Edwards emphasizes race issues

e-mail this story Dan Hoover • Income tax plan faces Senate ire (02/22/04) • Big-name backers not pulling in votes (02/15/04) • Edwards emphasizes race issues (02/01/04) • Democrats in state see long-term gains (01/25/04) • Kerry rebuilding his image in South Carolina (01/18/04)

The North Carolina senator and Democratic presidential candidate, who was born in Seneca and lived in Georgia before his family settled in Robbins, N.C., talks of race and growing up in a segregated South.

He shifts back and forth from the purely personal to the clearly political.

The other six Democrats still in the running bring the racial equality issue into their stump speeches, but not to the extent the 50-year-old Edwards does.

"I was in the sixth grade and my teacher walked into the classroom to announce that he was not going to teach the next year because the school was about to be integrated and he wouldn't teach in an integrated school," Edwards told a crowd during a campaign appearance last week in Columbia.

"We, those of us in the South, carry an enormous responsibility when it comes to issues of race and equality and civil rights. I feel it personally. We have so much work to do, for economic equality, for educational equality, we have to stand up.

"And, by the way, just so you know, this is not something I come to South Carolina and talk about. I talk about this every place I go, everywhere," he said.

'American issue'

"This is not an African-American issue, this is an American issue."

Where Edwards and the others cite moral imperatives behind their statements, there are political imperatives, too.

It's also an issue they hope will resonate among the state's black voters, 95 percent of whom pull the Democratic lever and are expected to make up 40 percent to 50 percent of Tuesday's presidential primary voters.

Jack Bass, a former South Carolina journalist who now teaches at the College of Charleston, said such messages can be effective when delivered undiluted, but also "resonate because it is a national message that recognizes racism as a national issue, not a regional one, and Southerners likely will respond positively to that."

Edwards has it tied into his economic platform, creating a two-track pitch, linking it to his own modest beginnings.

Dan Carter, a University of South Carolina political scientist, likened Edwards' effort to those of two other Southerners, who became president, Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

Broader appeal

"It appeals to blacks ... then says to whites that (Edwards) grew up poor as the son of a mill worker," Carter said.

"He gives a pretty hard-edged kind of class-oriented speech designed to appeal to whites, and it seems to be obvious that he's trying to find some way of talking to both African-Americans voters and white voters who traditionally, since the '60s, have not seen themselves in the same place," Carter said.

All this falls under the old unwritten rule in which outsiders are chastised for saying things about family that family members can utter with impunity.

"When it comes from a native of the South, such unpleasant truths are more acceptable," Bass said.

There's a strong rationale for any candidate to discuss race, poverty and equality, said Phil Noble, state president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

"Race is an American issue, but for Southerners, both black and white, it's like grits and our accent — it defines who we are, our history and our culture. If a presidential candidate, Southerner or Yankee, can connect powerfully with South Carolina Democratic voters in a compelling and moving way on race, they will win the primary," he said.

Dan Hoover's column appears on Sunday. He can be reached at (864) 298-4883 or toll-free at (800) 274-7879, extension 4883, and by fax at (864) 298-4395.