Southern Blacks Are Split on Clinton vs. Obama

Southern Blacks Are Split on Clinton vs. Obama

By SHAILA DEWAN
Published:
January 18, 2008

ATLANTA — The People’s Voice African-American Weekly News in tiny Roanoke, Ala., has not endorsed a candidate in the state’s Democratic presidential primary on Feb. 5 — much to the frustration of its publisher, Charlotte A. Clark-Frieson, a Barack Obama supporter.

Dana Mixer
for The New York Times

Mark Johnson, who backs Mrs. Clinton, was the first person to put up a sign in his neighborhood in Atlanta. He said his son reacted by asking, “Dad, what if they throw rocks at the window?”
“I’m trying to get ready to endorse him, but my board is so split,” Ms. Clark-Frieson said.

While letters to the paper are almost unanimously in favor of Mr. Obama, she said, the older of the state’s two black political organizations, the Alabama Democratic Conference, endorsed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in October.

So great is the tension over the Democratic contest, Ms. Clark-Frieson said, that many of her newspaper’s board members have refused to betray their preference even in private.

Across the South, a fierce competition is afoot for black voters, who are expected to constitute 20 percent to 50 percent of voters in the South Carolina Democratic primary on Jan. 26 and in the four Southern states with primaries on Feb. 5: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee. In many counties, registration has spiked since Mr. Obama won the Iowa caucuses, and election officials say interest is at its highest point in several election cycles.

While the official ground game is just beginning, chatter about the two candidates — both of whom have substantial claims to African-American support — is constant on black radio shows and e-mail lists and at barbershops. Officials and ministers are coming forward with last-minute endorsements, and campaigns are buttering up the activity directors at centers for the elderly. Both campaigns have opened or will open offices this week — the Clinton camp in Nashville, the Obama camp in Little Rock, Ark., in Memphis and two each in Alabama and Georgia.

For several weeks, race has dominated the Democratic contest, prompting a flurry of angry words between the Obama and Clinton camps. That fight appears to have died down, but Southern black voters are still in knots over a contest that pits a woman they know well against a viable black candidate. If any election can prove that Southern blacks are not a monolithic voting bloc, it is this one.

The competition pits old loyalties against new passions, and traditional kingmakers — many of whom backed Mrs. Clinton months ago — against Mr. Obama’s grass-roots energy. And as the Clinton camp doggedly pursues women, in some cases it is splitting families, like Representative Sanford D. Bishop Jr., co-chairman of the Obama campaign in Georgia, and his wife, Vivian Creighton Bishop, a public official in Columbus, Ga., and a Clinton supporter.

In Atlanta, the race has also split longtime allies in the civil rights movement. The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery has supported Mr. Obama, for instance, while Representative John Lewis has defended Mrs. Clinton against accusations that she and her husband denigrated the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in an attack on Mr. Obama.

Another prominent Clinton supporter from the civil rights era, Andrew Young, also defended Mrs. Clinton. “Hillary Clinton, first of all, has Bill behind her,” Mr. Young said on a recent Webcast devoted to African-American issues. “And Bill is every bit as black as Barack.”

But a younger generation appears to be embracing Mr. Obama. Raphael G. Warnock, the 38-year-old senior pastor of Dr. King’s home church, Ebenezer Baptist here, gave Mr. Obama the honor of appearing there this coming Sunday, the day before the national King holiday.

Roanoke has long been a stronghold of the Alabama Democratic Conference, which endorsed Mrs. Clinton in part because its members believed that a black man could not be elected. But statewide, the group’s support of Mrs. Clinton may be tested by the Obama campaign’s insurgency.

“This is going to be another one of these watershed events in the black community,” said Hank Sanders, a state senator and former president of the Alabama New South Coalition, a group that has endorsed Mr. Obama.

Gerald W. Johnson, the pollster for the Alabama Education Association, a powerful teachers’ union that has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, said Mr. Obama’s victory in Iowa had demolished Mrs. Clinton’s substantial lead among Democrats in the state. Mr. Johnson predicted that black voters would make up half of the Democratic primary voters, up from the usual 40 percent.

But Ms. Clark-Frieson said she feared that the Obama momentum might not reach Roanoke.

“A.D.C. is going to spend a lot of money,” she said, “and they’re going to put out a ballot, and voters are going to follow that ballot to the letter because they’ve been doing that for 30 years. Those that might would consider voting for Barack won’t commit publicly because they don’t want to be seen as going against the A.D.C.”

That hesitancy cuts both ways. In Atlanta, Mark Johnson, a 35-year-old seminary student, said he was the first to put a political sign up in his predominantly black neighborhood. It was a Clinton sign. “My son said, ‘Dad, what if they throw rocks at the window?’ ” Mr. Johnson said.