Trent Lott lost the most powerful position in the U.S. Senate for suggesting that the nation would be better off if Strom Thurmond, a one-time segregationist from South Carolina, had been elected president.
The flying of the Confederate flag over state property in Thurmond’s home state, a perennial thorn, has emerged anew as a sensitive issue for Democrats seeking nomination for president in 2004.
Insensitivity to racial concerns has become the electrified third rail of modern American politics. Step on it, and step out of the running.
Outright intolerance in this setting — expression of a racial slur — is radioactive.
“An overt racial slur these days is really deadly politics, not simply because it will repel blacks, but because it will repel moderate and conservative white voters as well,” said Ferrel Guillory of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“A lot of moderate to conservative white folks in the suburbs, while they may not admit it to themselves, will vote along racial lines and vote for candidates who happen to be white,” said Guillory, director of the university’s Program in Southern Politics, Media and Public Life. “But they don’t want these candidates to speak in racial slurs or to suggest, as Trent Lott did, that race-tinged thinking affects them.
“A lot of white people in the South want their political figures to be respectable, and to be overtly racist is not respectable anymore.”
The reported remark of Pete Barr Sr., the Republican candidate for the nonpartisan office of Orlando mayor who allegedly spoke privately of “niggers lining up to feed at the trough,” ranges far beyond the confines of any controversy Lott or the Confederate flag instigated.
“He’s finished and should be,” said Larry Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia, when told of Barr’s alleged slur.
“That’s one very positive development in society, that both blacks and whites are sick to death of people who attempt to play on racial divisions,” Sabato said. “It used to work, for decades, and now it doesn’t, and that’s welcome.”
LOTT COMMENT COST HIM
Lott crossed a more subtle line in early December, when the Republican senator from Mississippi celebrated the 100th birthday of Thurmond with praise for his 1948 campaign for president. Lott said his own state had been proud to vote for Thurmond, who led the ticket of an avowedly segregationist party, the Dixiecrats.
“If the rest of the country had followed our lead,” Lott said, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years.”
Lott was ready to become Senate majority leader again after Republicans reclaimed a majority of the Senate in November. Within two weeks, Lott found himself so alone — President Bush signaled that the Republican Party had no patience for such sentiment — that he was forced to step aside as Senate leader Dec. 20.
Ironically, the Republican Party has benefited from alienation among white Southern voters since Democrats championed civil-rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s. Black voters have sided with Democrats by margins of 9-1.
CANDIDATES MUST ADAPT
Today, in a polarized environment, candidates still face racial litmus tests.
In South Carolina, where flying the Confederate flag over the Capitol became an issue in the 2000 Republican presidential primary, it is again a concern in the 2004 Democratic primary.
The Stars and Bars no longer flies atop the Capitol in Columbia, S.C. Instead, it flies from another pole on Capitol grounds. The flag, hailed by supporters as a symbol of Southern heritage, is disdained by opponents as a symbol of racism.
U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri created a stir in South Carolina this winter when at first he said he didn’t want to take sides.
Gephardt quickly changed his tune: “I think South Carolina should remove the Confederate flag from any official display anywhere in the state.”
Fellow Democrats fell in line. U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina then moved beyond the line, expressing support for an NAACP boycott of businesses in South Carolina by announcing that he will stay at homes of friends as he campaigns for the state’s first-in-the-South primary election.
“Racial politics these days is played more in nuances and codes,” Guillory said. “We have an electorate that is polarized by race. But we too have moved beyond the old demagoguery, the old-fashioned race-baiting.”
SOME CAN’T KEEP PACE
If the South itself has evolved, some politicians still have trouble keeping pace.
“Because of the changes in the South, we have a lot of people living in the region — Orlando being Exhibit A — who didn’t go through the old struggles where race was right on the surface,” Guillory said.
Guillory and Bruce Ransom, professor of political science at Clemson University, credit Lott for reminding the country, albeit in a painful way, about a history its young never lived through and its elders want to forget.
“The controversy over Sen. Lott’s comments really refocused attention on the dynamics of race,” Ransom said. “President Clinton had a dialogue on race, and we talked about it on an intellectual level. But we hadn’t, until the Lott comment, gotten to the core of the issue of race in American life.”
