JoAnn Wypijewski: Black and Bruised

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   The New York Times, February 1, 2004
Black and Bruised
By JOANN WYPIJEWSKI

. . .[T]here's trouble for the Democratic Party in black America.
Most people don't have a passion for politics to offset the
skepticism born of being dragooned into service every election cycle
to cover the spot on the political gaming table labeled ''the black
vote.'' And skepticism reigns among the Democrats' most loyal
constituents on the eve of what is being called the ''black
primary.'' African-Americans could account for up to half the vote in
South Carolina on Tuesday, so for months candidates have been
visiting black churches, dropping in at football games and fish
fries, collecting black endorsements and welding themselves to the
memory of Martin Luther King Jr. or Bill Clinton, sometimes both.

Some say the outcome here will forecast how the candidates will sell
to African-Americans nationwide. As of early January, the most
compelling message appeared to be ''sellers beware.'' A schoolteacher
and choirmaster in the county seat, the city of Orangeburg, told me,
''I'm disgusted with the whole process.'' A store owner said he'd
vote for Al Sharpton because ''what choice do we have?'' One
21-year-old hip-hopper wasn't even having that; he said of Sharpton,
''All he's trying to do is manipulate the black people against the
white people to vote for him to be leader of black America.'' At a
meeting early last month of Concerned Citizens of House District 66,
a civic group in the area Cobb-Hunter represents, there was no debate
about ''the presidentials,'' as she calls them, but heated words
about a sheriff's race in June.

. . . Some election officials said a 20 percent turnout among all
Democratic voters for the primary would be an achievement.

Blacks who vote in South Carolina overwhelmingly want George Bush
out. But as one black South Carolinian told me, a party can't just
depend on ''a bogeyman'' or identify with a community when it's
convenient and expect consistent identification in return.

''The Democratic Party is the party that talks about the black vote
and attaining it by any means necessary,'' [Labrena] Aiken said.
''Now, that does not equate with 'We value the black vote' as much as
'We have to attain it in order to get what we want.'''. . .
Candidates parade through church, Aiken noted, but, she said: ''Has
anyone done a follow-up visit after a campaign? You know, 'I came to
your church, asked for your vote, the preacher gave me the pat and we
prayed. Now I'm in; I'm going to make one more trip back, at least to
thank you.'''

It is commonly recognized that whichever passing churchgoer
ultimately becomes the party's nominee, he will not be seen here
again. In the Democratic National Committee's markup of battleground
and nonbattleground states for November, South Carolina falls
definitively into the latter category. (Bush easily won the state in
the 2000 election with nearly 60 percent of the vote.) Some
Democratic strategists say that the party might be smart to write off
not just South Carolina but the whole South (except Florida) and
concentrate on states more demonstrably in play. It is less commonly
noted that writing off the South, home to 55 percent of the country's
black population, symbolically means writing off African-Americans as
well.

At a Democratic National Committee meeting last October, members of
the D.N.C.'s Southern Caucus confronted the committee chairman, Terry
McAuliffe, about the national party's failure to sponsor a single
debate in the South and about fears that the region will be starved
of resources for November. . . . [Gilda] Cobb-Hunter, like every
African-American I spoke with, has not forgotten that in 2000 the
party pulled virtually everything out of the South to concentrate on
Florida, then refused to see beyond hanging chads and go to the mat
over the tens of thousands of voters, the majority black and
Hispanic, said to have been improperly labeled felons and stripped
from the rolls. ''Any message that the Democratic Party wanted to
send, they sent in 2000, and '04 is just a continuation of that
message,'' she said. ''It's up to the Democratic Party whether they
want to change the story. Because if they don't, we will not carry
one Southern state. Let me just add that if the Democratic Party is
not serious about dealing with the issues of race and class that are
so prevalent in this country but particularly in the South, then they
may as well write it off, because there's no point in coming in here
with cosmetics.'' . . .

Unlike Aiken, whose people are from Orangeburg but whose childhood
was spent on military bases, and Cobb-Hunter, who is from Gifford,
Fla.,[Baraka] Cheeseboro has spent all her 46 years here. She holds
''office'' under a venerable pecan tree in Martha (Bay-Bay) Hooks's
front yard in the hard-time neighborhood of Sprinkle Avenue, where
locals plan for political campaigns, organize events and gossip. They
say Cheeseboro knows everyone and his cousin-once-removed in
Orangeburg, and she holds its history close. Back in 1968, when she
was 10, her 17-year-old cousin Delano Middleton was among three
people shot dead by white Highway Patrolmen at South Carolina State
University in one of the civil rights era's bloodiest events; known
as the Orangeburg Massacre, it was the first such use of force on an
American campus. That attack ripped her world of cowboy shows and
country and western on the radio; she never would be so carefree or
so unconscious of what people call the state's ''race culture'' again.

Cheeseboro can chart the class matrix and power gaps within white
society as well as black, but Orangeburg isn't a place presidentials
come to woo the white vote. They come here when they want to be sure
of a black audience and sure that their words aren't wasted. The
center of a county that is 61 percent black and nearly 100 percent
Democratic in elected offices, it is more or less midway between
Columbia and Charleston, midway between rural and urban, midway
between abject poverty and the high life, meaning that while some
African-Americans reside in the suburbia of cathedral ceilings and
others live out of rusty vans off a main road, most people occupy the
space where dirt alleys of trailers and shotgun shacks seem to melt
into potholed lanes of bungalows, which in turn melt into smooth
streets of ranch houses and pretty lawns. Just outside the city
limits, there are vast medical complexes and factories making
ibuprofen, sterile tubing and more lawnmowers and garden tractors
than anywhere in the world. Countywide, unemployment is 14.5 percent
and the average wage is $8.72 an hour, but a more palpable measure of
the area's financial state is the generous presence downtown of
pawnshops and all manner of loan-fixer and car-title repurchaser.
Candidates rarely, if ever, do walk-arounds through this slice of
Americana, preferring readymade audiences across the tracks at the
historically black colleges, State and Claflin University. . . .

. . . More than 27 percent of the county's households survive on
$15,000 a year or less, a condition of persistent poverty that
ensnares so much of the South, especially the rural Black Belt. For
some, the drug business is a way out, and Cheeseboro can spot the
''movin' on up'' homes that drugs bought. But more are caught than
lucky, particularly if they're black. African-Americans make up 30
percent of South Carolina's population but 70 percent of its
prisoners. Officially, one out of 13 black men in South Carolina is
barred from voting because he is in prison, on probation or on
parole; nationwide the rate is one in 8. And everyone says it: the
poor have been written off. The poor, the state, the South. Who's
next? . . .

Separately, each woman noted that the former state party chairman,
Dick Harpootlian, who is white, had once quipped, ''I don't want to
buy the black vote; I just want to rent it for a day.'' That was in
1986, he told me, an offhand joke that no one takes seriously, adding
that as a state and a country, ''we've got to get beyond racial
division, and we can't seem to do that.'' Memories are long; the
three women were not the first to mention his quotation to me. Nor
were they the first to assert that white Democrats would jump party
(and have) before accepting black leadership. Or to say they'd felt
used by the former Democratic governor, Jim Hodges, who was elected
in 1998 with the help of black party activists and who then, some
say, ignored black, poor and working-class voters.

Many fault Hodges for skimping on grass-roots campaigning in his 2002
re-election bid. He went down on Nov. 5, Cobb-Hunter's birthday. It
was, her friends joked, the best present she got. '''Y'all ain't got
nowhere to go,' Dick Harpootlian would tell me in meetings for the
2002 cycle,'' she said. '''Are they gonna vote Republican?''' One of
her best friends, a born Democrat, did. More than 10,000 South
Carolinians left the top of the ballot blank or, like at least one of
Cobb-Hunter's fellow legislators, voted for Kevin Gray, a black
write-in candidate. Gray, who later served as an adviser to Carol
Moseley Braun's campaign, studied state Election Commission
statistics and found that almost 289,000 blacks stayed home in the
2002 election, more than went to the polls.

The state Democratic Party executive director, Nu Wexler, maintains
that as a percentage of overall turnout, that was among the better
recent performances, which can't be reassuring. In any event, it's
hard to overstate the residual bitterness. Just last November the
Rev. Hayes Gainey of Edisto Fork United Methodist Church, in
Cobb-Hunter's district, got ''amens'' when in a Sunday sermon he
mentioned black voters' feeling of being used and abused by the
Democrats, specifically noting 2002. It's a sensitivity that carries
over in assessing national candidates now. ''John Kerry had his
people in Orangeburg one night,'' Gainey told me. ''They were trying
to push his platform to a group of us, and one of them says, 'If we
decide to use you -.' Well, 'Hold on,' I said. 'You're not going to
use anyone in this room. If we decide to support John Kerry's
campaign, we'll let you know.' Thought to myself, Man, you talking to
us as if you're the pimp and we're the workers.''

. . . Some 260,000 eligible black voters in South Carolina aren't
registered. Added to registered no-shows, that means half a million
or so African-Americans are ''missing voters,'' a group sizable
enough to turn any statewide election for the Democrats -- if they
saw a reason to. But everyone I met who's doing voter registration in
town, on campus or in the countryside said they're up against it.
Cheeseboro recalled that two years ago, ''folks actually ran me out
their yard. They'd say: 'Get out! I'm not voting. I don't want
anything to do with it. Ain't nothin' gonna change.' I have heard
that over and over again.'' . . .

No one I met in the 18-to-35-year-old cohort said, as did James
Sulton, at 80 the lion of one of Orangeburg's grand families, ''I'd
vote for the Devil if he was a Democrat.'' Often, younger blacks
called themselves independent or libertarian or said they thought the
two parties didn't differ fundamentally, supporting national data
showing that about a third of African-Americans of this age (and
almost 40 percent of the men) identify with neither party. Lately,
the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons announced plans to register
millions of young voters nationwide, but as in South Carolina, that
still leaves unaddressed the turnout question (in 2000, almost
two-thirds of registered blacks between 18 and 24 didn't vote) and
the matter of whether people believe voting can change anything. In
the hamlet of Elloree, in Cobb-Hunter's district, half a dozen
hip-hoppers spent four hours telling me about the jobs that were not
there, the cops that always were, the runarounds and racial
disequilibrium in the smallest things. They said they'd vote (except
for one, who had a drug rap), but as I heard repeatedly, you might
perform the act without having confidence in it. As for Elloree, ''It
ain't ever gonna change.'' . . .

The last time the question of energizing, even expanding the base
came under serious debate in the Democratic Party was in the 80's.
Labrena Aiken remembers 1984, when at 18 she cast her first ballot,
for Jesse Jackson, as something ''electric.'' She and her friends
knew, she said, that he would not win the nomination, but ''even when
you know, you still want to believe.'' Cobb-Hunter was a Jackson
delegate that year, her first national convention. It's often
forgotten that Jackson's campaign registered more than a million
voters in 1984 and that two years later the Democrats regained the
Senate, picking up four seats in the South. In 1988, his Rainbow
Coalition came in first or second in 46 of 54 primary contests,
registering another two million along the way. But as Ronald Reagan
had in 1980, Michael Dukakis took his general-election campaign to
Neshoba County, Miss., to court white votes, never mentioning the
murder of three civil rights workers there in 1964. The white
Democratic leadership's interest in rainbow populism, never
enthusiastic, was officially terminated. . . .

On our last day together, Aiken observed: ''The Republicans have a
strong white base, a very strong white base, an unwavering white
base. And the Democratic Party is being threatened because we're
wavering.'' In 2000 some of her professional friends were impressed
by the Republican convention's ''black night.'' She and Cheeseboro
watched it on TV from their own homes while talking together over the
phone. Cheeseboro wasn't impressed; she was more interested, she
said, that apart from ''liveliness'' (where Democrats had the edge),
she couldn't detect much difference in what the two major parties
presented on so-called black issues. That year Cheeseboro, a county
party officer ''raised to vote Democrat or you'd die,'' voted against
Al Gore and for Ralph Nader.

I remembered the look on Cobb-Hunter's face when I, surprised,
mentioned this -- one of those looks that says, ''Girl, where have
you been?'' What she actually said was, ''It's the Democratic Party;
it's not a blood oath.''

JoAnn Wypijewski writes about political and social issues for
Harper's and The Nation.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/magazine/01VOTERS.html>   *****
--
Yoshie

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