
          Blacks to Gain Senate Seats In South_Carolina
          By Bass, JackJack Bass
          Vol. 5, No. 3, 1983, pp. 3-4
          
          After years of resistance, the all-white South_Carolina senate
voted thirty to eight in February to adopt a single-member district
reapportionment plan that virtually insures election of blacks in 1984
for the first time in almost a century. The senate-passed plan
included seven black majority districts, four of them with fifty-nine
percent or more black_population.
          "Never in our wildest dreams," editorialized The
State, South_Carolina's largest daily, "would we have imagined
that the senate could handle such a sensitive issue that affects the
political lives of each member with such dispatch."

          Because of house amendments that increased the number of majority
black_districts from seven to nine and made several other changes, the
final battle is still being fought. The issue seems headed for federal
court, but it appears certain that blacks will serve for the first
time since Bruce H. Williams of Georgetown and Thomas John Reynolds
left the senate in 1888, two decades after a dozen black senators were
elected at the beginning of Reconstruction. Blacks returned to the
South_Carolina house in 1970, where their number has now grown from
three to twenty as a result of single-member districts.
          In part, the senate action represented a response to last year's
bruising fight over congressional reapportionment. That ended with the
federal_courts permitting the splitting of county boundaries. The
implications were clear for the senate. Also, last year's lengthy
wrangle left South Carolinians disgruntled over the legislature's
failure to put its houses in order.
          In a larger sense, the senate consensus reflected a recognition of
black political power as a fact of life in South_Carolina, the result
of years of effort in registering black_voters in hundreds of
communities. The NAACP and house black caucus leaders negotiated with
and kept pressure on the senate for single member districts. They then
pushed the house to go further in increasing the number of black
majority districts.
          Whatever plan finally emerges, the most visible all-white bastion
of power in South_Carolina will fall. In 1977, the U.S. Supreme_Court
frustrated black hopes when it ruled in Morris
v. Gressette that the Justice_Department's failure to object to a
discriminatory plan was not a proper matter for the courts to
resolve. Several years later, Justice's Civil Rights Division withdrew
its support of an NAACP-backed suit after the Supreme_Court ruled in
Bolden v. City of Mobile that discriminatory
"intent" must be proved.
          In relenting before new realities, the senate's action can be
paired with South_Carolina's adoption of a higher education
desegregation plan that was approved in record time by the federal
government. A key player in both senate reapportionment and the
desegregation plan was Senator L. Marion Gressette, the eighty-one
year old patriarch of the senate. Gressette, who once chaired the
state's official school segregation committee, represents a
constituency that is forty-five percent black and that now votes. He
has become more sensitive and more accommodating. "I hope I've had
enough sense to know you're subject to change, to changing times," he
says.
          Last fall, battle lines appeared to promise an all-out fight in the
senate, whose forty-six members represent sixteen districts. The
multi-member districts all have numbered posts, which means a black
candidate must run head-on against a white opponent in at-large
elections. In 1980, black Democrat William Saunders won nomination to
a senate seat in Charleston County, but lost to a Republican in a
county-wide general election characterized by racial bloc voting.
          In last fall's preliminary skirmishing, the state NAACP insisted it
would be satisfied with nothing less than single-member
districts. "The organization is putting its reputation on the line,"
said state NAACP President William Gibson, a Greenville dentist.
          At first, Gressette had insisted that counties should not be
divided. He told a reporter that black majority districts had been
discussed since 1967, but "you can't spread thirty-one percent (black
population) over forty-six counties if you're going to keep county
lines intact." In January of this year, a Gressette-chaired
subcommittee' reported out a reapportionment plan that included
twenty-five districts, thirteen of them single-member, five with black
majorities.
          The State, whose establishment editorial voice
expressed moderation on both the desegregation plan and senate
reapportionment, responded with an editorial headlined, "Single-Member
Plan for Senate Is Best."
          The editorial stated, "A fairly drawn single-member plan that does
not dilute black voting strength is less likely to be contested in
court and is more likely to meet the requirements of the federal
Voting_Rights_Act. Let's do this one right the first time."
          Gressette didn't have the votes in the full committee or in the
senate to enact his subcommittee's plan. Hospitalized for leg surgery,
he missed the final vote but sent word that the senate should proceed
without him after the plan left his home county, Calhoun,
intact. Gressette's decision not to be an obstructionist eased passage
of the single-member reapportionment plan. In his absence, senate
leadership fell to Thomas E. Smith of Florence, generally a
progressive voice. Smith recognized that the federal_court's approval
of splitting county lines in the congressional plan "made some people
reasonable who hadn't been reasonable."
          In December, popular senator Alex Sanders of Columbia removed a
political roadblock when he announced that he would not seek
reelection and expressed hope that this would make it easier to
divide' Richland County into four single-member districts that would
insure election of a black senator. The move by Sanders, who since has
become the leading candidate for chief judge on a new state appeals
court, meant Richland could be split without pitting incumbents
against each other.
          In working out the final senate plan, Smith and others met
informally with NAACP and house black caucus leaders, who had their
own demographer. A compromise was reached which pits two incumbents
against each other and places another in a fifty-nine percent black
district. Passed in the senate, this plan went to the house where the
black caucus prevailed in getting adopted a plan that would create
nine, rather than seven, black_population majority districts. But the
house amendments radically changed the boundaries approved by the
senate--boundaries that reflected delicate political
compromise. Although black representation in the senate now seems
assured, it appears that once again the federal_courts may resolve
South_Carolina's reapportionment dispute.
          
            Jack Bass is director of American South Special Projects
at the University of South_Carolina and co-author, with Walter
DeVries, of The Transformation of Southern
Politics.
          
        
