JAMIE GIBSON
Copyright Jamie Gibson 2001

Dating back to the Philadelphia State House in 1776 and the Virginia Presidential Dynasty, southern politics has throughout the years had its distinctive impact on the United States of America.  The South has produced such noteworthy statesmen and politicians as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Calhoun, William Fulbright, two Albert Gores, Sam Nunn, Bill Clinton, and many others.  In particular, the state of Alabama has contributed such nationally renowned figures as Rufus King, Hugo Black, John Sparkman, and of course four-time presidential candidate George Corley Wallace.  It is no overstatement to say that such men, in their own unique and sometimes outright unorthodox ways, have helped to shape the course of the United States.

However, the distinctiveness of the Southern political process in and of itself rivals that of its colorful national figures.  This characteristic is apparent when the voting patterns of the South, perhaps one of the most factious areas of the nation, are examined.  This is especially true in the Black Belt area of the State of Alabama.  The Black Belt, generally acknowledged to extend along the length of the state’s center and to be comprised of roughly twenty counties, makes for interesting and relevant study .  While admittedly not a perfect indicator of statewide candidate choice, the Black Belt counties have throughout the latter part of the Twentieth Century displayed a remarkable consistency of choice amongst themselves.  The caveat, however, is the fact that their voting patterns, though always consistent, underwent a radical change.  The Black Belt has always overall supported the Democratic Party; however, in and of itself this fact is misleading.

Noted political scientist V. O. Key comments on the distinctiveness of the Black Belt counties in his classic work Southern Politics in State and Nation.  Key points out that “within the Alabama Democratic party there emerges from time to time a sectional cleavage that party lines would probably follow if the state had parties” (42).  This statement was quite accurate; for during the era of one-party dominance, the progressive-conservative factions of the Democratic Party mirror the modern two-party Democratic-Republican state.  The political leanings of many of the state’s regions have changed due to various factors over the past half-century , yet nowhere is this more apparent than in the state’s Black Belt region.  Indeed, the Black Belt has been called “the historic focus of political power in Alabama” (Webster 48).  Prior to the changes stemming from the court rulings and new policies of the Civil Rights era, the Black Belt could almost certainly be counted upon to support decidedly non-progressive candidates for statewide office.

Key describes the Black Belt region as “a stronghold of conservative agricultural strength which has frequently allied itself with the business interests of the state” (43-44).  In order to maintain their power within the state, the wealthy agriculturists of the Black Belt region would not support any sort of progressive policy that might incite the desire for political participation among the few enfranchised blacks and the poor whites (Key 44).  Given this state of affairs, it is little wonder that Key called Alabama’s Black Belt “the backbone of southern conservatism” (44).  Although during Key’s lifetime the region was a bastion of conservatism and white supremacists, the Black Belt counties of today's Alabama are strongholds of progressivism that wield considerable influence in statewide races, facts evidenced by their voting patterns in gubernatorial elections from 1946-1998 .

In order to establish a basis for comparison to the two-party Alabama of the present day, it is most pragmatic to confine study to the Democratic Party’s Primary Runoff elections.  This is due to the fact that the presence of two candidates in the race translates into a better understanding of the progressive-conservative lines identified by Key and displayed time and time again in Alabama gubernatorial politics.  The 1946 Democratic Gubernatorial Primary Runoff election (cited by Key himself) is an excellent example of the voting tendencies of the Black Belt at that time.  Handy Ellis, the incumbent Lieutenant Governor, had finished second in the first primary to James E. “Big Jim” Folsom.  Folsom had finished second himself four years earlier in a campaign wherein his "greatest weakness was the Black Belt" (Barnard 21).  A candidate with a relatively progressive background himself, Ellis was unable to match the liberalism of Folsom and consequently the latter was able to paint him as a conservative (Barnard 39).  In so doing, Folsom came across as a populist “man of the people.”  Folsom received the endorsements of two candidates from the first primary, as well as that of the CIO Labor Union (Barnard 39-40).  Ellis elected to respond to the CIO endorsement by attempting to paint the union as a Communist threat, going so far to say that to elect Folsom would spell the end of the “southern way of life” (Barnard 41).  As a result of these actions, Ellis alienated whatever residual progressive support he had remaining (Barnard 40-41).

In this runoff, the Black Belt voted overwhelmingly against Folsom just as it had four years earlier.  This time, however, he would win the primary and become governor.  Of the twenty Black Belt counties, in only five was Folsom able to achieve a majority of the votes cast (in a sixth county, Bullock, Ellis won by a scant twelve votes).  Additionally, all five of these counties are relatively close in proximity to Folsom’s native Coffee County and thus his victories therein can be contributed to the “friends and neighbors” effect.  This effect, in essence, is the tendency in Alabama for candidates to “poll overwhelming majorities in their home counties and to draw heavy support in adjacent counties” (Key 37).  In brief, the 1946 runoff saw the more conservative candidate, Handy Ellis, win the unanimous support of the state’s Black Belt region save only for those counties closest to Folsom’s home county.  This was a pattern that would be often repeated in the annals of Alabama Gubernatorial politics, a notable example occurring in 1958.

The primary election runoff of 1958 would see a voting pattern in the Black Belt nearly identical to that of the 1946 contest.  The names were different, but the regional split remained the same.  John Patterson represented the conservative faction of the Democratic Party this time, with George C. Wallace of Barbour County making his first bid for statewide office as the more liberal candidate (a stance that can now be recognized as a historical irony).  As was the case in 1946, the conservative candidate, Patterson, won big in the Black Belt, the only exceptions being the counties of Barbour, home of Wallace, and the neighboring Macon, Bullock, Montgomery, and Pike counties, all of which can be attributed to the “friends and neighbors effect.”  Patterson’s success was thanks in large part to his ability to single out Wallace as the “candidate of black voters” (Stanley 70).  Indeed, Wallace received the endorsement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Conversely, it was generally understood that Patterson had the backing of the Ku Klux Klan (Lesher 124).  In the end, Wallace’s perceived liberalism on the race issue is mostly to blame for his defeat in 1958, and consequently he vowed to never let this happen again.  His comment that “John Patterson out-niggered me and I’m never going to be out-niggered again” (qtd. in Stanley 68) foreshadowed the campaign that would follow four years later.

George Wallace ran for governor again in 1962; just as in 1958, he qualified for a runoff election in the Democratic Primary.  His opponent this time was Ryan deGraffenreid of Tuscaloosa County.  However, this time Wallace took such extreme segregationist positions on the race issue that he became seen as the more conservative candidate.  Statements of his such as “I will continue to fight for segregation in Alabama…We shall fight the federals in the arena of an increasingly sympathetic national public opinion” demonstrated the extent of the conservative, segregationist ideology he would bring to the Governor’s Mansion (qtd. in Lesher 157).  Wallace even went so far to link his opponent with the racially moderate ex-Governor, James Folsom, referring to deGraffenreid as “Big Jim deGraffenreid” and decrying his propensity for “Folsomism” (Lesher 158).  This was a distinct difference from his stance four years earlier, and the results of the election proved its political effectiveness.  Not even deGraffenreid’s charge that Wallace was nothing but a “loud-mouthed demagogue” (qtd. in Lesher 160) could save him.  By making deGraffenreid into the more progressive candidate in the race, Wallace won the runoff election and thus the Governor’s Chair, taking the entire Black Belt save for Macon County.  For the third time in less than twenty years, the conservative wing of the Democratic Party decisively won the Black Belt region of the state in a head-to-head contest with a progressive.  However, change was not far away, and outside events that Wallace derided as “outside meddling” (qtd. in Lesher 157) by the federal government in the wake of the Civil Rights movement would soon radically alter the voting tendencies of the Black Belt.

The decade of the 1960s was one of assassinations, social and political upheaval, and civil unrest. Two of the more significant occurrences of that time period were the enactment of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  These bills were the culmination of a long and hard-fought struggle for civil rights.  Events such as Wallace’s symbolic standing in the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa, the death of Medgar Evers, and the demonstrations in Birmingham and the rest of the deep south all added to a growing national consensus for Civil Rights and thus made the aforementioned legislation possible.

These pieces of legislation, like the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education before them, had vital historical and political consequences.  They, along with the elimination of the poll tax by the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution, resulted in “a doubling of southern black voting strength and putting many southern whites in a paradoxical position: vote Democratic with their black neighbors or vote for the party of Lincoln” (Webster 381).  As this passage indicates, the enfranchisement of a large segment of the Alabama population that had been previously barred from the voting booths led to a dramatic realignment in the voting patterns of the state.  Indeed, African American voter registration rose from 19% in March 1965 (close to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of that year) to 52% in September 1967 (Webster 387).  The swelling of the voter rolls with newly enfranchised Negroes would cause a fundamental change in the voting patterns of the Black Belt – a change blindingly visible in 1970, in a primary runoff campaign between Governor Albert Brewer and, of course, George C. Wallace.

Governor Wallace’s wife, Lurleen, was elected as his stand-in to the Governor’s Mansion with little opposition in 1966.  However, her death in early 1968 catapulted thirty-nine year old Albert P. Brewer, then the Lieutenant Governor, into the Governor’s Chair.  Brewer’s ascension to the office gave the state its most liberal governor since perhaps the elder James Folsom.  The young governor soon proved himself to be “an able, fair, and progressive executive” (Stewart 207).  George Wallace, defeated in his bid for the presidency in 1968, sought a second term as governor in 1970.  In so doing, he was once more taking on a formidable opponent in the progressive Governor Brewer.

Wallace and a multitude of other candidates opposed the young Governor in the 1970 Democratic primary, but he was the only serious challenger.  Accordingly, Wallace found himself once more in a runoff election for the office.  Although he would narrowly defeat Brewer for the second term that he coveted, Wallace no doubt learned all too well that he could no longer count on the automatic support of the Black Belt in future situations as he and other conservative candidates had been able to do 1946, 1958, and 1962. Indeed, to win back the most prestigious office on Dexter Avenue, Wallace had to revert to his “old race-baiting tactics” in what would be one of the more bitter statewide campaigns in Alabama history (Lamis 80).  This is exemplified in a particular piece of Wallace campaign literature, which pictured “a young white girl surrounded by young black boys and urged readers to vote for Wallace to prevent the worst” (Stanley 69).  The Wallace camp purportedly spread accusations that Brewer was a homosexual, his wife an alcoholic, and that his daughters were having sexual relations with African American men (Lesher 441).  Such advertisements, unfounded rumors, and general overtones epitomized the Wallace strategy in his 1970 struggle to return to power.

To qualify for the runoff, Brewer had won a hefty percentage of the African American vote in the Black Belt counties (Lesher 445).  In retrospect this can be seen as foreshadowing the results of the second primary where, breaking all recent precedent, the progressive Brewer took twelve Black Belt Counties to the conservative Wallace’s eight.  Of Wallace’s victories, half (Butler, Pike, Russell, and his native Barbour) can safely be attributed to the friends and neighbors effect.  Even controlling for this, it is still the case that the 1970 runoff marked a turning point in the voting trends of the Black Belt.  Judging from the results of previous elections, most especially those previously mentioned, Wallace, as the more conservative candidate, could have expected to win handily in the Black Belt.  However it was Albert Brewer, the progressive nominee who refused to play the race card to the “Wallace Extreme,” who took the votes from this region of the state.  Simply stated, the case was such that contrary to the patterns of previous two-candidate primaries, here the more progressive candidate won the Black Belt, formerly a bastion of conservative strength. It was all precipitated by the fallout from the Civil Rights movement; as Gerald Webster observes, the increases in Negro voter registration were “responsible for the more complicated [voting] patterns in the Alabama Black Belt” (387).  The results of the 1970 primary runoff are markedly similar to those of general election contests in Alabama’s two-party era, a correlation that bears further description.

The Gubernatorial Election of 1982 provided what was then a rarity for Alabama: a two-party race.  Indeed, the GOP had taken great strides in the state in previous elections, the most visible example of which was Jeremiah Denton’s victory in a 1980 race for a United States Senate seat (Lamis 88) .  Earl Black of Rice University offers a partial explanation for this shift to a two-party state in his paper “The Newest Southern Politics.”  He writes that “in time a new southern politics emerged in which blacks joined whites as full-fledged participants, overt segregation rhetoric dissipated, and the Democratic Party's dominance gradually gave way to a more competitive two-party politics” (592).  In essence, African-Americans and progressive whites now were the electorate of the Alabama Democratic Party, with its GOP counterpart being comprised of the conservative former Democrats and the existing Republican voters.

Following an administration said to be the epitome of “’disorganization and indecision,’” then-Governor Fob James (at that time a Democrat) decided not to seek re-election in 1982 (Webster 379).  The absence of a Democratic incumbent saw a number of candidates to seek the party’s nomination for the office.  One of them was George Wallace, making his bid to once again return to the Governor’s Mansion.  He easily captured the Democratic Gubernatorial nomination in a relatively non-competitive runoff.  However, for the first time in his career, Wallace faced a serious Republican opponent in the General Election (Lamis 88).  This being the state of affairs, the presence of a Republican challenger whose ideology was decidedly conservative cast Wallace, the old states’ rights hawk and former segregationist, in a role that he had not portrayed since 1958: that of the progressive candidate.

The first competitive general election since Reconstruction  saw Wallace pitted against Emory Folmar, the mayor of Montgomery.  True to 1970 form, the Black Belt counties cast their votes overwhelmingly for the more progressive candidate, ironically personified this time by George Wallace.  He carried all but two Black Belt counties, the only dissenters being Montgomery County, which can be attributed to Folmar’s being the capital’s Mayor (Key’s “friends and neighbors effect” at work once again), and Lee County.  With the 1982 election, the transformation of the Black Belt’s voting patterns begun in 1970 is clearly seen: no longer a strong conservative region of the state, it had shifted instead into a reliable backer of progressivism – i.e., for Democratic candidates in the two-party era.

The 1986 and 1990 Gubernatorial races further demonstrate the altered patterns of the Black Belt in the two-party era.  Governor Wallace was not a candidate for re-election in 1986, stating that he had climbed his “last political mountain” (Lesher 498).  His final retirement left the 1986 gubernatorial race wide open.  Although this campaign saw the first Republican to be elected governor since Reconstruction, the mitigating circumstances surrounding it warrant examination.  Guy Hunt was originally to be the Republican “sacrificial lamb” nominee, and the Democratic primary came down to a runoff election between Charles Graddick and Bill Baxley, then the Lieutenant Governor (Stovall et. al 262).  Although official election returns showed Graddick winning by a narrow margin, Baxley challenged the results and was eventually named the nominee shortly before the general election.  In the words of Harold W. Stanley, the Democrats in essence “self-destructed and Hunt was the beneficiary” (77).  Despite the manner in which Baxley received the nomination, and that he ultimately lost to the Republican Hunt, he nonetheless managed to win thirteen of the twenty Black Belt counties.  Moreover, in four of the seven counties that Baxley did not carry, he lost by rather close margins: in Clarke County, the vote was 4968-4283; 3838-3658 in Butler; 36144-34520 in Montgomery, and 4856-4156 in Pike.  It is logical to draw the conclusion that the split in the Democratic Party accounted for the success, meager though it was, for Hunt in the Black Belt.  This would not be the case four years later when a united Democratic Party nominated Paul Hubbert to take on the incumbent Guy Hunt in the 1990 Governor’s Race.  Hubbert, who defeated then-Attorney General Don Siegelman in the primary race, lost narrowly to Hunt yet won overwhelmingly in the Black Belt region.  Still, Governor Hunt was unable to duplicate his limited success in the Black Belt in 1986, this time only managing to carry three of them (Pike, Elmore, and Autagua) rather than seven.

As was the case in 1986, the 1994 race for the Governor's Mansion saw the Democratic nominee running with a stigma attached to his candidacy.  With Governor Hunt’s removal from office in 1993 for alleged ethics violations concerning the illegal usage of funds, James E. Folsom Jr., the Democratic Lieutenant Governor, ascended to the office.  Despite his status as the incumbent in 1994, Folsom nevertheless had to deal with questions of scandal within his administration.  More specifically,

a number of issues and events had raised questions about Folsom’s ethics…questions had been raised about whether Folsom had received free work and material on his home, had arranged a job for his wife and had taken cash from a state senator seeking a choice committee assignment (Stovall et. al 292)

 Governor James was opposed in his 1998 re-election bid by Democrat Don Siegelman, then the state’s Lieutenant Governor.  James was resoundingly defeated in that effort, as Alabama voters put “a more professional man” in the Governor’s mansion (DeMonia 1B+).  Siegelman’s main campaign issue was a state lottery, the proceeds for which would go to fund the state's dilapidated system of education.  In light of these proposals, James went to great pains to paint Siegelman as dangerously progressive, calling him a “tax-and-spend liberal who will tell [the Alabama people] anything to become governor” (Orndorff 11A).  The governor even went so far as to enlist the aid of 1996 Republican Presidential nominee Bob Dole, who urged Alabama voters “not to elect ‘another Bill Clinton’ as governor of the state of Alabama” (Orndorff 1B).  James and Dole likely intended such statements as invectives, but to voters of the Black Belt they were encouragement.  This is seen in the fact that on his way to a landslide victory statewide, Siegelman nearly swept the Black Belt counties, winning all but two .  The Birmingham News on the day after election points out this facet of the campaign quite well:  “Republican efforts to associate Don Siegelman with President Clinton’s pot-smoking, anti-war background…failed to resonate with voters” (Sznaiderman 1A+).  The 1998 general election compares to the 1946 Democratic Primary in that they are polar opposites in two eras of Alabama politics; that is, the age of the two-party state as opposed to the one-party factional state.

The distinctiveness of the political process is by no means unique to the State of Alabama.  Southern politics has fascinated political scientists practically since its inception.  From V. O. Key to Charles Bullock III and beyond, this unique facet of southern culture has attracted some of the finest minds in the discipline.  The voting patterns of Alabama’s Black Belt admittedly are not the most flamboyant nor the most controversial issue at hand in the world of modern political research.  Still, knowledge and understanding of the transformation of the Black Belt’s voting patterns leads one into many areas of academia, including history, the sociological study of race relations, political realignment, and the like.  Of great importance is the understanding of the modern political process afforded by such a study.  The examination of the patterns of the Black Belt in statewide elections shows that for a Republican to win office, he or she ignores the Black Belt at his or her own peril.  That is, the region leans so traditionally Democratic that to simply cede the area to the opposition party starts off a GOP candidate with a distinct handicap.  This knowledge is invaluable in understanding the dynamics of party competition in 21st Century Alabama.

In order to understand fully the Alabama of today, one must closely re-examine the Alabama of yesterday.  Thus, the basic elements of the electoral shift in the Black Belt bear recapitulation.  No longer the domain of V. O. Key’s conservative “Big Mules” and wealthy planters, the modern Black Belt is a bastion of populism and progressivism.  The one-party Alabama during the age of Big Jim Folsom was one of conflicting factions, the lines being drawn on a progressive-conservative scale that is comparable to the two-party, Democratic-Republican Alabama of the Little Jim Folsom era and the present day.  Until roughly 1970 the Black Belt supported the conservative faction of the Democratic Party over its more progressive rival.  Afterward, it continued to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but it was for the unified, modern party of progressivism over its more conservative rival, the Republican Party.

In essence there have really been two Black Belts, and they supported two very different types of people – many of whom have gone on to become the occupants of the most coveted office on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery – the Governors of the State of Alabama.  President John F. Kennedy, a man bred far away from the Black Belt and Alabama yet whose destiny would involve him in the affairs of each, once commented, “Change is the law of life.  And those who look only to the past and to the present are certain to miss the future.”  Given the robust changes in voting patterns of Alabama’s Black Belt in only the previous half century, it can therefore be affirmed that if there ever were an axiom in factious world of Alabama politics, it would be the simple statement that “in Alabama politics, there are no axioms.”  More than likely, despite any future changes, this idea will continue to hold true.

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(1998): 591-613.

DeMonia, Robin.  “Siegelman acts confident in DeKalb.”  The Birmingham News.  29
Oct. 1998: 1B+.

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Secretary of State. <http://www.sos.state.al…/hersw2.cfm?focus=2trgtyear=
1994&office=Governor&trgtplace>.

Governor – 1998 Election:  Historical Election Results.  11 Apr. 2001.  Alabama
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 Appendix I: Counties by Partisan Voting Tendency

(Boldface indicates Black Belt County).

Democratic
1. Washington
2. Choctaw
3. Sumter
4. Greene
5. Hale
6. Perry
7. Dallas
8. Wilcox
9. Lowndes
10. Conecuh
11. Macon
12. Bullock
13. Russell
14. Jackson
15. Lawrence
16. Colbert

Republican
1. Madison
2. Morgan
3. Winston
4. Cullman
5. Blount
6. St. Clair
7. Shelby
8. Autauga
9. Elmore
10. Lee
11. Mobile
12. Baldwin
13. Covington
14. Coffee
15. Dale
16. Geneva
17. Houston

All other counties are identified as Swing Counties.

Source:  Stovall, James Glenn, Partrick R. Cotter, and Samuel H. Fisher III.  Alabama
Political Almanac.  Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.  pp. 257.