KILLINGS IN CHARLESTON BROUGHT BACK OLD SOUTHERN MEMORIES

…The historic Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, SC

Hate crime, or act of terrorism?  I say it’s both.

As President stated Obama had stated, what happened at that historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, was just another example of something that doesn’t happen anywhere else as often as it does in the United States.  It also shows that as a nation, we have not shown the guts for doing what needs to be done in dealing with unlimited gun access for people that should not have any access to firearms.  That applies to both those individual with mental issues and to those haters that think they have the right to shot and kill whomever they please.

While visiting Charleston, South Carolina, on past business, I remember having lunch at a restaurant on the town square where the “Mother Emanuel Church” is located.  The church is a beautiful period building and it is the oldest African American church in the South.  It is historic for many reasons including the hosting of past civil rights events and marches and the speeches of Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King and many others.

The current church, built in 1886, is the third version as it had been destroyed twice before.  The first time was when the then black church leader had been found to be planning a slave revolt of 300 slaves.  Thirty of the revolt planners were executed right there.  The church was burnt to the ground and a law was passed against any future all-black churches.  The members of the local black congregations then had to practice their religion for years in total secrecy.

Even though I was born in the South, specifically in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I have lived most of my life outside of the South.  I grew up living all over the country, but most of my adult life has been on the West Coast.  However, my business had me traveling all over the country and  over the years, I spent many weeks traveling our Southern states.

At the time, I also came to understand why some people would say that the North may have won the War, but apparently someone forgot to tell the South.

Back in the 70’s and 80’s, while visiting North and South Carolina, Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans, Jacksonville, Tampa, Huntsville, Paducah, and Montgomery, they all offered me one common theme.  They all offered up lots of Confederate Flags.  They were on car’s front license plates, on car radio antennas, in pick-up truck back windows and even on some front porches.  Finding this week that this young Southerner that killed these innocent people was photographed with a Confederate flag, that seemed quite appropriate.  

As a side note, while visiting the South during a national election, finding a yard sign for a Democratic candidate was virtually impossible. 

But even with all of this, today there are some signs that the situation may be changing for the better.

As expected, the changes won’t initially come from the rural areas of the deep South.  Instead, they will start in the cities that have large populations of both whites, African Americans and other minorities.

Up to the late 1960’s, when an African American entered into local politics, most urban residents would cast their ballots along very rigid racial lines.  Whites voted for whites, and blacks voted for blacks.  But it appears that things are starting to change.

In New York City in 2013, in the Democratic primary, Bill de Blasio, who went on to become mayor, received the same percentage of African American votes as did the black candidate William Thompson.  In Chicago’s run-off in April, the incumbent Rahm Emanuel defeated Hispanic challenger Jesús García.  But he did this by winning over a third of the votes in the local Latino-majority communities.

African American candidates, that had struggled for years to attract and retain white support, are now finding that their votes can many times be split almost 50-50 between black, white and non-white voters.  And this is starting to occur all around the country.

During his first campaign for mayor back in 1965, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes had to literally pledge to the community that he would not banish whites from Cleveland’s city government. “My election would not mean a Negro takeover; it would not mean the establishment of a Negro cabinet,” Stokes promised. “My election would mean the mayor just happened to come from the Negro group.”

But today, in Washington DC, one of our most racially polarized cities, change also appear to be on the horizon.

In last year’s DC mayoral election, the white candidate, David Catania took 22% of the vote in black-majority precincts.  This was coupled with 8% for Carol Schwartz, also a white candidate.  So, nearly a third of all the voters in black-majority precincts supported a white candidate over the African American winner, Muriel E. Bowser.   And Bowser got 41% of the vote in the white-majority precincts. 

Is this another example of how racial voting lines are fraying?  I certainly hope so.

In my own local communities, here in Silicon Valley, we are so diversified it’s very normal to have a regular potpourri of ethnicities running for the local offices, and that includes in the local big cities such as San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.  You will see blacks, whites, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hispanic, East Indians, Filipinos and others running.  And the winners will usually be just as diverse.

I do believe that this is a vision of what this country will eventually look like in the decades to come.

This will not happen in my life time, nor even by the end of this century.  But I do believe the “Left Coast” is way ahead for where it’s all eventually headed.

Unfortunately, we can expect that there will be many more examples of what went on in the Mother Emanuel Church.  Yes there will be more  troubled individuals killing more innocent Americans, only because of the color of their skin.

Old ways do eventually die, but they die long….. and hard.

Copyright G.Ater  2015