The New Racism

This was Alabama in the 1950s, when Jim Crow reigned and a governor’s race was determined by which candidate managed to secure the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. Life in Baldwin County, where Blacksher was located, may have been marginally less horrid for its black residents than in other parts of the state: The county’s last lynching had occurred in 1919 and some of the white men who perpetrated it had even gone to prison. But there were certain realities by which Sanders, as a black child, knew he must abide. He knew not to spend any of the money he earned picking cotton on the six-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola at the drugstore; those were only for white customers, and a black person who tried to buy one risked more than just being refused service. He also knew not to look in the direction of a white woman. The one time he did, the woman’s male companion threatened to whip him, and probably would have had Sanders’s mother, a strong-willed woman named Ola Mae, not intervened. For Sanders, the fact that there was no electricity or running water in his house—to say nothing of toilet paper—was far less distressing than the constant threat of danger.

In 1954, when Sanders was twelve, he momentarily ignored the intended purpose of a magazine his mother had brought home and instead read an article about Thurgood Marshall’s work on Brown v. Board of Education. The case had no bearing on Sanders’s everyday life. Baldwin County’s schools were segregated and would remain defiantly so for more than a decade after his education in them. But Marshall’s legal heroics wormed their way into the back of Sanders’s mind, and when his seventh-grade teacher asked her students what they wanted to be when they grew up, Sanders surprised himself by saying, “A lawyer.” His classmates—whose professional aspirations tended toward farming or turpentine work—burst out laughing. Sanders began to cry; the other kids laughed even harder, which prompted even more tears. When the episode was finally over, Sanders resolved that he would become a lawyer (still not entirely sure what one was) just to prove his classmates wrong.

Sanders went from being an eager student—the kind who devoured, cover-to-cover, the two encyclopedias that comprised his school’s entire library—to a determined one. By graduation, he had high marks, but not enough money to go to college. He spent the next three years working in a sawmill and then as a janitor and an elevator operator, squirreling away as much as he could. When he finally enrolled at Talladega College, a historically black school in central Alabama, it was 1963, and he threw himself into the civil rights movement. He joined the Selma-to-Montgomery march that led to the Voting Rights Act, and he did the dangerous work of registering black people to vote in Lowndes County, a part of Alabama so plagued by racial violence it was known as “Bloody Lowndes.”

Sanders’s professors at Talladega quickly identified him as a “poor young man of great promise,” in the parlance of the times, and they urged him to pursue his boyhood dream of becoming a lawyer. In 1967, he was admitted to Harvard Law School. In Cambridge, Sanders stayed involved in the civil rights movement, and it was through his activism that he became close to another black Harvard Law student from the South. Her name was Rose Gaines. She was an itinerant preacher’s daughter who possessed the self-confidence and moxie that Sanders was still developing for himself. Before he graduated, they were married. After Harvard, the newlyweds could have followed their classmates to lucrative law firm jobs in New York or Washington. But they knew how much work remained to be done in the South. So they moved to Selma, the spiritual home of the movement, determined to advance the cause.

It was hard, dispiriting work. The couple didn’t take the Alabama bar exam together because they doubted that two black lawyers would be admitted to practice law in the state at the same time. More than once, Sanders had a gun drawn on him by white business owners whom he was suing on behalf of black clients. But soon he and Rose were filing the lawsuits necessary for blacks in rural Alabama to become sheriffs, school board members, and city councilmen—translating the right to vote into actual political power. In 1983, Sanders ran for office himself in a newly created black-majority Senate district.

Over the next three decades, Sanders became a fixture in the statehouse, ascending to the chairmanship of the Senate’s Finance and Taxation Education Committee. From his expansive office just off the Senate floor, he controlled Alabama’s Education Trust Fund, the largest operating budget in state government. Sanders tried to exercise his power to represent people who were unaccustomed to having a voice in Montgomery—namely poor, black Alabamans. He helped bring more money to their schools and their hospitals, better infrastructure to their neighborhoods, and greater fairness to their tax bills. Thanks to Sanders and a growing caucus of African American legislators, many of whom also chaired crucial committees, it was a period during which black people in Alabama enjoyed their most substantive political representation since Reconstruction. And Sanders, an exceptionally large man who suffered from severe obesity and whose supporters called him “The Rock,” was the cornerstone of the black political power structure in the state. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced off in Alabama’s 2008 Democratic primary, both candidates sought the endorsement of Sanders’s political organization; it went to Obama, and Obama won.

Sanders told me the story of his remarkable rise to power earlier this year, but his tone was more wistful than triumphant. For so long, his life had been an uplifting tale of slow but seemingly inexorable progress—not just for himself, but for African Americans throughout the South. In recent years, however, the trajectory of Sanders’s story has been abruptly—and just as inexorably—reversed. In 2010, Republicans took over the Alabama Senate and Sanders lost his chairmanship; in the four years since, he’s watched as the new GOP majority has systematically dismantled much of his life’s work.

Now 71, with a bushy salt-and-pepper moustache and glasses that are forever sliding down his nose, Sanders struggled to articulate the magnitude of this development in personal terms, except to say that it had been “the most devastating and adverse of my time in the Senate.” But he wasn’t hesitant to describe the political ramifications. Sitting in his current office—a cramped space with missing ceiling tiles far from the Senate floor—he waved his arm and gestured at the statehouse halls. “The Republicans have demonstrated that we can be down here,” he said, “and that we can be powerless.” Sanders and other black Alabamans can now buy a Coke whenever they want or look at anyone without fear of being set upon. But in other, less obvious ways, black people in Alabama and across the South are as politically vulnerable as they’ve been since the emergence of the civil rights movement. “It’s a total disempowering of African Americans,” Sanders said. “We are going back to the past very fast.”

Yet, while the impact of the VRA on the federal government was profound, it was even more transformative at the state and local levels. Their names may be unfamiliar ones in Washington, but in Tennessee, it was Lois DeBerry, an African American state representative from Memphis and the House speaker pro tempore for 14 years, who was that state’s foremost advocate for public education; in North Carolina, it was the black State Senator Floyd McKissick Jr. who authored that state’s pioneering Racial Justice Act that allowed death row inmates to challenge their sentences on grounds of racial bias. By 2001, Mississippi and Alabama had 1,628 African American elected officials—more than the entire United States had in 1970. As the voting rights scholars Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman have written, the VRA fomented a “quiet revolution” in state capitals, county seats, and city halls across the South.

Granted, that revolution was years in the making. The Alabama statehouse that Hank Sanders entered in 1983 was almost comically racist. Privately, some of Sanders’s colleagues still referred to African Americans with racial slurs; publicly, their actions often weren’t much better. Under the state’s constitution—a document that was ratified in 1901 in order to “establish white supremacy in this State,” according to one of its drafters—cities and counties are given little say in their affairs. Instead, that power rests with the legislature, which at the beginning of the twentieth century was all white and which the constitution’s authors assumed would remain that way forever more. Early in his first term, Sanders sponsored a seemingly routine measure to annex several unincorporated black neighborhoods into a predominately white city in his district. In the Alabama statehouse, it was customary for legislators to grant their colleagues “local courtesy” and rubberstamp these sorts of bills. But when Sanders filed his, that courtesy was suddenly revoked.

One of his colleagues, a white Democrat who’d been enlisted by the city’s white residents, took Sanders’s bill and “put it in his pocket,” Sanders recalls. And he kept it there while Sanders waged a lonely filibuster—standing on the Senate floor and giving speeches or reading from the phone book—against “local legislation” from every other senator until he could get a vote on his. Alabama’s three other black senators did what they could to help. “I’d dash to the bathroom to try to urinate real quick,” Sanders says, “and Charles Langford, he would come running in shouting, ‘You’d better get back on the floor!’ ” After a month, Sanders’s bill passed. But it was an unpleasant lesson in the limits of his power. “I realized I wasn’t going to get even the things I’m supposed to get,” Sanders says.

He had come to Montgomery brimming with revolutionary fervor, but this experience led Sanders to a momentous decision: If he wanted to achieve anything, he would have to work with some of the same white legislators who were determined to undermine him. His role model for this strategy was one of the most polarizing figures in the South, Joe Reed. A veteran of the civil rights movement, Reed served as the head of the Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC), the state’s leading black grassroots political group, and spent much of the 1970s and ’80s filing lawsuits and drawing legislative maps to ensure the elections of black politicians. (It was a lawsuit filed by Reed that led to the creation of the black-majority Senate district that elected Sanders.) “My goal was to get equity,” Reed told me when I met with him at the ADC’s headquarters, a squat brick building next to a bail-bond shop in a depressed section of Montgomery. He is in his mid-seventies now, with a pencil moustache and a fondness for fedoras. “I’m not one of these guys who believes racism is dead,” he continued. “A man tells me he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body, he’s lying!”

In 1970, George Wallace successfully attacked his gubernatorial opponent for being “in bed” with Reed and his “black bloc.” But only a few years later, other white Democratic politicians, some of them as racist as Wallace, began turning to Reed for help. David Bositis, a scholar at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies who has worked with Reed for decades, recalls ADC meetings where he’d see “these redneck white guys in cheap suits and even cheaper haircuts, and they’d be there to get the ADC endorsement.” For Reed, maximizing black political power was what mattered most, so if the situation called for the ADC to endorse a white Democrat over a black one, he wouldn’t hesitate. “A lot of times, we were able to get things done with those good old boys,” Reed told me. “They’d come and tell you, ‘I’m not going to say anything, but count me.’ They’d vote with you.”

After Sanders’s terrible first months in Montgomery, he set out to become a deal maker, too. (He would go on to found his own political organization, the Alabama New South Coalition, which eventually would rival the ADC for influence.) But it was his alliance with Lowell Barron that ultimately made him a power broker in the state. The two Democratic senators had arrived in Montgomery within a year of each other in the early ’80s and had long eyed one another warily. Barron, a wealthy businessman from northern Alabama, viewed Sanders as “a big, heavyset dumb black guy”; Sanders considered Barron, whose biggest issue was tort reform, an establishment toady. At one point, the two men had adjoining offices, but it only drove them further apart, with Barron frequently complaining about the smell of the fish sandwiches Sanders would buy for himself and his secretary for lunch.

In 1998, though, the GOP won the lieutenant governor’s office, who traditionally controlled committee assignments in the Senate. After the election, Senate Democrats, who still had a majority, scrambled to change the rules so that the president pro tempore—a Democrat—would have control of the chamber. Sanders floated Barron for the job. He would have preferred a more liberal lawmaker, but he also knew that Barron was the only Democrat who could assemble the necessary coalition to win the vote. “I brought the white folks to the table, and he brought the blacks to the table,” Barron remembers.

The effort was successful, which meant the two men had to keep cooperating to hold their coalition together. Over time, “a bond developed more than just out of necessity,” says Barron, who came to view Sanders as “one of the brightest, most capable individuals, black or white, that I ever encountered in my life.” The two men would strategize late into the night on the phone and, oftentimes, one would fall asleep while the other was talking.

Sanders’s legislative initiatives might not have been as inspirational as the old civil rights battles, but they built on those battles in crucial ways. He passed legislation that changed the state’s school-funding formula so that it was no longer based on average daily attendance, making it more equitable for small, rural schools like those in the Black Belt. He secured additional money so Black Belt schools could replace their coal-powered heaters with modern HVAC systems. And he made certain that some of the government pork that had usually gone to the state’s white districts started making it to his impoverished one—from a $26 million state-trooper training facility in Selma to a $6 million technology center at the local community college.

One of his greatest accomplishments was convincing many of his fellow black legislators to work in a similar fashion. Principles mattered, he believed, but passing bills sometimes mattered more. In the House, John Knight, a representative from Montgomery, eventually rose to become chairman of the committee that oversees the state’s non-education budget. From that perch, he struck a deal in 2006 with Republican Governor Bob Riley that raised the threshold at which an Alabama family of four starts paying state income tax, from $4,600 annually to $12,500. Knight would have preferred to raise the threshold to the poverty line, but he felt that he had to focus on what was politically feasible. It was an approach indicative of Knight’s overall legislative philosophy. “When I got to be chair of the budget committee, there were a lot of these Confederate programs and so forth that were funded in the budget, and the black caucus really wanted to take a lot of those out,” he recalls. “My position was: We’ll meet ’em halfway. I’m not gonna take the historical Confederate projects out. The only thing I’m gonna do is insist that we have some African American historic projects.”

Sanders and Knight were criticized by some black politicians, as well as by liberal white ones, for being too timid, too incremental. But the two argued that they were playing a long game and that, eventually, they’d achieve their larger goals. One was the repeal of Alabama’s 4 percent sales tax on groceries, an especially odious piece of the state’s highly regressive tax structure that results in lower- and middle-class Alabamans paying twice as much of their incomes in state and local taxes as the state’s top 1 percent of earners. Not long after he was elected to the House in 1993, Knight began introducing legislation to repeal the sales tax on groceries; Sanders sponsored almost identical legislation in the Senate. For most of their careers, the legislation went nowhere. But gradually it gained supporters. Then in 2008, it passed the House for the first time. It appeared to be on the verge of passing in the Senate before falling one vote short. It was an agonizingly close defeat—“There is something wrong in Alabama when we decide we ought not to tax food for calves, but we tax food for babies,” Sanders lamented—but both legislators took comfort in the close result. On that issue, and so many others they’d been working on, the prospect of success seemed to grow more tangible by the day.

Hubbard, who grew up in Georgia, moved to Alabama as a young man in the mid-’80s to work in the Auburn University athletic department; he later made a small fortune when he helped the school launch its own sports broadcasting network. In 1998, Hubbard won a seat in Alabama’s House of Representatives, which had been controlled by Democrats since 1874. But unlike so many of his Republican colleagues, Hubbard did not accept Democratic dominance as a fact of life. Instead, he was determined to end it.

It was the Democrats themselves who helped Hubbard realize his goal. During the 2001 legislative redistricting process, Joe Reed and other prominent black leaders were eager to further protect black incumbents. They successfully pushed to fill the House’s 27 majority-minority and the Senate’s eight majority-minority districts with even more black voters. In the process, they endangered the seats of white Democrats, who increasingly relied on African Americans to make up for the growing number of whites defecting to the GOP. James Blacksher, a civil rights attorney who advised Democrats on redistricting, is still stunned by the shortsightedness of this plan. It wasn’t so much a gerrymander, he told me, as a “dummymander.”

In 2002 and 2006, Republicans benefited from this tactical mistake, picking off white Democrats here and there. But in 2010, Hubbard, who had recently become the state Republican Party chairman, proposed the most audacious electoral plan in the history of the Alabama GOP. Rather than take out white Democrats piecemeal, he decided to eliminate them in one brutal election. He put together an 88-page playbook, innocuously titled GOP Alabama State Victory Plan 2010, and pushed the plan to conservative donors not just in the state, but all over the country. Alabama’s campaign-finance laws prohibited corporations from giving more than $500, and some Alabamans were reluctant to contribute to Republicans in case the GOP’s takeover plans didn’t come to fruition. But moneyed conservatives beyond Birmingham and Montgomery didn’t share those concerns and saw a chance to flip the statehouse. Hubbard and his finance chairman, State Senator Del Marsh, ultimately reaped more than $1 million in out-of-state contributions. And in one instance, Hubbard appears to have used a national group, the Republican State Leadership Council (RSLC), to effectively launder contributions to Alabama Republicans from politically toxic gambling interests—a scheme, Politico’s Alexander Burns recently reported, that the RSLC’s lawyers concluded could result in “possible criminal penalties” if it was ever discovered.

Hubbard couldn’t have chosen a better time to attempt a takeover. The election of Obama, and white Alabamans’ visceral distaste for the president (88 percent voted against him in 2008), created a massive shift in the state’s politics. For many years, white voters had often split their tickets, voting Republican in federal and gubernatorial contests but sticking with the Democrats in legislative campaigns. Hubbard realized that, by nationalizing Alabama’s 2010 state races and putting Obama on center stage, he could bring that to an end. Hubbard himself had always been careful never to speak in explicitly racial terms. (Not all of his Republican colleagues were so circumspect. In 2010, a state senator named Scott Beason was caught on a wiretap referring to black Alabamans as “aborigines.”) Now, he didn’t need to explicitly invoke race—he only needed to mention Obama. As the state GOP put it in one ad, “After 136 years, the Democrats have brought us Obama, Pelosi, government health care, liberal policies, higher taxes, and wasteful spending.”

Suddenly, even entrenched white Democrats like Lowell Barron, who’d been in the Senate for 28 years, found themselves in trouble. “People weren’t voting against me in 2010, they were voting against that black man in the White House,” says Barron. “They were pretty specific about it, only they didn’t refer to him as a black man.” Some Republicans concede as much. “Anybody who denies that Barack Obama’s unpopularity in Alabama didn’t help Republicans come to power is just not being truthful about it,” Republican State Senator Cam Ward told me.

The transformation of Alabama politics was nearly instantaneous. Prior to the 2010 election, the Alabama House had 60 Democratic members, 34 of them white and 26 black. Afterward, there were 36 Democrats—ten white, 26 black. Meanwhile, in the Alabama Senate, the number of black Democrats remained seven, while the number of white Democrats fell from 13 to four. The casualties included Barron, who lost to a first-time Republican candidate.

All of this was enough to give the GOP supermajorities in both chambers. Hubbard assumed his role as speaker of the House, and Marsh was elected Senate president pro tem. Having wrested control of the statehouse, now they could begin to change the state.