Race in the South in the Age of Obama
By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF
Published: February 25, 2010
SEVERAL DAYS A WEEK, a tall, broad-shouldered African-American Methodist preacher named James Fields drives his black pickup truck toward the quiet Alabama city of Cullman. An hour into the red-dirt hills above Birmingham, Cullman is the seat of a farming county where the strongest legal drink you can buy at the pool hall is Pepsi; the kegs at the annual Oktoberfest hold only root beer. “Welcome to Mayberry!” strangers are greeted. And then, “We all do have bathrooms and wear shoes!” With its steeples, grain elevators, striped barber poles, fireflies and wisteria, Cullman has the faraway feel of a small Southern town untroubled by time. “Sweet Cullman!” Fields sometimes says when he’s on his way in. “It’s home!”
For Fields, the trip to Cullman takes him 17 miles north. He lives in Colony, a mountainous backwoods hamlet that in Cullman is usually called the Colony. Among the 81,000 people in Cullman County, there are only 401 African-American voters, and all reside, as far as most people in Cullman know, in the small houses and rusting trailers scattered through Colony’s hollows. Fields serves on several boards in Cullman, with white men who, in the midst of conversations with him, may refer to Colony citizens as “those people down there.” A composed, practical person, Fields responds without expression. He’s similarly inscrutable when he hears claims that what is known in Cullman as “the sign” never existed. Even though Fields says, “It was there and folks know it,” he doesn’t push back: “You just let it go. Sometimes things like that need to stay buried. That was in the past. Let us move forward.”
Versions of Cullman’s old sundown sign hung beside county roads well into the 1970s, and all of them repeated the message that the travel writer Carl Carmer saw when he visited Cullman in the late 1920s: “Nigger Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town.” The sign was notorious all over Alabama, and coupled with Cullman’s powerful Ku Klux Klan, it created a racial deterrent so effective that even today, Cullman’s are exits off the Interstate that most African-Americans avoid. A district judge at the Cullman courthouse named Kim Chaney told me, “I do have black people who are very reluctant to come to court here because of the reputation we’ve had for so many years.” As for younger white people who grow up in Cullman, they sometimes feel forced to justify themselves when they go elsewhere because, as Rozalyn Love, a medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham explains, “Cullman is known, especially among Birmingham folks, as the racist white bigot county.” In Alabama, this is, of course, saying something.
But what? Sixty years ago, in his classic book “Southern Politics in State and Nation,” V. O. Key wrote, “The politics of the South revolves around the position of the Negro.” In 1964, legend has it, the Democratic president Lyndon Johnson turned to an aide after signing the Civil Rights Act and predicted doom for his party: “We have lost the South for a generation.” Two generations later, the enduring, invisible presence of Cullman’s old sundown sign can seem to reflect racism’s tenacious hold on the Deep South. During the 2008 presidential election, exit polling revealed that an overwhelming 88 percent of Alabama’s voting whites chose John McCain, a total far exceeding what the incumbent George W. Bush received four years earlier against John Kerry, generally thought to be a weaker and more liberal candidate than Barack Obama. (The same pattern held true in Mississippi and Louisiana.) About these discrepancies David Bositis, the senior political analyst at the nonpartisan Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, says, “I attribute all of it to racial bias.”
One of the few Obama supporters in Cullman County was Fields, who drove two days to the new president’s inauguration and watched, “in a state of aweness,” Fields says, as Obama put his hand to the Bible. Not many months before, Fields entered politics himself. In the South, black politicians almost always represent districts with a substantial black majority. Yet when the state legislative seat for the western side of Cullman County was unexpectedly vacated one year into the four-year term, Fields went ahead and announced his candidacy for the January 2008 special election, making him the first ever African-American to run in Cullman County. Alabama’s lieutenant governor, Jim Folsom Jr., a Democratic former governor who grew up in Cullman and still lives there, says that Democratic power brokers across the state were aghast: “They thought it was totally impossible that James Fields could get elected in this county.” Several met with Fields, urging him to withdraw.
Fields is a descendant of slaves who worked on plantations in Georgia and Mississippi before relocating to Colony after the Civil War. During his career at Alabama’s state-employment service, Fields was a tireless advocate for the down-on-their-luck, finding so many white people in Cullman jobs that generations of working families — and their employers — came to know and admire him. He was similarly generous with his evenings and weekends, coaching children’s sports and giving guest sermons at Cullman churches of many denominations. Now 55 and retired from Alabama’s Department of Industrial Relations, Fields has a solemn face with chestnut-hued, vaguely Cherokee features, a black mustache, powder-gray hair and the relaxed, affable bearing that doesn’t ever seem ruffled in those moments when someone informs him that he is the first black ever to enter their home — which happens to him frequently in Cullman. Fields gives the impression of being such a humble, mild-mannered person that people often fail to notice how powerfully emotion runs alongside restraint in him. When he was elected with 59 percent of the vote, he became, in that most telling word, Cullman County’s representative.
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