NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON & JONATHAN MARTIN, Politico
- After last year’s historic presidential campaign, a new season of opportunity seemed at hand for African-American candidates in the South. Not only had a black man been elected president, he had carried Virginia and North Carolina along the way.
But Dixie is slow to yield its traditions and paradoxes, as Rep. Artur Davis is finding as he tries to fashion an Obama-style cross-racial coalition in his bid to become Alabama’s first black governor.
If anything, Davis, a Democrat, is finding it may be more complicated than ever for African-Americans to win statewide races in the Deep South. In today’s complicated political landscape, it’s not just old-style prejudice that must be overcome but also a more complicated stew of long-simmering personal grievances, generational tensions and intraracial rivalries.
Never a favorite of the state’s Democratic establishment, Davis has come under fierce attack from Joe Reed — for years the most influential African-American in Alabama politics — for being the only black House member to oppose health care legislation. Reed savaged Davis as a political opportunist who opposed the bill to curry favor with the state’s conservative-leaning white majority.
