Southern man
better keep your head
Don’t forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast (Neil Young).

As I write, the Supreme Court is considering a case predicated on a simple assumption: racial bias in the Deep South has declined so drastically that federal oversight of state elections and changes to election law is no longer required.

Strangely, the case has little support among Southern legislators.  Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue (pictured at the left) wants to be free of federal oversight, but few Southern Republicans have rallied to the cause.

Partially, that’s because both parties, with the full approval of the feds, use racial gerrymandering to shore up safe seats.  The same process that ensures the election of a handful of black candidates produces overwhelmingly white jurisdictions friendly to Republicans.

But let’s not be too cynical here.  Southern support federal oversight just might be sincere.

The Washington Post’s coverage of the Supreme Court case notes that Alabama’s statement of support for dropping federal oversight had to be filed by a private lawyer because the state’s attorney general refused to endorse it.

The issue turns on a question that pops up a lot on the Friends of Justice blog: how much has really changed in the Deep South?

Obviously, a lot has changed.  When Brown vs. Board of Education shot down the legitimacy of “separate but equal” public schools in 1954, national attention was rivetted on southern states like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.  The violent rejection of “Brown” across the Solid South exposed a society in which non-whites enjoyed few of the legal and political rights commonly associated with American citizenship.  The electoral system in states like Mississippi was rigged to prevent significant numbers of black residents from voting or registering to vote.  The legal system was unapologetically partisan.  There was one standard of justice for white people and another for non-whites and if you didn’t like it that way you learned to keep your mouth shut.

By the end of the 1960s, however, both the civil rights movement and the white backlash it inspired were running on empty.  Both civil rights groups and the white citizens’ councils were disbanding and reorganizing in reponse to steadily declining support. 

In general, white southerners gave up the fight for segregated education, turning their attention to the creation of private segregation academies outside the public system.  Gradually, racial attitudes softened across the South, especially among educated urbanites.

Canadian singer Neil Young created an outcry in the early 70s with songs like “Alabama” and “Southern Man”: “Southern change gonna come at last; now your crosses are burning fast.” 

Change has come, to be sure; but it is maddeningly difficult to measure. 

In my last post, I suggested that most Americans subscribe to some form of white nationalism–that is, we think of America as a nation founded by white people for white people.  In most of America, a banal form of white nationalism prevails.  Non-whites are welcomed into the political process and the legitimacy of the civil rights movement is widely acknowledged, but white remains the color of normal.

In states like Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, folks are more inclined to take their white nationalism straight.  Ask good Baptists and Methodists in little southern towns for their opinion of Martin Luther King and you won’t hear a lot of superlatives.  Southerners over the age of thirty generally resent a civil rights movement that made their region synonymous with bigotry. 

A few years ago, Paul Hendrickson visited the former Mississippi Sheriffs featured in a 1962 Life photograph taken on the campus of the University of Mississippi.   He kept hearing references to “that civil rights crap”.  The same words were repeated verbatim, like a mantra. 

The children and grandchildren of these former race warriors were less forthcoming, but they rarely disavowed their elders’ perspective.  It was no longer as personal.  The taste of humiliation had diminished over the years.  But there was little sign that a profound and intentional shift in perspective had taken place.

My experience (which is admittedly limited and subjective) suggests that the average middle-aged white person in the Deep South occupies a shadowy nomansland between the full-throated and banal forms of white nationalism.  The membership of overtly racist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens has never been high and their views are probably atypical.  But there is little celebration of diversity and racial understanding in the small town South.  A scab has formed on the wounds of historym but it is exceedingly thin.

Voting patterns are difficult to interpret with precision, but they provide the best empirical measure of racial attitudes.  The fact that a southerner voted for John McCain, doesn’t mean that she is biased against black people in general or Barack Obama in particular.  She may simply have a preference for Republican policies. 

You learn more from voting  trends. 

The data below isn’t as complicated as it first appears.  In states with a black population below 25%, Barack Obama outperformed John Kerry among white voters.  That’s the good news.  But in states with a black population above 25%, Obama did worse (in some cases, considerably worse) than the 2004 Democratic candidate.

Support for Democratic presidential candidates has been low in Mississippi ever since the federal government forced Ole Miss to integrate in 1962 and passed voting and civil rights legislation in 1964 and 65.  But notice the weak and declining support for Obama in most sections of the Deep South. 

Charles Franklin, the creator of this chart, provides a helpful summary of the results:

Three of the four deep south states dropped clearly below their 2004 white support for Kerry. Georgia did not, matching it’s 23% white support for the Democrat in both years. Mississippi, the lowest state in 2004, shifted from 14% to 11%, while my home state of Alabama dropped from 19% to 10%, claiming the prize for lowest white support for Obama of any state in the Union. Louisiana went from 24% to 14%, the largest point drop of all. One other southern state registered a notable drop, Arkansas fell from 36% white support for Kerry to 30% for Obama.

This dramatic decline in support is particularly significant when compared with national trends:

 There were a number of states with considerable increases (labeled in the chart for a five point or greater gain.) The most interesting are North Carolina (up from 27% to 35%) and Virginia (up from 32% to 39%.) Clearly Obama could not have won those states on the white vote alone, but those shifts amount to roughly a 5-6 point boost in statewide vote share, certainly enough to matter.

Also interesting are traditional red states Indiana and Kansas, with gains from 34% to 45% and from 34% to 40% respectively. Also Montana and North Dakota are notable, with gains from 39% to 45% and from 35% to 42%. While the Democrat didn’t win three of these four states, these shifts demonstrate that they are no longer as out of reach for Dems as recent past elections might have suggested.

 Barack Obama’s lack of popularity among Deep South whites would be particularly striking if urban centers were removed from the mix.  County-by-county voting results consistently showed virtually non-existent white support for Obama in rural sectors of the South.

What does all of this say about bias in the legal system? 

I’m not suggesting that the criminal justice regime in states like Mississippi is as partisan as it was in the middle decades of the 20th century; but a shift from cataclysmic to really bad doesn’t mean that black defendants facing all-white juries in isolated Deep South towns have nothing to worry about.  White resentment in these communities ran far deeper than most non-Southerners ever comprehended; and it didn’t wither up and blow away just because folks stopped wearing their bigotry like a badge of honor. 

Most tragically, the Christian faith is still associated with views anthithetical to the teachings of Jesus.  The public face of evangelical Christianity is of southern manufacture: the kind of Christianity encountered on television was honed and perfected by the same people who ran the White Citizen’s Councils.   Respectable southern segregationists fell into the habit of baptising southern segregation associating the opposition with communism and the very devil.  Consider this quote from Francis P. Mims from a 1959 edition of  The Citizen:

The membership of the Councils is made up of God-fearing, freedom-loving Americans who hate no one, however misguided he may be. Our struggle is to preserve for our children the wonderful faith in God and Country which has been taught us, and which is outlined for us in unmistakable language in the Constitution of the United States. They hate us. But an aroused band of Christian people will not be deterred. We march together under the banner of Faith, Hope and Charity–and we’re not afraid of what the ultimate outcome will be!

 

Southern men might not have wanted him around, but Neil Young was right about the Good Book.  Jesus lived and died by the principle of non-violence.  The arms of the historical Jesus were open to all.  Jesus was biased, to be sure, but his bias always ran in favor of the poor, the outcast and the disaffected.  Always! 

Jesus was the sworn enemy of the religion of respectability and he paid for it with his life.  Notice, Jesus was betrayed by a paid snitch and convicted on the basis of coerced and uncorroborated testimony. 

Followers of Jesus–the real Jesus–embrace the plight of the poor, the disconnected, the disheveled, the uneducated, the addicted and the insane.  Jesus may not have been a liberal, but he was definitely a bleeding heart.  We don’t wear our religion on our sleeves, but Christian discipleship has driven the mission of Friends of Justice from the beginning.  

Jesus goes on trial every day in little courtrooms across the South.  Every one in a while, Friends of Justice is there “to stand with Jesus in his hour of need” (Deitrich Bonhoeffer).  It’s in the Book:

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or athirst, and gave thee drink?  When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in?  or naked, and clothed thee?  Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?  And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethrn, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:37-40)