    
Tonya
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Username: Tonya
Post Number: 4694
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 05:11 pm: | 
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Black vote may focus on economic issues
By Leah Rupp and Julie Goodman
Montgomery Advertiser
March 5, 2007
SELMA -- Voting rights were what blacks in 1965 marched for, but blacks in 2007 aren't sure voting makes much difference if the economic gap between the races isn't closed.
For Herman Johnson Sr. of Atlanta, the issue today is parity.
"The people here can vote, but most of them can't buy any of the houses," said Johnson, 57, who grew up in this community of little more than 20,000. "And damn, personally, I'd rather have a house than a vote, you know what I mean?"
Political heavyweights including Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York gathered Sunday with more than a thousand others here for the anniversary of a 1965 march for equal voting rights.
Tattered curtains blowing in the shattered window of an abandoned home on Martin Luther King Jr. Street and businesses with iron bars across their doors greeted Johnson, who came back with his son to celebrate the march he participated in as a teenager.
"Selma looked a whole lot better when I was growing up than it does now," said 42-year-old Jerome Rush. "I mean, look around you."
Loss of jobs and increased crime have contributed to the boarded windows, vacant lots and debris scattered on the sidewalk, he said.
Downtown "don't look like it used to," said resident Alice Peterson, calling the area "dead."
Any new businesses struggle to stay open, she said.
"The thing is, this is just not a place for young people that are trying to make a better life for themselves ... Not a place for young people coming up in the world," Peterson said. "If you're uneducated, or look like you're uneducated, the world is going to walk all over you."
To revitalize Selma will take everyone pulling together, Johnson said.
"After that march there was a sense of calmness and even the white people with the shotguns loaded against us could feel it," he said. "It's going to take something like that, everyone getting together. I'll never forget that sense of calmness."
Before Sunday's march, Obama and Clinton spoke at churches only three blocks apart on Martin Luther King Jr. Street. The Democratic presidential candidates focused on the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
Both, according to a political science expert, are vying for the black vote next year.
"Alabama has a very large, black Democratic voting base and for either candidate to ignore that would be dangerous," said Andra Gillespie, an assistant political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "They could lose the state nomination if they lose those voters."
Selma residents Virgil and Mary Franklin listened to Obama's speech from outside Brown Chapel AME Church. Moments later, they listened to both Obama and Clinton speak at a rally from the steps of the chapel.
"I am really excited about next year's presidential race," Mary Franklin said. "For the first time in a long time, I feel like we are all going to have some quality choices when voting in next year's primary." At the march later, a woman hoisted a placard into the air, reading "Hillary, you should/could have chosen another day to beg blacks for votes!!!"
Jean Jones, 49, had biting words for all white candidates who descend on black churches during campaign season.
"That's where we are on Sundays is in church and the most segregated hour in the South is 11 o'clock on Sundays and that's during church services. So if we really are for all the people all the time, then why can't we go to church together? Why do we just have to see the white candidate in our church during election time?" said Jones, a child advocate.
Clinton, she said, shouldn't have skipped Alabama but played her hand differently. The senator could have, for instance, focused her efforts on Troy State University's Rosa Parks Library and Museum instead.
"She missed her golden opportunity in Alabama," Jones said. "She could have gone to Montgomery to the Rosa Parks Museum where the women actually started the civil rights movement and she could have expounded on that and ran with the feminist theory," she said.
John King, a black deacon with a Baptist church in Mobile, said he believes the two candidates will split the black vote because Bill Clinton has set such a precedent for responding to the needs of black constituents.
"He did a whole lot for black people, a whole lot for black people," King said. "He wasn't black but he did a whole lot for black people."
Staff writer Toni Konz contributed to this report. Julie Goodman and Leah Rupp are reporters with the Clarion Ledger in Mississippi.
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070305/NEWS/703 050339/1001 |
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