(5 of 11)
When the campaign officially opened in the summer of 1970, Carter's contacts and grass-roots identification helped him put together a smooth political machine. To get elected, it was necessary to make some gestures toward the past: he opposed busing, visited a private segregated academy and said he would welcome meetings with George Wallace. He also appealed to the ever-potent populist instincts of the state by promising to oppose Establishment power brokers and big money interests. He beat former Governor Carl Sanders in the Democratic runoff and went on to a 200,000-vote victory over the Republican candidate, Atlanta Television Newsman Hal Suit.
Then came the inaugural. In the four months since taking office, Carter has expanded on the few startling sentences with which he began his administration. He told TIME'S Atlanta Bureau Chief Joseph Kane: "I know my people, and I am saying what they are thinking. The people of Georgia have been through periods of great crisis. My generation has had to assimilate many changes. Our black and white citizens have decided there will be no more restraint on their search to work together. Our problems and our opportunities are completely mutual. We have a lot of problems still left concerning race, but we are no longer preoccupied with this problem to the exclusion of others. There is a new dynamic, a new freedom that exists throughout the South."
Bringing the South Back
This new dynamic that Carter sees at work in Georgia is in an odd fashion the outgrowth of that old preoccupation with racial issues. Says Emory University Political Scientist James Clotfelter Jr.: "The walls did not come tumbling down when schools were integrated. The people expected things to be so utterly bad that there was no way that integration problems could meet the expectations of the whites." Indeed, that has been the story with each painfully wrought accommodation between the races, from desegregating public facilities to abolishing the dual school system. The apocalyptic prophecies of the racist Jeremiahs have gone unfulfilled; the South had unknowingly built a buffer out of its nightmares. Adds Clotfelter: "People who said, 'Never, never, never!' have done it, done it, done it. The South is used to losing battles; now it is making the best of the peace."
The South is also being accorded its political due in new ways. Much of President Nixon's Southern Strategy was unsound, for it appealed to the baser instincts of the South. But it also right fully acknowledged the necessity of restoring the region's sense of belonging to the rest of the nation, of bringing the South into national political councils. The appointment of a Southern jurist to the Supreme Court was an admirable goal. But Nixon chose poorly in both his attempts. His efforts to slow the completion of school integration and to prevent busing as a means of racially balancing the South's schools were likewise ill-conceived, and the Supreme Court has rebuked him at each turn.