Davis Says Race a Challenge, Not Focus, in ‘10 Bid for Alabama Governor

Annie Johnson, CQ Staff

Democrat Barack Obama ’s historic win to become the nation’s first black president provides obvious encouragement to Democratic Rep. Artur Davis — Alabama’s only African-American member of Congress — as he ponders a 2010 campaign he hopes would make him the state’s first black governor.

If elected, Davis would not only be the first black governor anywhere in the Deep South, he would only be the second in any Southern state, following Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, whose 1989 election in Virginia made him the first in the nation.

And Davis would be doing so in a state where racial voting patterns have persisted, even though the strong resistance to the civil rights movement exhibited by many white Alabamans a couple of generations ago has faded. The tendency of the mainly conservative white electorate to vote Republican for major federal and state offices typically overwhelms the strongly Democratic voting habits of the black constituency that makes up about a quarter of Alabama’s population.

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