
          Taking the Fifth
          By Davis, MarilynMarilyn Davis and Willingham,  AlexAlex Willingham
          Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 7-9
          
          Two election contests have drawn much attention to Georgia this
year: a race crucial in determining the party alignment in the US
Senate, and a struggle between long-time allies that will send a
strong and articulate black Southerner to Congress. Indeed, the Senate
campaign helped prompt the congressional one.
          The race for the House seat took place in Georgia's Fifth District,
centered in Atlanta. Georgia, and the nation, have become accustomed
to the special nature of the state's Fifth District, since mid-century
one of the South's most volatile and visible political
theatres. During the last forty years, the Fifth has sent Georgia's
first woman to Congress, followed her with an arch-segregationist,
later with Andrew Young, and most recently, white liberal Wyche
Fowler.
          This year Fowler left his congressional job and won the Democratic
Party's nomination for the US Senate. In making the run for the
Senate, Fowler is testing whether a record built in his old district,
composed entirely of urban voters and a majority-black_population, can
sit well with the citizens in rural, whiter and more conservative
areas of the state. Some answers were provided in the August 12th
primary. Fowler captured the Democratic party nomination against
leading contender Hamilton Jordan (once of the Carter White_House
staff) without a runoff. Now, in one of the country's most important
campaigns, Fowler faces Reaganite incumbent Mack Mattingly this
fall.
          With Fowler gone, the action in the Fifth's Democratic primary
turned upon the rivalry of two civil_rights veterans: Georgia state
aerator Julian Bond and Atlanta city councilmember John Lewis (both
age 46). Lewis was to eventually win the nomination in a
come-from-behind upset decided in the run-off primary on September
2.
          The Fifth District has a black_population of sixty-five percent
(the black voting age population is sixty percent). Bond and Lewis
were hoping to become just the third black among the 138 members now
serving in the US House from the eleven Southern_states (blacks make
up twenty percent of the population of the South).
          Lewis, son of an Alabama sharecropper, was a leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. At the 1963
March on Washington where Martin_Luther_King, Jr. made his "I Have a
Dream" speech, Lewis received national attention when march organizers
demanded that he censor and tone down his own public remarks. Two
years later, he was one of the main targets of police attacks at the
Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma to Montgomery March.
          Lewis later directed the Southern_Regional_Council's Voter
Education Project. His first attempt at public office came in 1977
when he made an unsuccessful attempt to win the congressional seat. He
was appointed head of the federal Action agency in the Carter
Administration. In 1981, he won election to the Atlanta city council
and became a chief advocate of ethics in government. In 1985 he was
reelected over token opposition.
          Bond is also a former SNCC leader (he was communications director),
active in voter education. He is one of three children of Horace Mann
Bond, the renowned educator and historian. In 1966, after being
elected to the Georgia General_Assembly, Bond was denied his seat when
he stood firm in support of SNCC's anti-Vietnam War policy
statement. He was able to join the state legislature only after a
legal battle which drew international attention and support.
          Although still too young to accept the office, at the 1968
Democratic Convention in Chicago Bond's name was placed in nomination
as the party's vice-presidential candidate. Bond has been widely
sought as a gifted public speaker, particularly on college
campuses. He once hosted NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
          The contest between Bond and Lewis meant that Georgia would send to
Congress a civil_rights activist with strong credentials appropriate
for a congressional district that has struggled for decades with the
declining traditional symbols and the new and complex strains emerging
in contemporary Southern politics.
          The beginning of that struggle may be dated from a special election
held in February of 1946, when Fifth District voters sent Helen
Douglas Mankin, Georgia's first woman to Congress to fill the
unexpired term of the recently resigned veteran Representative Robert
Ramspeck. That year's special election marked the first time Atlanta's
black_voters had been allowed to participate in a congressional
election since 1929. Their participation had been prohibited by the
White Primary system under which voting in the nominating elections
conducted by the Democratic party was limited to white
citizens. Democratic nomination amounted to victory.
          When the time came for Mankin to run again, in the regularly
scheduled primary election of 1946, blacks gave her strong
support. She received an overwhelming vote in the Ashby Street
precinct that was to become a bellwether of black political
participation in Atlanta.
          Representative Mankin's tenure was short. She won a popular
majority in the regular primary, but was denied the nomination when
Democratic party leaders decided to make a "special exception" and
apply the rules of the county unit system--another of Georgia's
traditional disfranchising devices.
          The ultimate victor that year was James C. Davis, ally of the
openly racist Eugene Talmadge whose faction then controlled the
Democratic party and whose views could not have been more in contrast
to those of the majority of the Fifth's population.
          The county unit system insured the continued renomination and
reelection of Davis, although he drew consistent opposition and, in
1952, again lost the popular vote. Blacks always opposed Davis and his
segregationist views. In 1954, Morris Abrams, then flying the banner
of Southern liberalism, lost a party 

nomination to Davis. Abrams
received ninety-four percent of the vote at that Ashby street
box. When the county unit system was declared invalid in a 1962
Supreme_Court decision, Davis did not seek reelection.
          In the following years, the Fifth was to elect a white Democrat,
Charles Weltner, who would be one of the few Southerners to vote for
civil_rights legislation, and who resigned his seat rather than run on
a ticket with an avowed segregationist. Weltner was replaced in 1966
by one of the region's first Republicans Fletcher Thompson.
          In 1972, after an attempted gerrymander by the Georgia legislature,
the white majority district elected Andrew Young as the state's first
black congressman. Young was known as a close associate of Martin
Luther King, Jr. He then worked as director of the Atlanta Community
Relations Commission--a position that afforded him wide contact among
the district's voters and established his reputation as a
mediator. During Young's years of campaigning for Congress, he enjoyed
wide bi-racial voting support. He received a critical fourth of the
white vote in that first winning election and increasingly larger
proportions in his reelection efforts.
          Young served until 1977 when he accepted an appointment by
President Carter to head the US delegation to the United Nations.
          Despite the growing black_population in the Atlanta area, the Fifth
District remained majority white. Boundary lines were drawn in such a
way as to split the black_voters among three congressional
districts. During the 1980 reapportionment, an attempt was made to
redraw the lines. The Georgia legislature refused, but was eventually
forced, to improve matters when a federal_court held the districts to
be discriminatory. New lines were drawn creating a majority black
population in the Fifth District in 1982.
          The Fifth elected, after Young, Wyche Fowler, a white who shared
the moderate views of Atlanta's black middle_class. Fowler served and
won reelection as the racial make-up of the district was reversed.
          The idea of a white representing a black majority seemed to suit
the fancy of a district where a black had represented a white
majority. Black leaders praised Fowler's voting record and his
attention to serving constituents. He was adept at campaigning within
the black_community. During the Reagan drive to dismantle social
programs targeted to urban and minority citizens, Fowler was a
dependable opponent.
          The arrangement became uncomfortable, however, as potential rivals
began to insist that the district select a black representative. In
1984, SCLC activist Hosea Williams and three other blacks challenged
Fowler, who nevertheless won handily. This year, perhaps seeing the
writing on the wall, as well as an opportunity to challenge the
freshman Mattingly, Fowler chose to make his move for the Senate.
          Although ten candidates entered the contest when Fowler decided not
to seek the congressional seat, the Fifth was really Bond's to win or
lose.
          National celebrities and politicians--including Rosa Parks and New
York mayor Ed Koch--came into the district to campaign, most of them
supporting Bond. Former New_York Representative Shirley Chisholm, 

now
head of the National Black Women's Political Congress, came to endorse
Jan Douglass, one of five women candidates.
          The August primary in the Fifth developed within a broad consensus
on issues among the candidateds. Most opposed intervention in Central
America and supported effective sanctions against apartheid in South
Africa. On the whole, the candidates were sharply critical of the
Reagan effort to cirpple domestic programs, curtail civil liberties,
bloat the military, and politicize the government's civil_rights
agencies.
          Bond's frontrunner status was taken for granted both by the other
candidates and the news media. He was the leading fundraiser among the
group and enjoyed wide recognition in the opinion polls. Consequently
he became the target of "negative advertising" by opponents who
perceived him as vulnerable among white voters.
          Specially-targeted radio spots said Bond would promote racial
division, an allegation based on speeches in Bond's 1972 A Time
to Speak, A Time to Act, a book which responded to the growing
racial and socioeconomic differences between the inner city and the
suburbs. Other radio spots claimed Bond to be delinquent in his
federal tax payments. No taxes are currently in arrears but in recent
years, the allegation said, some had been.
          Such charges exploited a stereotype of Bond as a media personality,
ineffective, disorganized, and lazy.
          Bond's defenders argued that his persona and glamour were further
reasons to commend him to voters. They pointed, also, to his twenty
years of perseverance in the Georgia legislature which should be seen,
they said, in relation to the hostility he encountered. A
conservative, white, "old boy," leadership not only despised Bond's
presence but often used its powers spitefully to limit his access. A
loyal constituency repeatedly resumed Bond to office.
          An opposite image from that of the flashy, glib, Bond dogged John
Lewis, a man whom the editors of Time once called a
saint. In this year's campaign he enjoyed the endorsement of the
Atlanta Constitution (as he did in 1977). Yet in '77
(and again in '86,) there were questions about whether he is dynamic
enough to give effective representation.
          Lewis' defenders pointed to a personal history marked by hard work,
sacrifice and principled dissent. They say his persistent advocacy of
ethics in government while on the Atlanta City Council illustrates his
best quality, integrity. Lewis's ethics proposals walked with leaden
feet among some of his colleagues (four of the current council members
have had brushes with the law), but he has pursued this knotty and
sensitive issue with characteristic courage.
          Some Atlanta voters, wondering at what spot the ethical footsteps
might trespass across the threshold of civil liberties were startled
when, in the strained final days of the first primary campaign, drug
testing was made an issue. Lewis and several others volunteered to
undertake drug testing at a local hospital. Bond refused. The action
set the tone for a Run-off campaign marked by considerably sharper
controversy. Lewis hammered away at the drug theme manipulating it,
and other conservative domestic and foreign issues as a strategy to
appeal to white voters.
          On the eve of the August 12 primary, Bond hoped to win outright. A
day later he received forty-seven percent of the vote to Lewis'
thirty-six percent (double what was granted to him in the pre-election
polls) forcing the September 2 runoff.
          Despite his failure to avoid a run-off, Bond demonstrated strong
vote getting power. Of the 242 precincts in the district, Bond carried
over seventy perecent on August 12. He outpolled Lewis in the black
precincts (getting as high as seventy percent of the vote and
averaging sixty-one percent), but came in third overall in the white
precincts. Bond also won a majority of the precincts (sixty percent)
in the run- off.
          In August and again on September 2, Bond won low_income black
precincts by comfortable majorities. The crucial difference in the
election was the refusal of whites to vote for Bond in appreciable
numbers. Upper income whites, were especially reluctant to vote for
Bond. Precincts of affluent whites rarely gave him more than ten
percent of the vote. The extraordinary majorities Lewis enjoyed among
white voters furnished the key surprise in the voting and poses a new
set of questions about the quality of politics to be expected in a
district with such contradictory voter preferences between the
affluent white minority and the low_income, inner city black
majority.
          Only seventy-thousand voters (twenty-nine percent of the 230,000
registered) came out for the August 12 primary--about the same number
as voted in the September runoff. The small voter turnout is a
striking irony given the roles these two men have played in voter
registration.
          Even in the Fifth District, black_voters continue to suffer special
disadvantages in the political process, the results of a legacy of
underparticipation, of continuing disparities in social and economic
opportunities, and of growing doubts about the capacity of political
leadership. Despite fifteen years of black progress in office holding,
voter_registration among Atlanta blacks reaches only about half its
potential.
          The 1980 census shows that in Fulton County (a major part of the
Fifth District) less than half of black youth live in two-parent
homes. In black, female-headed households with children, the median
annual income is $6,000, less than half that of similarly situated
whites. The county's $25,000 median income for white families is twice
that of black families. One census tract in a black_community in the
Fifth District shows the median family income at $2,900. By contrast,
the highest median family income in the Fifth ($53,000) is in a white
neighborhood.
          No single election will change these disparities and
inequalities. They are a reminder of the challenge facing the Fifth
District. The competition between Bond and Lewis has been
uncomfortable for those who see them as pure symbols of the movement
years. The campaign has created definite expectations--and hope
--about the future. Despite the near-reverence for both men, it is
only realistic to admit that the problems that face the Fifth and the
country are much more resistant to symbolic and even electoral change
than they seemed in the days of Movement victories.
          
            Marilyn Davis teaches political science at Spelman
College in Atlanta. Alex Willingham is research associate at the
Southern_Regional_Council and a contributing editor of Southern
Changes.
          
        
