Black voters were Alabama’s salvation
Moore is a self-righteous bigot, yet he almost won
The great Charles Barkley said it best. “We’ve got to stop looking like idiots,” he told Alabamians while campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones. After Jones defeated Roy Moore, Barkley pronounced himself “proud of my state,” even as he acknowledged Alabama still had plenty of “rednecks” and “ignorant people.”
For much of the nation, Moore’s loss was a huge relief. He was, after all, a candidate with problems, and that’s putting it mildly. He’s a backward-looking, self-righteous religious bigot who symbolizes much that was foul about the Old South. His opponent, by contrast, haddedicated much of his life to delivering the South from darkness.
As U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, Jones reopened an old, festering wound. He took on the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of a black Birmingham church that left four little girls dead and made Birmingham an internationally detested symbol of bigotry. In 2001, he prosecuted and convicted Thomas Blanton, one of the perpetrators. “They say justice delayed is justice denied. Well, folks, I don’t believe that for an instant. Justice delayed is still justice, and we’ve got it right here in Birmingham tonight,” he said after the jury delivered the guilty verdict.
It was a poignant moment, an enlightened son of the South repudiating the racial ugliness that had long defined the region. At the time Moore, recently elected chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, was poised to illegally install a 5,000-pound granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the state Judicial Building. Such religiously themed stunts brought Moore increasing fame and ultimately resulted in his removal as chief justice. He has spent the years since making outlandish statements, preaching to his fan base, and doing absolutely nothing to prove his suitability for public office. We should be glad that Alabama got this election right, but we should not mistake how and why that happened.
The only reason Alabama avoided the disaster of electing Moore is that blacks turned out and voted in droves. The National Election Pool exit poll found that blacks made up 30% of Tuesday’s electorate and voted overwhelmingly (96%) for Jones. Moore won 68% of white votes and even won a majority of white women’s votes — although 45% of college-educated white women voted for Jones.
All of this raises an uncomfortable question: Have we advanced at all since 1991, when the good white folks of Louisiana would have made a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan their governor had black votes not interceded?
I suspect we have moved forward, but not nearly as much as we like to think. It’s heartening that many white Alabamians found Moore too toxic for their taste. It’s likewise encouraging that the flimflam tag team of President Trump and Steve Bannon could not stir up much enthusiasm for him. And it’s somewhat reassuring that close to a majority of educated white women could not countenance putting an accused sexual predator in office; that they didn’t let bigotry (or partisanship) trump decency. But it says something distressingly damning that so much of the New South’s virtue is dependent on blacks rescuing whites from their worst impulses. And it says something equally damning that so many Southerners remain so reluctant to make the South’s future better than its past.
Much of this country — and certainly much of the American South — has long been better at figuring out whom to hate and marginalize than how to provide all its citizens with a decent life; better at finding scapegoats than solving societal problems; better at supporting candidates telling grandiose lies than at determining what is in America’s best interests. To the extent that Jones’ victory signifies a resolve to move beyond such blinkered thinking, it is something to celebrate. But it would be a mistake to confuse one anomalous election with real and fundamental change.