After History of Racial Division, Jackson Victories Point to a New South Arising

In his novel “Black Boy,” Richard Wright dramatically captured black alienation from the American South. Born in Mississippi, Wright fled the South in order to launch his career as a writer. His flight was a tale familiar to thousands of blacks who left a region known for slavery and Jim Crow to seek better jobs and living conditions in the North.

The novelist chronicled this experience in his fiction and, through it, showed the grim world that blacks faced in the region. Wright, like many other Southern black artists, felt that he could not live and create in a society that denied his manhood. While his fellow Mississippian William Faulkner remained at home in Oxford, Wright found his home outside the region--first in Chicago, and later in Paris.

In 1987 Wright’s daughter, Julia, flew from Paris to receive on behalf of her father an Award of Distinction from the University of Mississippi. While in the state, she visited her father’s birthplace in Natchez and met relatives who recalled her father and his life there as a child.

Julia Wright viewed her emotional journey as a pilgrimage: “This trip to the university to accept my father’s award and then on down to Natchez to find my tribe cannot leave me quite the same person ever again. Nearly 50 of our relatives welcomed me and wished me well in a small church not far from the cemetery where so many of us are buried. I thought how enriched I am for having found a way back to my father’s home.”

Julia Wright’s impressions reflect the dramatic changes that have occurred in the region that so threatened her father. Jesse Jackson’s success in the Super Tuesday primaries underscores the depth of change that the South has experienced. His victory is a victory for the South over its history of racial division.

Like many other Southerners, Jackson was drawn by the winds of change during the 1960s into the civil-rights movement. Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson was an important voice in demonstrations protesting racial segregation in the South. Both King and Jackson clearly understood that voter registration was the key to the political changes that they sought. Since King’s tragic death, Jackson has been enormously successful in expanding voter registration by blacks.

Yet while the black vote was essential to his success on Tuesday, Jackson’s greatest achievement was in securing the white vote that gave him an important margin of victory in many states. As Southern whites crossed racial lines to vote for Jackson, they broke with a century-old tradition that had divided Southern worlds into white and black castes. Jackson courted the white vote by forthrightly addressing issues that affect both the region and the nation. His statements on education, energy, environment, the family farm, voting rights, peace and drugs strongly appeal to the younger generation of white Southerners.

Generations of white liberals have called for and celebrated the “New South,” a world of economic growth that sought to balance agriculture with industry. For blacks, however, this New South differed little from the old one. Poverty and racism continued to plague the region. Given this history, it is a major change to hear a black presidential candidate appealing to voters to help build a truly new South. A Jackson campaign tabloid that was distributed to Southern voters contained this quote: “Twenty years ago racial violence in the Old South was not only constant, but legal. Today, racial violence still occurs but it’s illegal, so we can struggle effectively to end it. But economic violence is legal and is devastating the lives of Americans of all races. On March 8, we can begin to move forward from racial battlegrounds to economic commonground to achieve economic justice in a New South.”

“Economic violence” is a familiar problem to poor and working-class black and white Southerners who heard Jackson’s appeal and responded with their votes. He carried 10% of the Southern white vote and received a clear majority in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia and George Wallace’s home state of Alabama. These victories symbolize fundamental changes in the heartland of the Old Confederacy.

Yet Jackson’s concern for the economic problems of working-class people is clearly not limited to the South. His success in Vermont and Maine indicate that his platform is national, and issues that appealed to Southerners on Super Tuesday will also attract voters outside the region.

Jackson’s showing on Super Tuesday is part of the healing of wounds of racism and a divided house that the South has known for so long. White and black Southerners joined hands in a historic election, and brought political change to the region in a dramatic fashion. Issues rather than race governed the Southern vote, and both black and white Southerners should be proud of the real New South that they are shaping.