Five Blacks in South Given Chance in House Elections

Up at the podium, black congressional candidate Mike Espy was asking the all-white Kiwanis Club to picture the district’s voters as the contrasting squares on a patchwork quilt, held together by “common threads like belief in God, common threads like respect for our country and its laws.”

But this rhetoric of racial unity has never penetrated the reality of Mississippi Delta politics. “Ninety-nine percent of the black people are going to vote for this fellow, and 99% of the white people are going to vote for Franklin. That’s the way it’s been,” said James McDowell, an insurance agent sitting near the rear of the room.

That was only a slight exaggeration of the blunt truth that Espy, a 32-year-old attorney and former assistant state attorney general, faces in his bid to become Mississippi’s first black congressman since Reconstruction.

If the last two elections are any guide, Espy can expect to receive no more than 10% of the white vote, and 44-year-old incumbent Republican Webb Franklin will probably pick up a roughly equal share of blacks.

But Espy is considered to have at least an even chance of defeating Franklin, in part because of the discontent of white farmers with Reagan Administration agriculture policies. And at least four additional Southern black congressional candidates are seen as having a good shot at being elected.

If they are victorious, 1986 could mark a political turning point. So far the experiences of this flat, sprawling district and of other so-called “black belts” of the South show that the laws that were passed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s have not knocked down the obstacles that racial divisions have placed in the way of black candidates for federal office in the South.

More than two decades after the Voting Rights Act ensured that blacks would have access to the voting booth, only two blacks from the Deep South--Reps. Harold E. Ford (D-Tenn.) and Mickey Leland (D-Tex.)--sit among the 21 blacks in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. Both Ford and Leland are given good chances of being reelected.

In addition, Democrat John Lewis, a sharecropper’s son who was among the front ranks of the civil rights foot soldiers 20 years ago, is considered a sure bet in the race to replace white Rep. Wyche Fowler Jr. (D-Ga.), who gave up his seat in a majority black Atlanta district to run for the Senate. And black Democrat Faye Williams is in a tight race against conservative Republican Clyde Holloway in central Louisiana, where blacks represent only 40% of the district’s population.

‘Bloody Sunday’

Lewis, who helped build a groundswell for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by leading the “Bloody Sunday” march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, insisted that race is less an issue than it used to be in Southern politics, at least in urban areas such as Atlanta. Ironically, Lewis won his primary runoff against fellow civil rights leader Julian Bond with an overwhelming 84% of the district’s white vote but only 41% of its black vote.

“I used the same campaign speech with whites that I did with blacks,” he said.

In many of the South’s rural areas, however, it still is considered almost impossible to build such a biracial coalition, and black candidates must focus their efforts on breaking the old patterns that have dampened black voter turnout in the past.

‘One to Be Watched’

“I know it’s improved some,” said H. C. Anderson, a 75-year-old retired Baptist minister, who recalled when a $2 poll tax, literacy tests and even violence kept fellow Mississippi blacks from the polls. “But we got a few yet who believe their votes do no good. . . . This (election) is one to be watched.”

Nowhere are the barriers against black candidates more evident than in this rural district--one of the nation’s poorest and most racially polarized--which has been redrawn under court order twice since 1982 to increase the strength of its black majority voter population.

3 After the first round of redistricting, five-term Democratic incumbent David R. Bowen decided not to run for reelection, saying it was time for a black to represent the area.

But Franklin campaign manager Bill Crump argued that while the Voting Rights Act offered blacks opportunity, it did not promise them results. “If we’re going to do that, why don’t we just say (we’ll reserve) one district in Mississippi for blacks?” he asked.

Lower Registration Rate

Even though the successive redistrictings have given blacks a 58% majority of the district’s population, blacks have a lower voter registration rate and significantly fewer blacks than whites have turned out to vote in the last two elections. Studies by the private Voter Education Project in Atlanta show that black turnout in the district has been as much as 12 percentage points lower than white turnout in the last two elections.

Voters, meanwhile, have split along racial lines, rather than hewing to their traditional party or philosophical allegiances.

As a result, Franklin--an affable former Circuit Court judge dismissed as a long shot when he first ran in 1982--has won two elections with a margin of about 3,000 votes out of more than 140,000 cast. In each of the earlier elections, his opponent was Robert Clark, who had been the first black to be elected to the state Legislature.

‘Couldn’t Do It’

“Some (white) Democrats, sort of good old loyal Democrats, had every intention of voting for Clark, but when they got in the booth and put their hand on the pin, it just wouldn’t come down. They just couldn’t do it,” recalled Bowen, who is now a professor at Mississippi State University.

The political gap grew when Jesse Jackson’s bid for the presidency mobilized blacks in 1984. That year, when activist civil rights attorney Johnnie Walls was elected the first black chairman of the Washington County Democratic Party convention, “the whites, a lot of them, got up and walked out,” Walls recalled.

Blacks and whites here carry few common interests to the polls. Over the last 20 years in this part of the South, the two races have grown accustomed to working together and, in some cases, even worshiping together. But whites who can afford the tuition generally send their children to all-white private schools, and few neighborhoods or social organizations are integrated.

Campaign Slogan Issue

Democrats still point bitterly to Franklin’s 1982 slogan--”he’s one of us”--as an example of none-too-subtle racism that has crept into past campaigns. However, Crump insisted that the slogan had been printed on campaign materials before redistricting, when Franklin thought that his opponent would be Bowen, whom he hoped to portray as a liberal who was out of touch with his conservative constituents.

Franklin, first elected in a recession year when most Republican House candidates fared poorly, has often differed with Reagan on agricultural policy, but he has agreed with the President’s free-market philosophy in other areas.

Meanwhile, Espy estimates that half the district’s adults over 25 lack a high school education and that almost 27% of all its residents live below the poverty line.

While Mississippi’s unemployment rate often is the highest in the nation, joblessness is even worse than the state average in many Delta counties--last month reaching higher than 20% in Jefferson County, which is at the southern end of the district.

Highest Poverty Rate

Two hundred miles away, at the district’s northern tip, is Tunica County. With almost 53% of its population below the poverty line, it has the highest poverty rate of any county in the nation. In 1985, Jackson took congressmen and reporters through the county’s notorious Sugar Ditch Alley shantytown, which he had described as a “moral Ethiopia.”

Construction crews last week began demolition of Sugar Ditch Alley, which got its name from the open ditch that served as a reeking makeshift sewer system, and eventually plan to replace its roach-infested shacks with public housing. But fully 22% of Mississippi’s housing still is classified as deficient by the federal government.

Such statistics, Espy said, are “what this race is all about.”

Espy and Franklin have run a low-key race this year that is seen as a tossup hinging on two unpredictable factors: the farm vote and overall voter turnout.

Facing Foreclosure

As the fall winds kick up thick clouds of dust over their already harvested fields, a third of the district’s farmers are estimated to be facing foreclosure by the federal government, which has been their lender of last resort.

Few say they blame Franklin personally for the crisis, but some of the district’s white farmers say they will vote for Espy as a protest against a Republican Administration in Washington. Many others may stay home, which both camps acknowledge would amount to a vote for Espy.

With no exciting national or statewide races at the top of the ticket, voter turnout is almost certain to be low. Both Franklin and Espy have raised considerable amounts of money--more than $300,000 each--but they have concentrated much of their efforts on their grass-roots organization: targeting key precincts, registering voters and arranging to get them to the polls on Election Day in buses, cars and vans.

Avoid Race Issue

Until the last few weeks, both candidates have avoided making race an overt part of their campaigns--in part to avoid mobilizing the other’s bloc of voters.

“There hasn’t been much talk of it generally in the community,” Washington County Chairman Walls said. “In the past, when a black candidate ran a very high-profile race, the whites have been alerted too, and they have turned out against him.”

But Franklin said this lack of voter interest could be the most formidable force working against him. “If we go to sleep and get lethargic, and people don’t come to the polls to vote, I’m going to be in trouble,” he told a group of supporters at the opening last week of his Greenville headquarters.

Staff writer David Treadwell in Atlanta contributed to this story.