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Still Divided 

50 years later, racial nightmares still haunt the South. Can we ever get past them?

Page 3 of 4

Witness how candidates embrace the Confederate battle flag, as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour did when he won election in 2003. Or, with somewhat more subtlety, as Sonny Perdue did to capture Georgia's governorship in 2002.

click to enlarge University of Miami law professor Donald Jones. - COURTESY: UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
  • Courtesy: University of Miami
  • University of Miami law professor Donald Jones.

To be sure: These aren't the bad old days. Certainly, terrorism against blacks in the South is much more rare than in past decades.

"I'm not afraid of being lynched today," says the University of Miami's Jones. "But has there been a fundamental change in the relationship between blacks and whites? No, there hasn't.

"The majority belief," Jones continues, "is that blacks belong in the position that they are in. It's an ideology, and it's a lie. But because it's an ideology, people aren't aware it's a lie."

Bigotry may still be as much of a mainstay among many Southerners as grits, magnolias, hurricanes and NASCAR. But could that bigotry erupt into widespread racial violence?

Certainly, the embers of crosses that once burned at Klan rallies or on the lawns of black civil rights workers still smolder. North Carolina witnessed the ominous flaming symbols of white supremacy just last year.

Last year Chattanooga Klansman Daniel Schertz sold five bombs to a man who turned out to be an FBI informant; the goal was to kill immigrants, not blacks, but the incident had all the earmarks of Klan violence of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1999, embalmer Lawrence Lombardi set off two bombs at the historically black Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. Just a decade ago, the Klan burned a black Baptist church in South Carolina; the terrorists not only were prosecuted, they were sued and ordered to pay the church $38 million.

The most notorious recent lynching of a black man in the South ended in stiff sentences. In 1998, James Byrd Jr. was chained to a pickup in Jasper, TX, and dragged down a road until his body was ripped to pieces. Likely alive for most of the dragging, Byrd died only after his head and arm were ripped off by a culvert. What was left of him was deposited in front of a black cemetery. It was a message -- the sort that Southern white society often sent in past decades.

Two killers -- one was a member of a North Carolina Klan group -- were sentenced to death, the first such sentences for a white killing a black in Texas. The third killer received life in prison.

While many of those cases have been prosecuted -- an obvious difference from years gone by -- enough incidents remain unsolved to make one wonder whether the South is committed to racial healing.

Three years after Byrd's lynching, another black man was found hanging from a tree near Jasper. It was ruled suicide, but the fact that he dated a white woman provoked fears of a Klan-style lynching.

And, in Linden, TX, two years ago, four white men brutally beat a mentally retarded black man. The perpetrators were "punished" with what amounted to a legal shrug, and 30- and 60-day jail terms.

Numbers paint the picture another way. Of the 9,035 hate crimes reported nationally to the FBI in 2004, 54 percent were race-based. Blacks were victims in 68 percent of those reports of race-based crimes.

In a nation increasingly divided along race, class, ideological and political axes, some claim that indifference toward the problems faced by African Americans amounts to a form of violence.

Numerous black leaders point to the Bush administration's indifference to the plight of post-Katrina New Orleans as certain proof that racism still has a lethal edge.

"They died from abject neglect," New Orleans community activist Leah Hodges told NBC News. "The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die."

"But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and he is not white? What then is our response?"

-- Robert F. Kennedy

There have been stunning changes in the Southern landscape since the Jim Crow years. But tragedies among blacks -- the deaths and devastation in New Orleans after Katrina, for example -- are often cited as proof of systemic racism. State-sanctioned murders are quite different than allowing people to die from neglect, however.

click to enlarge Roy Ennis, chairman of CORE. - JOHN SUGG

Historian Cobb of the University of Georgia argues that the largely rural Old South was fundamentally different, hostile to outsiders and introverted in its perspective.

The chilling reality of a half-century ago was that lynchings, the bombings of black churches and other race violence were often a community affair, a celebration of supremacy. Families, including children, attended the gruesome ceremonies, which commonly featured burning, castration and dismemberment -- often performed while the victim still lived, writhed and screamed. Local newspapers publicized the atrocities, tours were arranged, photographs became family keepsakes. Fingers, ears and penises were popular mementoes.

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