation...

...however, the South may be ready for major political breakthroughs for minorities, labor, and the Democratic Party...

...As long as some form of domestic liberal doctrine prevailed, blacks had a voice in the formulation of national policies...

...With few exceptions, the black vote is overwhelming when an election offers the choice of a black candidate, no matter how modest the prospects for victory...

...Surveys show that blacks, proportionately speaking, give far less money to candidates, parties, and political causes than whites...

...The 1965 Voting Rights Act played the most significant long-term role in dismantling local obstacles to black voting and representation...

...Opposition to Reagan Administration politics, particularly the evisceration of domestic programs, threatens the Southern conservative establishment...

...95 per cent voted for the anti-busing amendment...

...elude a population that would be slightly more than 65 per cent black—probably enough to elect a second black member of Congress from the old Confederacy...

...On (he contrary, it could be the fertile soil for significant social and political changes in t he nation as a whole in the years ahead...

...Before the flourishing of the civil rights movement, Southern blacks were barred from voting and holding office by the poll tax, rigged literacy tests, and force and intimidation...

...Cases in point: H Blacks account for almost one-quarter of North Carolina's population, yet the state's senior Senator, Jesse Helms, does not employ, nor has he ever employed, blacks on his 125-member Congressional and political staffs...

...Bill Edwards, a progressive white supported by the black community, is a strong candidate for Alabama's Public Service Commission...

...Once again, 76 per cent of the Southern members voted for two out of the three Reagan Administration bills...

...Hundreds of others could serve as well...

...Since the days of the civil rights movement, courts have overturned segregation laws, and public policy makers for a time sought solutions to poverty, unemployment, and the maldistribution of income and opportunity...

...Of the 5,038 black elected officials in the nation in 1981 (20 per cent of them are female), 61 per cent serve in the South...

...Yet pressure group and constituency politics has limitations...

...Not only was his the best showing by far for a black candidate in the state, but his campaign spurred a remarkably high black turnout of 60 per cent where 35 per cent had been the norm...

...None of Virginia's twelve Federal district judges are black...

...They constitute a critical mass of political talent at the local level and are just now beginning to acquire state and national prominence The growing number of black elected officials in the South has stimulated political competition and black voter turnout...

...Only one black judge serves on the Federal bench in Louisiana...

...Too often, these organizations have operated as elite groups, giving a small number of men and women the power to choose candidates and the issues they run on...

...Sixty-three Congressional districts have black populations of 30 per cent or more...

...In August 1981, the first black-oriented PAC was formed to support minority and progressive candidates...

...Racially gerrymandered districts, capricious changes in voting procedures, at-large elections and annexations, and limited black representation in statehouses, courthouses, and state agencies have been the functional equivalents of the raw forms of disenfran-chisement practiced in the past...

...Mississippi blacks are challenging a court-ordered plan that gives the new district a black population of 53 per cent and are demanding a 65 per cent black majority similar to that in Georgia...

...Black Americans, by and large, have little familiarity with the workings—and potential—of political action committees...

...Organizers in Mississippi have won sixty-three out of ninety-four shop elections in the past several years...

...The numbers of elected blacks have been improving dramatically over the past decade, however, and they point to the rise of a significant political force...

...It held its first training conference in Jackson, Mississippi, this April...

...Twenty-seven per cent of Georgia's population is black, though blacks occupy fewer than 4 per cent of that state's public offices...

...BY JOHN CONYERSJR AND NEIL KOTLER I think we're going to be able to deliver in the South____I think the direction of this nation is going to be determined by the direction that comes from the southern part of the United States...

...another 25 per cent sit on school boards...

...Blacks are 26 per cent of the South's population, but they hold only 6 per cent of the elective offices...

...As a region, it has been most supportive of higher military spending and an aggressive...

...82 per cent against welfare reform, and 82 per cent against fair housing...

...By the mid-1970s, the Caucus elaborated its interest-group focus by creating a series of policy task forces...

...The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights compiled the voting records of members of the Ninety-sixth Congress (1979-81) on seven issues that, taken together, measure Congressional commitment to civil rights...

...Granted, the South has spawned the right-wing poii(ics of the evangelical movement and has been in (he forefront of the opposition to labor and abortion rights...

...Andrew Young, 1974 The South is the area of greater hope...

...Twenty-five years ago, however, the South also was the seedbed of the civil rights movement...

...The policy positions of black citizens simply are not heard or served...

...an incomes policy for curbing inflation without recession, and national economic planning, including conversion of military facilities and industries to civilian production...

...Trainees took in nuts-and-bolts workshops on every aspect of campaign management...

...In Charleston, South Carolina, Mullins McLeod has put together a populist coalition of blacks, rural whites, and labor to unseat the incumbent Republican Representative, first-termer Thomas Hartnett...

...national holiday bill...

...The Alabama district is 40 per cent black, and Tuscaloosa's organized black community is heavily involved in Car-tus's campaign, as are local labor unions...

...Most of these districts are represented by conservative Democrats and Republicans, who consistently vote against both the local and national interests of the minority communities at home...

...This recent rise in its fortunes can only mean that the South, whose political leaders have long enjoyed a disproportionate influence over national policy, will continue to have its way in Washington...

...One is the emergence of an issue-oriented and programmatic politics, existing side-by-side with the constituency politics of black organizations...

...Despite the new industries and the arrival of large numbers of blue-collar workers, anti-union attitudes are pervasive...

...In the South especially, Federal transfer payments and, later on, affirmative action and minority business set-aside programs produced a growing number of black business leaders, teachers, and other professionals...

...His commitments won him a substantial black vote, far greater than normal, and that vote proved decisive...

...Perhaps the most significant aspect of black political mobilization in the South is taking place in rural and small-town locales...

...In their place today are sophisticated devices to thwart minority participation in electoral politics...

...To be effective, the pressure exerted on elected officials has to be selective, episodic, and targeted to the most critical issues...

...Trainers came from the AFL-CIO, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and other civil rights and labor organizations...

...Urban-industrial centers coexist with vast areas of rural and small-town underdevelopment...

...The Caucus, which presented its budgets after consultations with organized labor and liberal groups, emphasized that it laid out a set of policies for all Americans, not just for blacks...

...The growing numbers of local black elected officials are paving the way for political power at the state and Federal levels...

...Although blacks made up 30,38, and 46 per cent of the population in these three districts, they had virtually no clout...

...The civil rights movement and pressure on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations brought blacks into the political process...

...Parker-Coltrane's most distinctive contribution so far is its candidate training program...

...baiting stance toward the Soviet Union...

...Civil rights politics came to an end in 1968, however, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr...

...In 1981, they held almost 6 per cent of these posts...

...The conventional wisdom holds that low black voter registration and turnout result from low social and economic status...

...The collapse of liberal politics during the last few years of the Carter Administration, and the coming of the Reagan Administration, have compelled blacks to move in new directions...

...Together, they formed the Parker-Coltrane Political Action Committee, which recruits, trains, and supports black and progressive candidates for public office in the South...

...A greater awareness of national and local issues has taken root in the black community, and stepped-up organizing around key issues has complicated the lives of once-comfortable incumbents...

...Black organizations in Gadsden, Alabama, for example, have sparked unusual opposition to local policies that in the past were routinely adopted without regard to black interests...

...it depends on community support as well as big givers at-a-distance, and its sponsors are white and black...

...The 22 per cent black population of North Carolina is represented by one-half of 1 per cent of the state's elected officials...

...A push from one group sets off counterpressures from others...

...Economic distress and sophisticated political organizing have led to coalitions among labor unions, blacks, and whites...

...Black political pressure generates intense counterpressures from conservative groups...

...The figures are appalling...

...Of the eighty-two judges who sit on Federal district court benches, six, or 7 per cent, are black...

...Andrew Young and John Lewis may be right, after all...

...Yet the South should not be written off...

...Neil Kotler, a former political science professor, serves on Conyers's Washington staff...

...A few years ago, officials closed down all but one of the county's thirteen polling places...

...Jim Hightower, the Texas progressive, is likely to become the state's next agriculture commissioner...