Still Divided 

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In many ways, progress has been at best halting and has even slid backward. Public schools are resegregating at the very time they're turning into dropout factories, according to a recent Harvard University study. And despite a larger black professional class and the seeming ubiquity of African-American celebrity athletes and entertainers, overall economic advancement has been mostly inconsequential: In 1968, blacks earned 54.8 cents for every dollar earned by whites, according to the US Census Bureau. By 2001, black earnings had climbed -- if you can call it that -- to 57.2 cents. At that pace, blacks can expect to achieve parity with white income in the year 2582.

The tenor of public debate hasn't matched up well with the facts on the ground. While blacks continue to benefit from our society less than others do, conservative leaders egg on many whites, especially in the South, to believe they're losing ground to African Americans. Rather than address the reality that blacks are still struggling for the same basic rights as other Americans, policies seem to follow the rhetoric.

Examples? A familiar one occurred in Florida just before the 2000 election. Gov. Jeb Bush's administration purged 57,700 voters, a disproportionate number of whom were black, from the voting rolls for allegedly being felons. Because many of the voters weren't felons, the NAACP and others decried the move as racist.

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• John Sugg
• Mississippi State Sen. Willie Simmons.

In 2004, Alabama voters decided to keep Jim Crow school segregation language in the state constitution. Leading those opposed to scrapping the racist text was the man likely to be Alabama's next governor, Republican Roy Moore, best known for being ousted from the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from the high court's building. Moore says the constitutional amendment would have allowed federal judges to intrude into Alabama's schools. That's not only unlikely, but that rationale -- a throwback to the "states' rights" defense of segregation -- is a clear wink at Alabama's unreconstructed whites.

More recently, two Georgia GOP congressmen, Charlie Norwood and Nathan Deal, have proposed a national law requiring a picture ID to obtain Medicaid. They don't appear overly worried that blacks are less likely than whites to have the birth certificates or passports needed to get the federal identification.

That Medicaid ID proposal evokes a voter ID bill that Georgia's Republican legislators pushed last year through the General Assembly under the guise of deterring vote fraud -- when it was clear who would really be deterred are black, elderly and poor voters. A federal judge has placed part of the bill on hold because of questions about its constitutionality, but Republicans came back this year with a revised version -- one still likely to make voting more difficult for poor, elderly and African-American people who don't have drivers licenses.

State Rep. Sue Burmeister, who sponsored the voter ID bill, drew a candid connection between racist rhetoric and a policy designed to have a negative impact on black voters. According to US Justice Department records, the Augusta Republican declared to Justice Department lawyers that if blacks "are not paid to vote, they don't go to the polls."

"You ravish and debauch the mother as your mistress; You raise a divided city and from her loins springs hate; You sate the greed of greedy men while others starve -- assigned their fate."

-- W.E.B. DuBois, "Litany at Atlanta," 1906

It's important to distinguish between actual racism and political maneuvers that have racial implications or play to racial anxieties. Jim Cobb, a University of Georgia historian who has focused on Southern "identity," argues, for example, that the Florida voter purge wasn't just "to assuage North Florida crackers. It was a political calculation."

Cobb also cautions that bigotry against blacks is no longer peculiar to the South. "It is hard to let go of the idea that race is still just a Southern problem," Cobb says. "The whole damn country is Southern now," Cobb says. "The Republicans just took race and made it a tool for victory."

At the same time, race symbolism has always soaked through to the core of Southern politics, and the continued reliance on a racial subtext by conservatives is part of a conscious strategy that has helped the GOP become the dominant party in the South and across the nation.

Following Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in the 1964 presidential election, Republicans launched an offensive to attract white, Southern voters appalled at the thought of integration. President Lyndon Johnson pushed the passage of hallmark civil rights legislation, but he presciently remarked at the time that the Democrats' support of voting rights and integrated schools had cost the party the South "for a hundred years."