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After 150 Years, Dixie Still A Place Apart

After 150 Years, Dixie Still A Place Apart

On the day after the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Abraham Lincoln appeared at a second-floor window of the White House. He was acceding to the wishes of citizens who had gathered to serenade their president in this moment of victory. They called for a speech but Lincoln demurred. Instead he asked the band to play “Dixie.”

The song — a homesick Southerner’s lament — had been the de facto anthem of the Confederacy during 48 bloody months of civil war, but Lincoln declared now that the South held no monopoly on it. “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” he said. It was probably his way of encouraging a nation that had ripped itself apart along sectional lines to begin knitting itself together again.

Lincoln received an answer of sorts two days later as beaten rebels surrendered their weapons to the Union Army. Union General Joshua Chamberlain remarked to Southern counterpart Henry Wise that perhaps now “brave men may become good friends.”

Wise’s reply was bitter as smoke. “You’re mistaken, sir,” he said. “You may forgive us, but we won’t be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts which you little dream of. We hate you, sir.”

Two days after that, April 14, Lincoln received a more direct response. John Wilkes Booth, famed actor and Southern sympathizer, shot him in the head.

Thus ended arguably the most consequential week in American history. This week, the events of that week move fully 150 years into the past. They are further away than they have ever been. And yet, they feel quite close. If the “hate” Henry Wise spoke of has dissipated in the 15 decades gone by, what has not faded is Dixie’s sense of itself as a place apart and a people done wrong. Small wonder.

Twice now — at gunpoint in the 1860s, by force of law a century later — the rest of the country has imposed change on the South, made it do what it did not want to do, i.e., extend basic human rights to those it had systematically brutalized and oppressed. No other part of the country has ever experienced that, has ever seen itself so harshly chastised by the rest.

Both times, the act was moral and necessary. But who can deny, or be surprised, that in forcing the South to do the right thing, the rest of the country fostered an abiding resentment, an enduring “apartness,” made the South a region defined by resistance. Name the issue — immigration, race, abortion, education, criminal justice — and law and custom in Dixie have long stood stubbornly apart from the rest of the country. But the headline 150 years later is that that apartness no longer confines itself to the boundaries of the Confederacy.

In 2015, for example, we see the old pattern repeating in the fight over marriage equality — most of the country having decided as a moral matter that this has to happen, yet a few people resisting as the change is imposed over their wishes. But if resistance is fierce in Arkansas, it also is fierce in Indiana. The sense of apartness is less geographically constrained. Who knows if that’s progress?

There is nothing predestined about America’s ultimate ability to overcome its contradictions. This was true in 1865 and it’s true now. It will always be true of a people bound, not by common ancestry but only common cause — a presumed fealty to self-evident truths.

America shattered in 1861. Lincoln forced the bloody pieces back together at the cost of over 600,000 lives, one of them his own. It never did knit itself back together in the way he had hoped — in the way he might have helped it to, had he survived.

Instead, it became this once broken thing where the seams of repair still show. And the question of that consequential week is the question of every day since then. Can you make a country out of that?

So far, so good.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Confederate flag on state capitol grounds, Charleston, S.C. (Jason Eppink/Flickr)

New Generation Of African Americans Are Moving Less

New Generation Of African Americans Are Moving Less

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org (TNS)

STOCKBRIDGE, Georgia — Tavaras Powell moved hundreds of miles south to an Atlanta suburb in search of a job after getting his college degree 15 years ago. Here, he met and married Toye, who has lived in the area all her life.

The Powells — Tavaras, 37, and Toye, 35 — embody some of the latest trends in migration by African Americans: Some are moving for economic opportunity, but many are extremely loyal to childhood homes.

“I moved from home and she’s still home. It’s an interesting mix,” said Tavaras Powell.

A new study shows that today’s black families are less mobile than whites or previous generations of black families, and are tending to stay in the same state and even the same county where they were raised. Some scholars see this as evidence that blacks have been left out of recent regional booms in tech and energy, but it also may be that they simply are making shorter moves from cities to nearby suburbs.

The study, by sociologist Patrick Sharkey of New York University in the journal Demography, found a sharp difference between the current generation, born between 1952 and 1982, and earlier waves of African Americans who moved from the rural South to Northern cities in the last century, which historians call the Great Migration.

“This new geographic immobility is the most pronounced change in black Americans’ migration patterns after the Great Migration,” Sharkey wrote. “In the most recent generation, black Americans have remained in place to a degree that is unique relative to the previous generation and relative to whites of the same generation.”
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MANY BLACKS IN SOUTH STAY PUT

Sharkey found that nationwide, 86 percent of African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 had not moved from the area where they grew up. For his study, he used a series of surveys that followed families from 1968 to 2007 that were conducted by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan.

A Stateline analysis shows that blacks are more likely than whites, Hispanics, or Asians in Southern states to have been born in the state where they live — ranging from 89 percent in Louisiana to 63 percent in Virginia and Georgia. The only exception is West Virginia, where white residents are more likely to have been born in the state than blacks.

The same also is true in California, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

Some scholars, such as Sandra Susan Smith, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, worry that the findings imply that African Americans are not finding a place in job booms in construction, technology, and energy industries in other parts of the country.

Many cities and states have tried to create more jobs requiring highly skilled workers, including offering tax incentives to companies that provide them. But many African Americans don’t have the education and training for such jobs.

“The economic expansions of the last 25 years or so that might have inspired families to move have been concentrated in industries and occupations that have not been traditional niches for blacks,” said Smith, who is black. “If you’re black, these economic developments would not likely have caused you to pick up and leave.”

Smith also suggested that a lack of long-distance movement may mask a recent trend of black families moving out of inner cities and into the suburbs. That would help account for Sharkey’s findings that many blacks remain in the same states and even counties where they were born.

“This suggests that there is mobility, but much more contained than that studied by Sharkey,” Smith said. “Such a movement would likely reflect two phenomena: The increased economic cost of living in big cities, which pushes those without great means to the suburbs, where more than half of the poor now currently live, and the continued promise that the suburbs hold for many in the middle class — less crime, more space, and parks.”

Despite finding less migration, Sharkey did find a reversal of direction compared to previous generations, with today’s blacks tending to move to the South rather than to the North.

Sharkey said his findings don’t conflict with recent accounts of a new Great Migration by blacks headed to the South, as William Frey of The Brookings Institution called it in 2004 in looking at movement in the years 1965 to 2000.

Frey noted at the time that the South had gained black migrants in the 1990s, reversing a 35-year trend, with metro areas like Atlanta leading the way. There were “brain gains” in the South, Frey wrote, as Georgia, Texas and Maryland attracted the most black college graduates from 1995 to 2000.

“I don’t think it necessarily conflicts,” Sharkey said of his findings compared to Frey’s. “I do think the emphasis is different, as he hasn’t focused on the drop in long-range mobility.”

Frey acknowledged that he did not address generational differences as Sharkey did. “It may be the case that later generations of Northern blacks are not moving across counties or anywhere as much as earlier black generations,” Frey said.
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STAYING AT HOME; ECONOMIC, CULTURAL FACTORS

When black Americans do move, it’s often for economic opportunity. That was the case for Tavaras Powell, who moved more than 300 miles south to seek his fortune in the Atlanta area after getting his college degree in 2000 from Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina.

“Atlanta was like the candy land. Everybody wanted to go,” said Powell, an environmentalist who monitors water quality in a neighboring county.

His wife Toye, meanwhile, said she has had no desire to move because she feels more comfortable near her hometown than in any other place she has visited. She is an elementary school teacher.

“You look at the news and you see African Americans in not the best light, but in Atlanta you see lots of positive examples,” she said. “It’s nice to see, in Atlanta, African Americans who are successful and doing a great job; you see doctors and lawyers. You get used to that and you just get kind of comfortable.”

Tavaras Powell has a family history that conforms with the Great Migration and return to the South. Several relatives in his grandparents’ generation moved from North Carolina to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he often visited during the summer as a child. But in the 1990s they returned to their childhood home in North Carolina.

“They retired and went right back to the same spot, all in arm’s reach of each other. They had a totally different lifestyle and they came right back,” Tavaras Powell said.

Economics as well as a feeling of home also come into play. Carlotta Harrell, a management consultant in Henry County, who is black, happily remains here where her grandparents settled.

“I’ve done a lot of traveling, and to be perfectly honest there is no other place I would rather live,” said Harrell.

“The house that I live in would probably cost $2 million up North,” she said. “I hate the weather. And to me, the people up north are just not as friendly. There is such a thing as Southern hospitality.”
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BLACKS AREN’T ALONE

African Americans aren’t the only ones who feel the lure of the South. Sharkey’s study showed that whites who had left the South were even more likely to return there — 14 percent of whites as opposed to nine percent of blacks, though blacks were more likely to return to the same county.

“It is my contention that all Southerners eventually go home,” said Allison Glock, a writer who is white and who has blogged about the difficulty of staying away from “the bleached-linen, biscuit-baking, horsefly-biting landscape of my childhood.”

For her, the lure was more cultural than economic, she said, although she doesn’t mind mentioning her low mortgage payments to New York City friends.

“I missed the easy sociability of the place,” she said. “When we get off the plane in Atlanta, I am always so happy to hear people chatting and joking with each other…Nobody talks to each other in Denver or Los Angeles. You strike up a conversation with a stranger in L.A. and it’s like you’ve asked them to take off their pants.”

Photo: Tim Henderson via Stateline

Gay Rights Supporters Gird For Fight In Mississippi Beyond Marriage

Gay Rights Supporters Gird For Fight In Mississippi Beyond Marriage

By Timothy M. Phelps, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

TUPELO, Mississippi — At Hardee’s restaurant on the east side of town, near the tiny two-room house where Elvis Presley was born, five mostly retired Tupelo good old boys sit nursing coffee, talking about gay marriage.

“I’m agin it,” said Roger Morgan, 78, as the others nodded in assent. “‘Cause my Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman. It didn’t say anything about Adam and Steve.”

Such attitudes are common in this bastion of Southern Baptists, but they’re increasingly under fire — not only by a national wave of court rulings, but by gay rights activists mobilizing in the conservative American heartland like never before.

From its newly opened advocacy office in Tupelo, the national LGBT organization Human Rights Campaign is leading an effort to persuade Main Street business owners here to post “We Don’t Discriminate” stickers in shop windows. Organizers are lobbying the City Council to endorse a nondiscrimination pledge.

And a new generation of homegrown activists like Will Knight, a 22-year-old community college English teacher, see it as their mission to increase gay visibility. “I feel sometimes I come out every day,” Knight said.

The national debate over gay marriage and equality is sweeping through this deeply religious town like a spring tornado, uprooting long-held biases but also stirring a conservative backlash.

Fire-and-brimstone preachers, such as the Reverend Forrest Sheffield of Harrisburg Baptist Church, complain that gay activists and judges who support same-sex marriage “have got Mississippi by the jugular.” From the headquarters of the American Family Association, which runs a conservative national radio network, host Bryan Fischer tells listeners that homosexuality should be criminalized like drug use.

As gay rights groups fight for a legal beachhead at the Tupelo City Council, conservatives last year persuaded the Mississippi Legislature — which is defending its ban against same-sex marriage — to adopt a law to make it easier for religious-minded individuals, businesses, and others to openly discriminate against gays and lesbians without fear of being sued.

Like it or not, gay marriage is likely coming to Tupelo, either at the hands of a New Orleans federal appeals court that could soon announce a ruling, or when the U.S. Supreme Court takes action in June. A majority of the justices is widely expected to legalize gay marriage nationwide.

But lingering hostility toward homosexuality here explains why many gay families predict their problems won’t end with a legal victory for same-sex marriage.

“Marriage equality is around the corner for Mississippi and the entire nation,” said Amelie Hahn, a 37-year-old lesbian raising two children. “This is great. But that piece of paper isn’t going to ensure that we keep our jobs, or that kids can come out in schools. It’s scary here.”

Hahn’s story reflects not only the difficulties of growing up gay in the South, but the high stakes same-sex couples here have in the marriage debate.

Despite its conservatism, Mississippi has the highest rate of same-sex couples raising children among the 50 states, according to a 2013 study by UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy.

Twenty-six percent of gay couples in Mississippi are raising children, higher than the rates in more progressive communities like Los Angeles or New York (16 percent and 17 percent, respectively), the study found. Experts speculate that the rate is higher in conservative states in the South, West, and Midwest in part because gays and lesbians often face pressure to enter heterosexual relationships and start families before coming to terms with their sexuality.

Growing up with a devout Christian father, Hahn buckled to social pressure and married a man when she was in her 20s. They had two children. “It’s what I have always been brought up to believe you do,” the New Orleans native said, even though she knew she was a lesbian.

Years later she came out, got divorced and moved with her children to Tupelo, hoping for a fresh start. But Hahn quickly found that living openly as a lesbian with kids, including a disabled daughter, was difficult.

“I’ve had people spit at my car,” she said. “They whisper as I walk by in a restaurant. In the grocery store, two elderly ladies said, ‘Oh my God, that’s the homosexual woman with a kid in a wheelchair.’ ” Tired of the animosity, Hahn decided to move to the state capital, Jackson, where “it’s a lot easier to breathe.”

Hahn’s experience is why gay rights groups say they are already gearing up for the next battle: passing a federal law to ban discrimination in employment, housing, and commerce based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Census figures suggest there are more than 60 same-sex couples in Tupelo raising kids, but most keep a low profile or remain in the closet.

Groups like the Human Rights Campaign are taking that battle to the states and to the streets, opening offices recently in Alabama and Mississippi, the two most disapproving of same-sex marriage.

Tupelo, named for the Tupelo gum trees that inhabited the surrounding swamps, grew up around a railroad crossing just before the Civil War, when it was burned to the ground by Union troops. It has always been known as a progressive city economically but is conservative socially and politically. Tupelo voted against Barack Obama by nearly two to one, well above the statewide average. It is a place where residents don’t hesitate to ask a stranger, “You follow Christ?”

“Tupelo is one of the strongest church-based communities I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Sheffield, the Baptist minister, whose 3,500-member congregation expelled its Boy Scout troop after the national association decided to accept gay members. Two-thirds of the residents of Tupelo and the surrounding county are affiliated with a church, and 60 percent of those are Southern Baptists.

At the same time, Tupelo is known in Mississippi as having a small liberal counterculture. It has its own professional symphony orchestra (the smallest city in the country to have one), two ballet companies, and several art galleries. Two years ago it elected Democrat Jason Shelton, who gay activists say is a privately sympathetic mayor.

Although gay groups are pushing the city council for a pledge not to discriminate, their chances appear slim.

Volunteers like Bob Spencer, lay leader of the local Unitarian Universalist Church, have been walking downtown, home to the hardware store that sold Elvis his first guitar, asking business owners to post window stickers stating, “We Don’t Discriminate. If you’re buying, we’re selling.” Few businesses have complied, and one that did lose business as a result.

“It was important to me to be one of the businesses that stood up and said, ‘I’m tired of Mississippi being known as one state that discriminates,’ ” said Moe Briston, a Tupelo native who runs the local Culligan water treatment company.

After Briston posted the sticker, she lost a major account of 15 years, the American Family Assocation, worth $1,200 a year. But the stickers are still there.

There are some anecdotal signs of progress. When a prominent Presbyterian minister here recently urged his congregation to “stand up for the Bible” against homosexuality, more progressive churchgoers bristled at the intolerance and he was almost fired, according to members. He took a leave of absence to reflect, one member said.

Knight, the openly gay English teacher, said his goal is to ensure that people know there are gays in the community. A survey by the Human Rights Campaign last year showed that only half of Mississippi’s residents say they know someone who is gay, compared with nine in ten Americans nationwide.

“Something about the South, a lot of people say they have never been introduced to someone who is gay,” he said.

Knight says he is sometimes frustrated that more gays are not active in gay rights here.

“I think there is a lot of fear here and, as much as fear, shame,” he said. “That goes a long way to caging a lot of people.”

Like Hahn, he believes that legal marriage is just a first step. “I don’t feel like Mississippi should stop at marriage. There are so many other areas where we are not equal,” he said.

Rob Hill, a former United Methodist pastor who heads the Human Rights Campaign’s Mississippi office, recalled a Tupelo elected official once telling him that “gays are fully accepted here, but we just don’t talk about it.”

“How open and accepting is it if you live and get by in that community, but yet you can’t be open about who you are?” Hill asked. He agreed it will require more than legalized gay marriage to pry open the Southern closet.

“Marriage equality will come to Mississippi,” Hill said. “But the problem with that is that you can get married on Saturday but lose your job or get kicked out of your apartment on Monday.”

Photo: Sean Davis via Flickr

Democrats Divided: How Did They Lose The White Middle Class?

Democrats Divided: How Did They Lose The White Middle Class?

By David Lightman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — The Democratic Party is a mess.

One group of party leaders sees 2014 as simply a bad year, requiring just some tweaks. Others regard 2014 as a disaster and want an overhaul, and fast.

Leading the tear-it-up side are liberals, the party’s most loyal constituency. They’re angry because they saw no clear economic message pledging to help people with middle- and lower-class incomes.

“The first thing the party has to do is stand for something,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal activist group.

Elected officials offer similar warnings. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat, last month criticized his party for revamping the health care system in 2009 and 2010 instead of focusing on helping people get and keep jobs.

Then there’s the South, where Democrats were crushed last month. Getting even a quarter of the white vote was a struggle in most state races.

“The national Democratic Party is just too liberal for us,” explained Richard Harpootlian, a Columbia, S.C., attorney and former South Carolina Democratic chairman.

When the Democratic Party hierarchy met and strategized at a Florida resort last week, the split over how much is wrong was apparent.

“This happens to both parties at various times,” Connecticut Chairman Nancy DiNardo said of the 2014 defeats.

Not like this, said others. “We’ve alienated the white middle class,” protested Jeanne Buell, Idaho vice chairman.

Democrats lost control of the Senate last month. Republicans gained seats as well in the House of Representatives, where they will hold their biggest majority since the 1940s. The GOP now has 31 of the nations’ 50 governorships, the most for either party in 16 years.

Officially, the Democratic intelligentsia is concerned and has authorized a task force to conduct a “top-to-bottom” review of what can be done. Insiders and outsiders comprise the panel, and preliminary findings are due at the party’s February meeting.

Like-minded Democrats noted the party still holds the White House, and in 2014 were victims of an unusually Republican-friendly Senate map — among the Democrats seeking re-election to the Senate, seven were in states that had voted against Obama in 2012. In the House, they said, Democrats were often victims of Republican gerrymandering.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, told the party meetings to look at Democratic successes, including governors who won tight New England races.

“Voters agree with us on major issues that are important to them,” she said.

She got public praise from officials, but in private meetings and outside the room serious qualms surfaced. At one closed-door meeting, at least three officials stood up and urged the party to be more sensitive to white middle-class concerns. “There was some applause,” said Buell of Idaho.

The ultra-concerned saw the party making two tactical errors this year. It assumed that since economic numbers were pointing up, voters would give its candidates credit. And it was too intent on targeting specific groups loyal to the party, notably single women and African-Americans, instead of reaching out to middle-class whites.

Instead, candidates often ignored a telling statistic: Throughout the year, roughly two-thirds of Americans saw the country as moving in the wrong direction. They’re worried about their futures.

How, voters asked, would Democrats help? At one closed-door seminar for state chairs at the meeting, consultants found Democrats had offered about a dozen different campaign messages. Republicans made it simpler, saying that by cutting taxes and spending, people would wind up with more money to spend as they wished.

“It’s clear we need to hone our message and give people something to vote for,” said Iowa Chairman Scott Brennan. Republican Joni Ernst beat Rep. Bruce Braley, a Democrat, for Iowa’s Senate seat, a seat Democrat Tom Harkin had won five times since 1984.

Too often, chairmen said, Democrats seemed engaged in implementing strategy rather than discussing substance. “How many times can you knock on someone’s door?” asked Washington Chairman Jaxon Ravens. “It’s not so much how often you talk to them, but what you say.”

In West Virginia, for instance, Democrats have warned voters for at least 30 years that Republicans are out to take away Social Security while busting unions. Social Security survives, and union problems can’t be tied exclusively to Republican policies.

“So people just tune out,” said Belinda Biafore, the West Virginia Democratic vice chairwoman.

They might tune in if they saw party regulars in their neighborhoods. That’s why, in South Carolina, Democrats plan a workshop this spring to help people with job search skills such as resume writing and interviewing techniques.

“This is how we show our values,” explained South Carolina Democratic Chairman Jaime Harrison.

Even with a streamlined message, Democrats still have systemic hurdles that could take years to overcome.

Foremost is what Harpootlian called “the re-segregation of the South.” Democrats have long fought for majority-minority congressional districts to boost African-American representation. But that often means packing reliable Democratic votes into one district, making it easier for white Republicans to win surrounding areas.

About one-fourth of South Carolina’s voting population this year was black, but the state’s lone majority-minority district is the only one represented by a Democrat. Other Southern states have similar patterns.

Democrats want to maintain support from black and Latino voters, who have been giving them huge majorities. Winning bigger numbers among Southern whites, though, is proving difficult.

One solution, said former South Carolina Gov. James Hodges, a Democrat, is for candidates to establish their own identities apart from the national party.

“Outsiders win,” he said.

Another tactic: Demonize Republicans. Democratic regulars predicted that as Republicans get stronger, fissures between diehard conservatives and the center-right become more apparent.

That tilt toward Tea Party Republicans helped elect Democrats two years ago. This year, Republican regulars turned back those challenges and did well.

No one knows whether Democrats’ woes are cyclical or structural. That’s why “everything should be on the table,” said Alan Clendenin, the Florida vice chairman.

At the moment, it’s not clear what that might mean. “Too often the inclination after a night like we had on Election Day is to throw everything out and start over,” said Wasserman Schultz, “but to do that would be to ignore the incremental but significant progress that we did achieve over the last two years.”

Photo: studio08denver via Flickr