Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 17, 1990 TAG: 9006180359
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARLAND L. THOMPSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Gantt knows plenty about the difficulties of breaking new ground. He was the first black to attend Clemson University in South Carolina, where he grew up. An architect with a master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gantt fashioned two mayoral victories in Charlotte, North Carolina's biggest city, before falling victim to overconfidence. And that was in a city whose 75 percent white electorate usually votes Republican.
Now he gets to meet Jesse Helms, the rhinoceros of the right, in a test of how much the state has moved away from its segregationist past. Gantt noted during the primary campaign that "in Jesse [Helms'] vision of America, I wouldn't even have been allowed to vote."
Helms congratulated Gantt on "a hard-earned victory," and news reports say Helms ads attacking the black candidate were "softer" than the harsh rhetoric aimed at Easley during the primary campaign.
As well they might have been. As editorial voice of Raleigh's WRAL TV and radio stations, Helms broadcast daily editorials excoriating the "consistent bias in national television network news programs" between 1960 and 1972. That bias Helms found particularly evident in the reporting of "the civil rights uproar," coverage he thought "absolutely contrived - this wasn't news, this was a little one-act play" consisting of "staged" events.
North Carolina is a state whose black population is more than 1.3 million strong, 22 percent of the total. Democrats make up 2 million of its nearly 3 million registered voters, and blacks make up almost 600,000 of those.
Suffice it to say that those voters - who, like Gantt, came up fighting to break down the stifling walls of discrimination that sustained the placid life Helms misses - didn't think it was all a stage show. If Gantt has a long memory, so do they.
Helms, however, is obviously chary of reminding too many others of his strident opposition to black advances. Only a quarter of the state's Democratic electorate went to the polls Tuesday. But of them, 273,000 voted for Gantt, to 207,000 for Easley.
North Carolina's political center of gravity is clearly shifting, as the state attracts more of the industry that once sustained the Smokestack North and brings with it the Northerners who follow the jobs. Gantt succeeded politically in a city that normally votes heavily Republican, against white candidates less abrasive and backward than Helms.
One onlooker, the Raleigh News and Observer's Ferrel Guillory, puts it this way: "Democrats, especially blacks, think that Mr. Gantt, as a black, may pose an especially delicate problem for Mr. Helms, whose campaigns have regularly featured racial cues to voters. Many whites, these Democrats contend, won't stomach a campaign in which racism is even implied."
It should be noted that Gantt won endorsements in the primary from three of the state's four biggest newspapers, the Greensboro News & Record, the Charlotte Observer and the Winston-Salem Journal. His Democratic opponent was endorsed only by the Raleigh News & Observer, in Helms' heartland territory.
Gantt was a respected mayor who helped give North Carolina a new image in national politics, while Helms' hard-line stands on abortion, the death penalty and the National Endowment for the Arts have embarrassed more than a few progressive-minded Carolinians.
Pollster Harrison Hickman, a consultant to North Carolina's other senator, Democrat Terry Sanford, said he thought Gantt should make the race "the 1990s vs. the 1950s," instead of conservative vs. liberal. The question this race can help answer: Is North Carolina ready for the 1990s?
by CNB