[For those who live in the shadow of segregation and racial
terror, the election is not about policy or personality. It’s about
something much darker.] [[link removed]]

WHY SOUTHERN DEMOCRATS SAVED BIDEN  
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Mara Gay
March 6, 2020
New York Times
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_ For those who live in the shadow of segregation and racial terror,
the election is not about policy or personality. It’s about
something much darker. _

Biden supporters at a campaign event in South Carolina, Damon
Winter/The New York Times

 

At the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated in 1968, things look much as they did a half-century ago.

The site is now home to the National Civil Rights Museum
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a remarkable collection that includes a replica of a firebombed bus
ridden by the Freedom Riders as they traveled through the South
protesting segregation in 1961.

Inside the museum the other day, a woman sat down beside me and wiped
away tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What gets me is, after all
this time, look what’s happening right now.”

Visitors to the Lorraine Motel after a ceremony in 2018 marking the
50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Southern Democrats — particularly black Democrats — are hoping to
keep the history that surrounds them in the past.

Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina explained this in
visceral terms when he announced his support for Joe Biden
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last month, an endorsement
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began with Mr. Clyburn, 79, talking about the first time he was
arrested protesting for civil rights decades ago. “When I sat in
jail that day, I wondered whether we were doing the right thing, but I
was never fearful for the future,” he said. “As I stand before you
today I am fearful of the future of this country. I’m fearful for my
daughters and their futures, and their children, and their
children’s futures.”

Mr. Clyburn said he was sure Mr. Biden was the right choice. “I know
Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us,” he said.
Three days later, Mr. Biden won a convincing victory in the South
Carolina primary, launching him into his Super Tuesday triumph and the
front-runner status he enjoys today.

My friends in New York, many of them Elizabeth Warren or Bernie
Sanders supporters who see Mr. Biden as deeply uninspiring, were
mystified. But after traveling through the South this past week, I
began to understand. Through Southern eyes, this election is not about
policy or personality. It’s about something much darker.

Not long ago, these Americans lived under violent, anti-democratic
governments. Now, many there say they see in President Trump and his
supporters the same hostility and zeal for authoritarianism that
marked life under Jim Crow.For those who lived through the trauma of
racial terrorism and segregation, or grew up in its long shadow, this
history haunts the campaign trail. And Mr. Trump has summoned old
ghosts.

“People are prideful of being racist again,” said Bobby Caradine,
47, who is black and has lived in Memphis all his life. “It’s
right back out in the open.”

In Tennessee and Alabama, in Arkansas and Oklahoma and Mississippi,
Democrats, black and white, told me they were united by a single,
urgent goal: defeating Mr. Trump this November, with any candidate,
and at any cost.

“There’s three things I want to happen,” Angela Watson, a
60-year-old black Democrat from Oklahoma City, told me at a campaign
event there this week. “One, beat Trump. Two, beat Trump. And three,
beat Trump.”

They were deeply skeptical that a democratic socialist like Mr.
Sanders could unseat Mr. Trump. They liked Ms. Warren, but, burned by
Hillary Clinton’s loss, were worried that too many of their fellow
Americans wouldn’t vote for a woman.

Joe Biden is no Barack Obama. But he was somebody they knew. “He was
with Obama for all those years,” Mr. Caradine said. “People are
comfortable with him.” Faced with the prospect of their children
losing the basic rights they won over many generations, these voters,
as the old Chicago political saw goes, don’t want nobody that nobody
sent.

Mr. Biden understands this. “If the Democrats want a nominee who’s
a Democrat — a lifelong Democrat! a proud Democrat! an Obama-Biden
Democrat! — then join us!” he told voters
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South Carolina in his victory speech.

Joe Biden with a supporter last week after a rally.Credit...Damon
Winter/The New York Times

Despite enormous progress, poverty in this still largely rural region,
for Southerners of every race, remains crushing.

Confederate flags proudly paid for by the Sons of Confederate Veterans
dot the highways.

Michael Bloomberg’s campaign office in Montgomery, Alabama faced a
town square where human beings sold other human beings into slavery.

In Memphis last week, steps from the campaign trail, hundreds gathered
across town for the 68th annual Mid-South Farm & Gin Show. Inside a
massive convention hall, white Southerners mingled amid the giant
steel claws of farm equipment and cardboard cutouts of Donald Trump
and Mike Pence. At one booth, vendors sold a shirt that read, “Make
Cotton Great Again.”

“The past is never dead,” as the Mississippi novelist William
Faulkner wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.” “It’s not even past.”

Faulkner was on my mind when I picked up the keys to a rental car in
Memphis, for the long drive to Selma, Ala. Along the way, I stopped
for breakfast in Olive Branch, Miss., where I met a man named Dave
Wright. His grandfather, Leonard Wright, was William Faulkner’s
physician. “Faulkner wrote about Granddaddy. Granddaddy didn’t
like what he said, but it was all true,” Mr. Wright told me. He
stopped there.

 

A sea of marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on
Sunday.Credit...Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

On Sunday, I marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge with
thousands, an annual exercise in remembering that draws Americans from
all walks of life. In 1965, police attacked civil rights protesters
here in an event that came to be called Bloody Sunday.

This year, the Democratic presidential candidates joined. So did Bob
Smith, an older black man, who stood at the edge of the crowds holding
a sign. “I was here in 1965, pistol whipped and kicked by police,”
it read.

When I asked him about it, Mr. Smith smiled. “Yeah, I was here all
right. Got the crap kicked out of me, too!” he told me with an easy
laugh.

The march began and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a dull block of
concrete named for a Confederate brigadier
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was suddenly flooded with life. Choirs sent the sounds of gospel high
into the thick Alabama air. Drummers walked the route alongside school
groups, and church groups, and black sorority women in their pink and
green regalia. Parents carried young children on their shoulders,
hoping to catch a glimpse of the presidential candidates. “This is
better than Mardi Gras,” Sharon Holmes, of Pontiac, Mich., told me.

At the crest of the bridge, hundreds stood with their faces to the
warm Southern sun, breathing it all in.

Together, they are determined to hold on to a country that was paid
for 55 years ago in blood. In the South, as in the rest of America,
that may be a hard thing to do.

_Mara Gay is a member of the New York Times editorial board._

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