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King's Dream of a New South

March 30, 2008 —

In early 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told President Lyndon B. Johnson that passage of the federal Voting Rights Act would create a “coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that will really make the New South.” Congress passed the Act seven months later, but Dr. King’s New South coalition became a long deferred dream as racially divided voting patterns in national elections quickly widened and stayed below the Mason & Dixon line.  Millions of new black voters registered and voted as Democrats, but millions of white voters, especially in the Deep South, left the party of their parents for the Republican Party.

 In all but one of the 12 presidential elections since 1960 (the first election year when civil rights became a national political issue), Democrats have received a majority of black votes in the Deep South and, in turn, have lost most of those states. Only in 1976, when Georgia’s former governor Jimmy Carter became president, has a Democratic candidate for president won the Deep South with black and white voters. In all other presidential elections, including President Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 and 1996, Democrats failed to muster a coalition that could carry the Deep South.

 In November, however, the die-hard patterns of Southern politics could change. Democrats have an opportunity to create Dr. King’s beloved community of New South politics in the heart of old Dixie. Recent presidential primaries suggest a new interracial coalition is emerging within the Democratic Party that may now have the votes to win national elections in the Deep South. If so, in a grand, historic moment of the South’s richly ironic possibilities, the candidate probably most able to bring about this fundamental change in Southern politics is a black man from a Northern state.

The five Deep South states -- South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi –have now held their 2008 presidential primaries.  In three primaries, for the first time since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the nomination for president in both parties was clearly up for grabs --- giving voters real choices across either party’s candidates.In South Carolina, Democratic voting exceeded Republican voting by more than 100,000. In Georgia, the Democratic primary drew nearly 90, 000 more voters than did the hotly-contested Republican contest. Republican ballots did outnumber Democratic ones in Alabama-- but only by a difference of about 17,000 out of a total of a million votes.  In the Louisiana primary, Democratic turnout was also high, while Republican turnout was low, in large part, due to the assured nomination of John McCain. In Mississippi, according to Hasting Wyman of the Southern Political Report, Democratic turnout was the largest in 20 years. All told, in these five open state primaries (where any voter can select a Democratic or Republican ballot), a combined total of more than 440,000 voters preferred Democratic candidates over the Republican choices.

The extraordinary level of Democratic voting in the Deep South comes from an increased turnout of both black and white voters. Voting returns clearly prove that Democrats enjoyed an enormous turnout among African American voters in all the Deep South primaries, but voting among whites for Democrats often increased. For example, in three predominately white Atlanta suburban counties -- Douglas, Cobb, and Gwinnett, the historical base of the modern Georgia Republican party -- Democrats received nearly half -- 47 percent -- of the counties’ votes in the February 5^th primary.

Barack Obama’s candidacy clearly is the driving force for this “New South coalition.” By enlarging support among both African and white voters, Obama has attracted more than 50 percent of the Democratic votes in each of the five Deep South states. In Atlanta’s three top suburban Republican counties, Obama won more than two-thirds of all Democratic votes, which meant in the Republican stronghold of Cobb County he pulled more primary votes than did John McCain and Mike Huckabee together. In fact, Georgia gave Obama alone 66 percent of the Democratic votes, a larger margin than what he received in his home state of Illinois and this year’s largest state primary election victory for any candidate, Democrat or Republican.  

Obama’s appeal in the Deep South is anchored among black voters. Exit polling shows that he received at least three out of four votes among African Americans. In Georgia and Mississippi, 9 out of 10 blacks voted for Obama.  This overwhelming support involved all ages and both genders among African Americans who also came out to vote in near record numbers.  

Exit polls also suggest that Obama’s appeal to Deep South whites proved unusually effective, especially among younger voters who turned out in record numbers.  In both South Carolina and Georgia, a majority of young white voters (18 to 29) voted for Obama. (This is the first time a majority of whites of any age group in the Deep South states have voted for a black candidate for president.) In Georgia, 45 percent of the white men voting in the Democratic primary supported Obama. Almost one-third of the white men in Democratic primary in Mississippi voted for Obama. This kind of appeal among white groups by a black candidate running for national office in the Deep South is simply unprecedented.

  Despite its interracial character, Obama’s Deep South coalition did not unite a majority of white voters with a majority of black voters.  As in the past, most whites voted for a white candidate, and almost all blacks voted for the black candidate – even within the Democratic party. At the same time, exit polls in most of the Deep South states strongly indicate that a significant percentage of Deep South white voters --- most Democrats, some Republicans, and a big number of independents --- may be willing to vote for Obama in November.

In effect, the Deep South primaries revealed the emergence of a potential interracial “New South coalition” -- not the final form or rewards of it.  As Dr. King knew, changing old voting patterns in Southern politics begins with a limited number of “moderate whites” who are ready to leap across the historical divide and join black voters.

 The fact remains that for the first time since most African American adults acquired the right to vote in the Deep South, there exists the real possibility of a new, interracial majority of voters who can carry the day in national elections this year --- and perhaps in years to come.

 Of course, none of this analysis suggests any certainty or mandate for this outcome in November. The Democrats could self-destruct their party’s chances if the campaigns’ growing bitterness and rancor escalate into internal warfare at a deadlocked convention. Regardless, Senator John McCain will be a very formidable, attractive candidate for Deep South voters. In addition, as Bill Clinton proved, the Democrats do not have to nominate a candidate who can win the Deep South in order to win the White House.  And, while Democrats have the force of history behind them as their nominee seeks to become either the first woman or the first black to be an American president, their candidate will try to win states in the Deep South that five generations ago refused to ratify a woman’s right to vote and two generations ago denied African American adults that same American right.

Yet, Deep South primaries this year proved that, challenged by an insurgent, younger generation of voters, the South’s past need not dictate its future politics. It is an opportunity that will require a kind of transformative politics that the South has rarely seen in national elections -- one bringing together and sustaining enthusiastic voters anew across race, gender, party, generations, and even history.

For a lifelong white Southerner who has been involved in the some of region’s interracial work for over four decades, this change in old voting patterns offers nothing less than the chance of a lifetime. It presents, at long last, the first prospect of fulfilling Dr. King’s vision for what Southern politics should and can be --- politics that can help unite Southerners for a more common future instead of pushing us apart every four years along the ancient lines of division. It would be a “New South” that all Southerners could finally claim as their own.  

 A lifelong Southerner, Steve Suitts is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama and an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University.