Atlanta’s reverse Obama moment (I)

First, in a momentously unexampled feat of racial rapprochement, a 70 percent white American electorate elected Barack Obama as president. And he is, as is by now well-known, the son of a Black Kenyan father and a white Kansas mother who nonetheless proudly self-identifies as “black.” Then, in May this year, a predominantly white Mississippi […]

First, in a momentously unexampled feat of racial rapprochement, a 70 percent white American electorate elected Barack Obama as president. And he is, as is by now well-known, the son of a Black Kenyan father and a white Kansas mother who nonetheless proudly self-identifies as “black.”

Then, in May this year, a predominantly white Mississippi town called Philadelphia that became notorious for its cruelly brutal murder of three civil rights activists in 1964 elected its first black mayor. You will only appreciate the enormous symbolic significance of the election of this really dark-skinned man called James Young when you realize that, for many years, Philadelphia in Mississippi had come to represent what the London Guardian aptly described as “all that was wrong with the old [American] south.”

The town’s bloodcurdling murder of one black and two white Americans (and, it was later found out, seven other black men) whose only crime was that they tried to get black people in the town the right to vote made it the byword for vicious segregation and violent racial intolerance in America. This incident inspired the film Mississippi Burning.

Because of the town’s cultural and symbolic importance as the bastion of racist conservatism, American conservative icon Ronald Reagan chose it as the site from which to launch his 1980 presidential campaign. And the strategy worked: Reagan swept the south and won a landslide against then incumbent Jimmy Carter, who is a Southern liberal. That’s how deeply emblematic the town is in America’s racial and cultural wars.

Now, 43 years later, this same town, which savagely butchered civil rights activists in cold blood without the slightest twinge of moral compunction—and for no reason other than that they wanted get black people the right to vote— has elected a black man as its mayor. This is as much a consequence of the radical improvement in race relations in this country as it is the after-effect of what has now been called the Obama effect.

“Obama’s election sent a message to our people that it was possible,” Young said. “If we can elect a black man as president we can elect a black man as mayor of Philadelphia. In the last couple of weeks I was hearing that a lot in the community.”

Well, the mayoral election in Atlanta on November 3 has shown that the Obama effect does not always have to be a one-way street: white people electing black people. For the first time since 1973, predominantly black Atlanta is also about to elect a white woman as its mayor. Mary Norwood, who lives in the imposingly fashionable and predominantly white Atlanta neighborhood called Buckhead, has beaten such formidable and well-regarded black candidates as Mohammed Kasim Reed (a state senator), Lisa Borders (the current president of the Atlanta City Council) and Jesse Spikes (a brilliant and successful Harvard- and Oxford-educated lawyer) in the first round of the mayoral election.

Norwood garnered 46 percent of the votes, Reed got 36 percent of the votes, Borders received 16 percent of the votes, and Spikes (who got less than one percent of the vote. To win, a candidate must get over 50 percent of the total vote. So there will be a runoff contest between Norwood and Reed on December 1.

If Norwood prevails on Dec. 1, she will go down in the annals as the first white mayor of Atlanta since 1973. Interestingly, according to the Nov. 3 pre-election polls, while over 90 percent of white voters said they would vote for Norwood, she was the leading candidate among black voters. An Insider Advantage poll showed that nearly one out of three black voters preferred her. Black people make up 59 percent of the electorate here, so no candidate can win without an overwhelming black support.

Of course, it would be unpardonably reductionist to entirely attribute Norwood’s victory to a reverse Obama effect. After all, Atlanta has always prided itself on being the “city too busy hate.” And as Andrew Young (who has endorsed Mohammed Kasim Reed) said recently, “Atlanta has a reputation of voting for progressive white people. Atlanta’s black community has been willing to vote for the person they think is the most competent.”

However, it can’t be denied that the increasing tolerance toward black people nationally, as evidenced in the election of many blacks to high-profile positions all across the nation, has eased the historic disharmony that has characterized race relations in this country, and has given black people the emotional and psychological incentive to resist the urge for knee-jerk racial solidarity.