Flowers and former U.S. Congressman Carl Elliott—banking on the addition of 200,000 newly-registered blacks among the 600,000 whites in the Democratic Primary—attempted to end the Wallace Era through the use of biracial coalitions.
Flowers openly sought the black vote by talking about civil rights:
When I’d speak to black groups I’d tell them, “When I’m governor and you come to Montgomery, you’re gonna get jobs, and I don’t mean with mops and brooms. You’re gonna get good jobs behind desks and typewriters. Not because you’re black. You won’t get a job in my administration simply because you’re black, but you’ll never be turned down for a job just because you’re black.” That was what they wanted to hear, and they’d all cheer and shout.[9]
Flowers was cited by the New York Times as “the first major white candidate in modern times to campaign directly among Negroes in the Deep South”; and he was endorsed by the Alabama Democratic Conference and most other black political organizations. Later analysis indicated that he got nine of every ten black votes in the primary.[10]
However, when all was said and done, Lurleen Wallace won the Democratic Primary with more votes (54 percent) than all nine male opponents combined; Richmond Flowers was a distant second, with only 18 percent of the record turnout.
Flowers himself acknowledged his miscalculation of the Alabama political situation:
That was my biggest disappointment in politics. When I ran for governor, I was thoroughly confident. My polls had told me, with the black vote I was going to receive, I could win with a small percent of the whites. That’s one time I was completely wrong. I took a calculated risk and lost. I thought I had it figured, but I didn’t . . . I guess I should have kept talking about the Southern Way of Life.[11]
Carl Elliott, a respected, moderate congressman of that time, likewise described his quixotic adventure in biracial politics as an ill-fated and career-killing experience; we’ll let the late leader talk at length because his message has particular relevance to our thesis and case study:
It wasn’t the Wallaces I worried about as that campaign hit full tilt in April. It was Richmond Flowers. By that time, everyone knew Lurleen was going to finish first in the primary. A vote for her was a vote for George, and there were more votes for George than anyone else in Alabama. The real race was to finish a strong enough second to force a runoff. To finish that strongly, I knew I had to have the black vote.[12]
While Flowers concentrated on black votes, Elliott attempted a biracial campaign.
Meanwhile I went about courting blacks and whites alike, refusing to go to either extreme for the votes of one or the other. I summarized my stance in a speech in Selma: “I have not come to Selma tonight to stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and shout ‘Never!’ Nor have I come to stand in the Brown’s Chapel AME Church and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ There must be a middle ground for Alabamians.”
In the middle is just where I found myself as the black political organizations in the state moved toward endorsing a candidate. Richmond Flowers had done exactly what I’d mentioned in my speech, joining hands with black leaders in the Brown’s Chapel Church and singing “We Shall Overcome” with them. And they were responding to him as the alternative to George Wallace.
Elliott’s pitch for black votes was, he felt, honest and straightforward.
I didn’t cozy up to them, I didn’t back away either. When I made a speech in the town square in a place called Greenville, three times as many black people were in the crowd as white. When my talk was done, I shook hands with the crowd, black and white alike. Then I went inside to pay my respects to the probate judge, who hadn’t come out to hear my speech. I began to thank him for the privilege of speaking at his courthouse when he suddenly cut me off.
“You,” he said, as if pronouncing judgment from the bench, “have violated Southern tradition, shaking hands with those niggers.”
. . .
As I was walking away, this judge came out and hollered right there in front of the crowd, “You’ve gone around and shaken hands with these niggers! No white man’s ever done that around here before.”
I turned and said, “Well, this is a new kind of day, and I’m a new kind of white man.”[13]
Elliott’s politics played well in sympathetic circles—he eventually was honored as the first recipient of the John F. Kennedy “Profiles in Courage” award in 1990. However, in Alabama of the 1960s, he scored little respect among either white or black voters, finishing way back in third place (with only 8 percent), struggling with painful memories of a biracial campaign, virtual financial ruin, and the end of a celebrated, productive public career.
William R. Keech, who studied varying impacts of voting and other political actions in Southern communities of that time, speculated that the problems of blacks perhaps were unfixable through electoral democracy:
The real problem is much deeper than these tactical considerations imply. The tragedy of American racial history is that it has left the Negro with more problems than men of good-will are able to solve. Votes, litigation and even the threat of violence are useful because they can influence the behavior of elected policy-makers. The most frustrating problem of the American Negro in politics is that even if elected policy-makers were totally responsive to Negro demands, it is not at all clear that they have it in their power to eliminate the inequality with which three and a half centuries of discrimination have saddled the American Negro.[14]
Thus, apparently, the concerns of early analysts about biracial politics were well founded; the heroic struggle seemed to be running out of steam.
Surprisingly, however, the Old South changed. Despite several centuries of entrenched racism and biracial electoral disasters of the 1960s, Southern politics began evolving in different manner in the 1970s.
Some may debate the merits of the subsequent pace and direction of Southern politics, but the South began—haltingly and stubbornly and constantly pressed by black civil rights groups and the U.S. Justice Department—to address its historical dilemma. As will be shown in the rest of this chapter, the system functionally adjusted in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to incorporate black participation and move toward biracial progress, cultural moderation, and relatively normal politics.[15]
The South’s Cultural Journey of Moderation and Convergence
While the South is still divided, racially, on important political attitudes and partisan inclinations, there is expansive public opinion research showing, with some obvious variations, a blending cultural journey of internal and external dynamics: (a) white Southerners have moderated their views about race and civil rights significantly over the years; (b) there has been substantial Southern convergence with the American nation in terms of racial ideas and behavior.
We should note up front, of course, that racial history still dominates Southern culture. J. David Woodard writes about the continuing interplay of black-white issues in The New Southern Politics (2007):
Racial conflict between black and white has always been the most visible negation of whatever was commendable about the South. No matter how much one admired Southern virtues, be they the
