A Corner Turned

In long, patient hours at the polls, Alabama's Negroes grasped for themselves last week the full citizenship to which federal civil rights legislation had served only as a passport. Their courage and persistence proved an optimistic augury, not only for the Old Confederacy's five million Negroes of voting age but also for the nation as a whole. For the promise held out by Alabama's primary is that the politics of the South will become more mature and more meaningful as more and more Negroes freely participate in elections, the free society's fundamental process and privilege.

In its first ballot-box test, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 worked as effectively as its most idealistic framers could have dreamed. More than 80% of Alabama's 235,000-plus registered Negroes turned out for the Democratic primary. Half of them had never been registered until the past year. Despite advance talk of Negro "apathy," after nearly a century of disfranchisement the act of voting was, for most, a compelling duty and an unforgettable experience. Said Willie Bolden, 81, the grandson of a slave, who had never cast a ballot until last week: "It made me think I was sort of Somebody."

Unexpected Sympathy. Thousands of new Somebodies had to overcome the barrier of illiteracy. Many learned to identify the names of the candidates they favored by staring for hours at crayon-lettered flash cards prepared by civil rights workers. Despite an election regulation that allowed just five minutes in the voting booth, some Negro novices puzzled and pondered over the mysteries of the ballot for as long as half an hour. Encouragingly--if unexpectedly--sympathetic white officials usually gave them all the time they needed, even helped confused illiterates by reading aloud the candidates' names and marking ballots when voters recognized those they supported.

Though Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had sent in 350 federal observers to guard against last-ditch attempts by white men to keep Negroes from voting, no serious incidents had been reported at week's end. "People voted freely and comfortably," said Katzenbach. "This reflects great credit on all the people involved."

The election results shed considerably less credit on the white voters of Alabama, who overwhelmingly endorsed Lurleen Wallace as her segregationist husband's puppet candidate in a cynical attempt to evade the state's constitutional provision that prohibits a Governor from succeeding himself (see following story). Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King denounced Lurleen's victory as "a protest vote against the tide of inevitable progress."

Counter-Bloc. That was true enough. Yet King had himself helped solidify the white vote by stumping the state to rally Negro support for State Attorney General Richmond Flowers, a fairly recent convert to racial moderation, who had gone all out for the Negro vote. As expected, the great majority of Negroes cast their ballots for Flowers. But the specter of a black-bloc vote effectively polarized the whites, whose unexpectedly unified vote sent Lurleen Wallace soaring ahead of Flowers and all eight other opponents. Without the open threat of a monolithic black ballot, white Alabamians' votes in the primary might well have been sufficiently fragmented among other candidates to force a runoff election.

In local elections, Alabama's Negroes voted with greater success. Fifty-two Negroes had filed for county or legislative offices; none won outright, but 24 at least managed to make the runoff elections on May 31. All face grueling man-to-man battles against white opponents. Even more significant in a sense were two Negro defeats. In the Black Belt's Wilcox and Greene Counties, where Negro voters outnumber whites, incumbent sheriffs--both white, both considered fair-minded law officers--faced Negro candidates for the first time. Far from affirming the bugaboo of Southern whites that "black votes mean black government," Negroes in both counties helped re-elect the white men to office.

New Tone. If the Negro vote was not powerful enough to thwart the Wallaces' gambit, it managed nonetheless to shake such local despotisms as the Dallas County sheriffdom of Jim Clark, the nationally televised heavy of the Selma march last year, and to settle old scores against the likes of Al Lingo, the onetime state police chief who was humiliatingly beaten in his primary bid to become the sheriff of Jefferson County (Birmingham).

Alabama's white politicians do not underestimate the Negro's new force in politics. For the first time in memory, no Alabamian candidate cut loose in 1966 with the sterile race baiting that has studded political rhetoric in the South since Reconstruction. The new tone was heralded by Wallace's painful struggle to enunciate the word Negro, as prescribed by Webster's: not once in the campaign did he refer publicly to the "nigra."

The most heartening and significant portent of Alabama's 1966 primary is that Negroes voted--massively, enthusiastically and sensibly. They demonstrated a remarkable ability to vote with racial sympathy in instances where this was the issue and ignore color where it was not important. Said the N.A.A.C.P.'s

Washington Director Clarence Mitchell: "They turned the corner in the political life of Alabama. Because Alabama has been one of the worst states for Negroes, this means that we have turned the corner for the whole South."

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