Here in the other Georgia, the Georgia of pecan groves and peanut farms and big Confederate monuments on little town squares, the Georgia in which Atlanta sometimes seems as foreign as Tokyo, a black man is doing what not so long ago was unthinkable. He is running for governor.
He has posed with the watermelon queen in Thomasville. He has marched in the St. Patrick`s Day Parade in Savannah. He has wooed his way through textile mills and quail plantations, pinning buttons on tractor caps, pasting bumper stickers on pickup trucks, treading with a diplomat`s artful step past the booby traps of racial politics. The pollsters say he just might win.
But this is what he`s up against:
”Durned if I`m going to vote for a black man for governor of Georgia,”
said Alice Snyder, an Americus woman who won`t divulge her age, which appears to be about 70. ”It`s nothing personal against him. It`s just that he`s black.”
”He`s probably one of the smartest black people around,” said Eloise McLeod, 79, of Thomasville. ”But I don`t know. He used to be mayor of Atlanta, and that downtown Atlanta, well, it`s full of blacks. That downtown`s scary.”
”There`s a lot of people who like him,” said Dan Sutton, 36, advertising manager of the Thomasville Times-Enterprise, the town`s daily newspaper, ”but when they get into the voting booth and ready to pull the lever, a lot of them`ll say, `Yeah, I`d like to vote for him, but no, he`s black.` ”
The black man they`re talking about, Andrew Young, prefers the story of the old white man in Fitzgerald. He tells it one hot lunchtime at the Gold Plate restaurant in Valdosta, a town of 32,000 in the flat, sun-baked farm fields just north of the Florida border.
About 100 people, most of them black, have pressed their sport coats, polished their high heels, and paid $7 apiece to eat fried chicken, black-eyed peas and cornbread while quizzing Young on drugs, parks, jails and jobs.
”Yesterday in Fitzgerald, an old man grabbed me on the courthouse steps,” Young tells his audience. ”He said, `I never voted for a colored before, but I`m going to vote for you-but don`t you forget the little people.` ”
Young`s voice is mellifluous and refined, Southern but not discernibly black. It dips and swells like a preacher`s without veering into those extravagant rhetorical ranges that might cause some squirming when he talks at the Kiwanis Club.
He continues. ”I said hallelujah, praise the Lord. That represents a new kind of Georgia. Not just young folks with new ideas, but some of those same old folks who have come to understand that the world didn`t come to an end when we stopped fussing and fighting over color.”
Twenty-five years ago, Andy Young stood right in the middle of that fight. He was Martin Luther King Jr.`s secretary of state, emissary to the white establishment, the handsome young preacher who in all the fury and fulminations seldom lost his cool.
When the civil rights movement shifted into low gear, of all its leaders, Young graduated most smoothly into the establishment, first as a U.S. congressman, then as ambassador to the United Nations, finally as Atlanta`s infamously globetrotting mayor, an eight-year tenure that ended in January.
Now, at the age of 58, Young wants to tack another title to his long resume. If he survives the five-man Democratic primary in July and triumphs in November`s gubernatorial election, he would follow Virginia`s Doug Wilder as only the second elected black governor in the country and would become the first in the heart of Dixie. To help him, he has hired Franklin Greer, the Washington consultant who crafted Wilder`s media image.
If he loses, he gets rich
Even Young seems surprised that his circuitous route through life has led back to the campaign trail.
”I think of myself as having been almost on a roller coaster of destiny,” he says at the end of a long day, sprawled in an armchair with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened.
There are those who say he lacks the fire in the belly for this campaign. He counters that he has commitment in his heart. Politics, he says, is his ministry. If he wins, he wins. If he loses, he`ll be relieved and get rich as an international business consultant.
”I`m in politics because I think I can lead people through the woods,
`cause I know the way,” he says. ”If they don`t want to go”-he shrugs-”
that`s tough.”
Things will be tough in these particular woods, the piney woods of small- town Georgia, and not just because he`s black.
”The thing that hurts him more than being black is being from Atlanta,” says Bill Shipp, an Atlanta political commentator.
Out in what is commonly called ”the other Georgia,” Atlanta seems part Oz, part Gomorrah, big, rich, greedy, garish, wild. And not only must Young overcome the fact that he`s from the big, bad city, he must also fend off the perception that while he was mayor there he was too busy romancing big business all over the world to stop criminals, potholes and the homeless from claiming Atlanta`s streets.
So up and down the two-lane roads Young goes, to tiny towns that other candidates reach primarily by television, courting the vote, particularly the white vote, most particularly white women under 50, whom his pollsters tell him should be his target group.
He has covered 10,000 miles since February, often driving the campaign`s blue GMC Explorer van himself. This two-day jaunt carries him to Valdosta, then west to Thomasville, a town of 10,000 people and 24,000 rose bushes where he will march in the annual rose parade. His theme song is ”I Don`t Feel No Ways Tired.”
Young has built a career on his talent for moving easily among people of all colors and classes. It says something about him, and something about the new Georgia he extols, that it is far easier to find Andy Young supporters out here than it is to find backers of Lester Maddox, the segregationist ex-governor who is running again.
Little talk of race
But even Young, with his optimistic talk of a new Georgia peopled by the likes of the old man in Fitzgerald, has to admit that this is ”hard territory.”
”These are areas where blacks and whites didn`t speak to each other,”
he says.
There are days, however, when this hard territory shows its soft side. Once, driving through a small mill town on his way to a campaign appearance, he and his staff got lost on narrow roads lined by the factory-owned houses of poor whites.
”It was really still all of the physical symbols of the old South and that made me a little nervous,” Young says. ”But when I got in the meeting, I realized there was a level of personal relationship (between blacks and whites) that really surprised me. And I got a very good response.”
In a state where only about a quarter of the voters are black, Young`s approach to whites is necessarily conciliatory.
He doesn`t talk much about race. Mostly he talks about jobs, promising to spread to the rest of Georgia the prosperity he helped sow in the business community in Atlanta.
Although he still favors legal abortion, he recently changed his stand against the death penalty, a position that plays well in towns like Waycross and Baxley. As mayor of Atlanta, he explains, he saw old women raped, children murdered, policemen shot down in cold blood. ”Maybe,” he says, ”the state does have an obligation to take mad dogs off the street.”
As his campaign manager, he hired not a city slicker but a big, gray-haired white man named Hobby Stripling, the former mayor of the small town of Vienna, pronounced with a long ”i.”
Stripling is convinced that Young has plenty of support hidden in the trailers and little wood houses of the hinterlands. Many Young supporters, he says, don`t speak out-or turn out at lunches like the one in Valdosta-because they are afraid of committing one of the gravest breaches of Southern etiquette, offending their neighbors.
”We`ve got the best closet support you`ve ever seen,” Stripling says.
`I`ll go anywhere`
Occasionally, Young`s longtime supporters feel he has gone too far in courting traditional whites. Not long ago, he visited a redneck bar in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta. The owner, in Young`s honor, temporarily removed from the juke box a couple of records that contained the word ”nigger.”
Young cheerfully showed up with two substitutes, records by Ray Charles and Hank Williams Jr.
To those who thought he should have stayed out of the bar altogether, he replied simply: ”I`ll go anywhere to talk to anybody about the future of Georgia.”
Young, the son of a prosperous New Orleans dentist, straddles racial divisions with an ease that comes from both temperament and training.
”I didn`t come into the civil rights movement out of any sense of anger or frustration,” he says. ”I lived a pretty comfortable life. I always felt like either me or my parents were in control of my life. They taught me that white people just didn`t know any better. My daddy used to say a doctor doesn`t get mad with a patient who`s sick. You have to heal them.”
Young also understands the rules of Southern protocol and abides by them. At a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Thomasville, he stands quietly next to the sweet rolls, one hand around a coffee cup, the other in the pocket of his seersucker suit, speaking when spoken to.
”Nothing seems to me to turn people off more than the politician who`s automatically shaking hands and back-slapping and kissing babies,” he says.
At the suggestion that he sometimes seems reluctant to touch whites, particularly white women, he nods tentatively.
”When I was growing up, you could get killed for that,” he says. ”I mean, literally. And maybe you don`t ever outgrow some of those cautions.”
On a Friday morning, shortly before the Thomasville rose parade, Young stops by Bethany Congregational Church, where he was a pastor 35 years ago. Some things have changed. The street is paved. The nearby school is integrated. The surrounding houses have indoor plumbing.
Businesses back away
But the two-story clapboard house where he lived with his wife still looks about the same. Standing in the shade of the moss-draped oak trees, he recalls a time when he lived in fear that the Ku Klux Klan would terrorize his home to punish him for leading voter registration drives.
He tells the story without any sign of resentment. In fact, about the only time during this trip that Young sounds even vaguely resentful is when he mentions the reluctance of Atlanta`s big businesses to contribute to his campaign.
At parade time, Young lines up with the other candidates behind a procession of floats and marching bands. For the next hour, he sprints from one side of Broad Street to the other, shaking hands with old men in lawn chairs and young men in T-shirts and flocks of ladies from Georgia`s garden clubs, running even as he mops his forehead with a handkerchief.
Not a lot are ready to commit to him. But they`re curious and courteous, on occasion even starstruck. He`s sure nice-looking, they say. He`s certainly different, they say. And more than one, with a shrug and a furtive glance, mutters, ”Better than Lester.”
