Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 9, 1990 TAG: 9006110177
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There's truth to that. And just hours before he raised the point in a commencement address at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, events in North Carolina suggested an expansion on the point. To pundits and reporters, Wilder might well have added Justice Department bureaucrats.
At Harvard, Wilder recalled Jack Kennedy's 1960 campaign for president. When West Virginia Protestants gave Kennedy their primary votes, it helped boost him toward the Democratic nomination - and helped scotch the notion that Kennedy's Catholicism was an issue for most Americans.
Similarly, said Wilder, who is black, he ran for governor last year in the belief that race is not an issue for most Virginians.
Nor, it seems, is it an issue - or at least as much of an issue as it used to be - for North Carolinians. Last Tuesday, the night before Wilder spoke, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, who also is black, was celebrating his runoff victory for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.
If elected, Gantt would not be the first black U.S. senator in modern times. That distinction belongs to Ed Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican who served in the Senate during the 1960s and '70s.
Nor in modern times are North Carolina Democrats the first major party to nominate a black for the Senate. That distinction belongs to Virginia Republicans, who in 1988 nominated Maurice Dawkins.
But unlike Dawkins against Charles Robb, Gantt is no sacrificial lamb: He is the underdog in his general-election challenge to Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, but he is thought to have a chance of winning. Also unlike Dawkins (and, for that matter, unlike Wilder) Gantt won his party's nomination via primary elections rather than party conventions.
This is where the Justice Department comes in.
Until this year, a candidate to win a primary election in North Carolina - as in most Southern states - had to get more than 50 percent of the vote. If the top vote-getter did not get 50 percent, he or she had to face the No. 2 finisher in a runoff.
That, said Justice, was unfair to black candidates. After finishing first in the initial primary, they would lose the runoff because of racially polarized voting. Under pressure from Justice, North Carolina changed its election laws: Now, the top finisher in a primary is nominated without a runoff if he or she gets more than 40 percent of the vote.
In the first round, however, Gantt fell a few votes short of even the 40 percent threshold. Thus a runoff. And thus, under Justice's theory and in the eyes of pundits, his candidacy was doomed.
Except it wasn't: Gantt won the runoff with a comfortable 57 percent of the vote.
The notions of Justice and of the pundits were not spun from thin air. Until Kennedy in 1960, the only Catholic on a national major-party ticket had been Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith in 1928, and Smith's religion clearly contributed to the extent of his defeat.
And until Gantt's victory last week, the political candidacies of several black North Carolinians had followed precisely the script set forth by Justice.
Nonetheless, Gantt's nomination suggests it may be time to rewrite a few scripts. Perhaps it's time to worry less about the political barriers of race that once seemed so high in America - and more about the economic barriers that increasingly divide rich from poor, regardless of color.
by CNB