Arkansas Blog: The South's redemption

No thanks to most Southern states, Barack Obama's inauguration today represents a measure of atonement for the dark history of Jim Crow.

For some relevant Arkansas history pertinent to the historic day, here's an early look at Ernest Dumas' column this week. It's on the jump.

FYI: Here's the full schedule of today's events. The inauguration itself is at 11 a.m. our time. The parade will begin about two and a half hours later. Tonight, ABC will broadcast the "neighborhood inaugural ball." Live coverage all over the web, including Washington Post.

Atonement day

John Gray Lucas could have been the Barack Obama of his time, which was a full century before the first African-American president took the oath of office on the steps of the most famous edifice in the world that was built with the toil of slaves.

Unlike Obama, Lucas was a son of the South, born a year after the Emancipation Proclamation, but other than that their early lives bore a remarkable similarity. John Lucas moved with his father from Marshall, Texas, a slaveholding arsenal for the Confederate army, to Pine Bluff when he was five and attended Branch Normal College, which had been established for blacks during Reconstruction 10 years earlier. He then studied law at Boston University, a couple of stone throws across the Charles River from Harvard, where a century later Barack Obama would get his law degree. Both graduated with high honors, but in 1887 Lucas was the only black in a class of 52 and no one could have had poorer preparation for the work.

Lucas came back to Arkansas, served a term as a deputy prosecutor, another in the legislature and some time as a United States magistrate, but he fled Arkansas in bitterness to Obama’s Chicago, where he had a distinguished 50-year career in politics and law. Something else Lucas shared with the president was a rich gift for oratory, and were he alive he better than anyone else could say what the inauguration of an African-American president represents to the South, the redemption of its history.

Their most historic speeches, Obama’s inaugural on Tuesday and Lucas’s valedictory in the Arkansas House of Representatives on Feb. 17, 1891, are fitting bookends of an era that we should be allowed to hope is finally ended.

It is not presumptuous to talk about the inauguration as a Southern event. So overwhelming was Obama’s victory that although he carried three states of the Confederacy, including the cradle of massive resistance, Virginia, he would have been president without the vote of a single Southerner, black or white. He would have had 40 electoral votes to spare if the South had once again been solid for the Republican as it had been for much of the past 40 years. But if the South was irrelevant to the big victory in the Electoral College, the inauguration Tuesday was epic for the South in ways that could be only dimly appreciated by the rest of the country.

It was not merely because the first African-American nominee of a major party got the votes of 17,850,000 Southerners, 40 percent more than any Democratic candidate in history, including three white sons of the South. (Arkansas, alas, contributed nothing to that end, giving Obama the smallest share of the presidential vote of any Democrat since Reconstruction, except for the three-way split in 1972.)

Obama’s inauguration represents the ultimate fulfillment of possibilities, that miracle which expired all across the South in one dark decade at the end of the 18th century. State by state, Southern legislatures moved to extinguish the progress of a whole race by the adoption of Jim Crow laws that entrenched segregation and virtually ended black participation in political and civic life.

The first was the separate coach law, an iniquitous bill cribbed from the state of Mississippi, which fixed the agenda of total segregation. Electoral changes barred the participation of African-Americans in elections in any way that mattered. In another two years Lucas and all the other black officeholders in Arkansas would be gone until well past the next mid-century.

Across the hall in the Senate where the coach bill originated, the eloquent plea of Lucas’ colleague, George W. Bell of Desha County, for “a common cause, a common humanity,” had fallen on deaf ears. “The dirtiest peasants from Europe, the nihilists and cutthroats of every government can come here … and receive better protection before the law and in their civil rights than we who have helped make this country what it is,” Bell said.

Lucas saw more keenly what Jim Crow meant, the forestallment of all opportunity, all possibilities, for blacks in Arkansas and the South until some far-off day of atonement and reconciliation. The eloquence from the lectern that day was never matched again in the Arkansas legislature.

Upon Lucas’s commencement from Boston University four years earlier, the Boston Globe had quoted him as saying that colored men from the North ought to make Arkansas their home because “a liberal public sentiment prevailed” there and black men could aspire to anything. Lucas read the newspaper article to a sullen House and said “Mr. Tillman’s bill seeks to make a liar of me.” Jim Crow, he said, was taking Arkansas spiritually “across the Mississippi River where, yoked to the crimson soil of Mississippi, Arkansas shall be as incapable of advancement as a fixed star to alter its course.”

How did that prediction turn out? The premise behind the separate coach was that blacks were uncouth and unhygienic and should be placed in a separate rail car and kept at a distance in every public venue. Lucas told his colleagues that cleanliness was not the problem but rather the sensory whitening of blacks, their rapid advancement, which troubled the white lawmakers and caused them to take away “the right of free men to choose their own company.”

“It is the constant growth of a more refined, intelligent and I might say more perfumed class that grow more and more obnoxious as they more nearly approximate our white friends’ habits and plane of life,” he said. If hygiene was a problem, he needled, why did the men in that room permit so much closeness with maids, cooks, servants and nannies in their homes?

One other distinction between President Obama and John Lucas. At the moment of atonement Tuesday, Lucas would have been as eloquent but not so gracious.

Comments

Happy day! Happy day! What a fabulous day this is and how long we've waited for this moment! Yes, the South once again let America down.....a majority, a misguided majority, but NOT all of us. I control my own bowels and I control my own vote! I cannot help if my neighbors and friends are not smart, are still clinging to their Bible and their guns.

My shame of Arkansas voters is far outweighed this morning by my joy of having Cheney-Bush GONE! I trust by 2012 Arkansas will redeem itself by voting solidly to continue the unbridled success, peace and prosperity that President Obama has brought America and the world. In the next 4 years the scales will be removed from our eyes, the hate will be removed from our hearts and the good America will emerge once again.

Today is a great day! Tomorrow will be a great day! We've made it to the other side and though it won't be perfect, it won't be easy, but even our worst days will be better than any day of the last 8 miserable years because once again there is HOPE. We shall overcome and the overcoming starts at 11 am today, Arkansas time. Hurray! Hurray! Long live President Barack Obama!

Posted by: Deathbyinches | January 20, 2009 09:24 AM

Redemption for two southern states: NC and VA.

Ya know, the most advanced ones.

Posted by: JD | January 20, 2009 09:37 AM

I don't consider FL southern.

Anyways, happy day.

Posted by: JD | January 20, 2009 09:41 AM

The supporters that Obama has rested his win on are also the most fickle group of voters in the nation. He'll lose the support of the young voters in months if they don't see drastic change, his others supporters will leave in a year if it doesn't get better in the ghetto or if he becomes perceived as uncool. Why, well because his major voting block is 2 groups that feed off of and make decision based on hype. I bet that 1/4 of his vocal voting block could tell you who the rapper of the week is but can't name at least 1 of his cabinet members, beside Biden. Obama has to now bring us Medical Coverage and fund it when the cookie jar is empty, fix a economy that really needs to have it's heads dragged out into the street, and bring home 100k + troops from Iraq when making sure that Iraq doesn't become a suburb of Iran.

Posted by: wordonthestreet | January 20, 2009 10:17 AM

Thank you wordonthestreet for your racist views. The next 4 years will not make you very happy. Prepare to be wrong a lot and often and completely. Iraq is lost, Afghanistan is lost.....ask a Russian about Afghanistan......he'll tell you it's worse than getting both tits caught in the wringer.

Posted by: Deathbyinches | January 20, 2009 10:27 AM

So, JD doesn't consider Florida Southern, eh? Hope the CSA boys don't catch up with you, JD.

Posted by: Cato | January 20, 2009 11:14 AM

I'm talking culturally 2008, not 1868.

Posted by: JD | January 20, 2009 12:41 PM

"Obama's inauguration represents the ultimate fulfillment of possibilities, that miracle which expired all across the South in one dark decade at the end of the 18th century. State by state, Southern legislatures moved to extinguish the progress of a whole race by the adoption of Jim Crow laws that entrenched segregation and virtually ended black participation in political and civic life. " -- Ernest Dumas

I hope the typo ("18th century") is corrected before you commit this to hard copy.

Posted by: Polecat | January 20, 2009 03:51 PM

DBI, I though Afghanistan and Iraq was lost from the beginning. I though we should nuke them and use them to store our countries massive amounts of Garbage. ( Thats a joke) I think Health Care for all is great, I also think a keg of beer everyday at the house is great, but just like with everything you have to ask yourself, "How do I pay for it"? Going into to Irag is alot like the time I offered to fix my neighbors Drywall. I FUBAR'd it all up. SO do I leave my neighbor's wall's a wreck or do I fix it? I am the one who f'd it up. The economy is in the wringer b/c we all let it get that way. I could of told you that 5 yrs ago letting someone who makes $30k a year get a $300k house was going to be bad deal. Loaning college kids $35k for a car is a bad deal. Letting bank's swap bad debt was a screwy deal. However, it made our economy look prosperous, and as long as everyone got what they wanted, it was great thing. Five years ago in Washington, as a civil servant of the USA, I wrote a paper for the house and senate telling them that all the above ideas would hurt us, and that with citizens saving at a negative rate, we needed to do something. I proposed that we raise everyone's tax's by 5% with that five percent going into a mandatory savings account for each taxpayer and that the account would remain sole property of the taxpayer, but could not be accesed until a major illness or 65 years of age.. No one looked at that paper and my boss withdrew it and I got into trouble. I myself saved 15% of my salary each year, and even though this poor market has eaten a chuck of that money I still have some savings. When I came back to Arkansas I bought a house the old fashion way, 20% down, borrowed only 3 times my yearly salary and did a 30 year fixed rate. I didn't get to live at the country club or in some new fancy condo downtown, but I got a roof over my head. People have to start making decisions for themselves. Don't go to college to get a degree in basket weaving, and expect to live on a street with brain surgeons, or expect to take a vacation every year. Don't have a large family if you can't afford. The same thing should hold true for big companies, don't import cheap crap, pay your employees nothing, pay your ceo millions, and then expect the country to bail you out in a recession. I am all for Obama, I ran one of his campaign offices, but we won this election on voters expecting alot and near the end we made way to many promises.

Posted by: wordonthestreet | January 20, 2009 05:37 PM

The Washington Post article paints a pretty discouraging picture from Brinkley. It looks like the New York Times decided to do a similar one but they sent a reporter to even redder Oklahoma, where not one single county voted Obama. The Times actually found a much more hopeful picture of potential Obama optimists in Oklahoma, although to be fair they rigged the scales a bit. Instead of going to a totally rural place like Brinkley, they went to urban Tulsa where they found some McCain voters who had nice things to say about Obama. Hope may be out there after all. See the link.

Posted by: j. jack flash | January 20, 2009 07:57 PM

Arkansas Blog

The South's redemption

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