This struggling community of red dirt roads and rusty house trailers knows the value of political representation. Just ask residents like 78-year-old William Blount.
For about as long as he can remember, Blount wheeled a rickety wooden cart down to the First Baptist Church, where he filled jugs with water and hauled them back to his tarpaper-covered house.
Others had to do the same thing because Keysville didn’t offer them any services, not even something as basic as water.
For more than 50 years, people in this impoverished rural town were powerless to improve their basic services because they also were denied one of the most fundamental rights of all: They couldn’t vote for local leaders who might make a difference. In the 1930s, the town’s white officials had dissolved the municipal government and stopped holding elections.
“They wanted to control the power,” said Emma Gresham, 71, a former schoolteacher who, like other local blacks, decided to do something about it.
In 1988, after a long political and legal battle to reactivate Keysville, Gresham was elected mayor. Since then, empowerment at the local level has brought dramatic changes to Keysville. One of the first was a towering water tank, emblazoned “Keysville: Where Everybody is Somebody.”
“It has been good,” said Blount, bent over the cane he must now use to get around. “Real good.”
The right to vote for city leaders and have blacks in elected offices long has been a cornerstone of the civil rights movement.
But the debate over political representation has moved beyond the unpaved streets and broken-down trailers of Keysville to the mansions of Augusta and beyond.
Because of its painful history, Keysville illuminates a much larger debate going on across the country: Can whites adequately serve the interests of blacks, or should government step in to see that black officials represent black voters?
Voting rights is a complex and volatile issue that touches on other such highly charged questions as whether white voters would elect a black candidate. At its core, the controversy addresses just how far the government should go to ensure that minorities can be elected to office. Is it necessary–or wise–to create meandering legislative districts that are predominantly black solely to get blacks elected?
The debate stirred intense feelings in Keysville and across the country last year, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the town was part of a sprawling 11th District that violated the Constitution.
The 260-mile long district was called “Sherman’s March” because it stretched from Atlanta to the sea, through Augusta and Keysville to the genteel South of azaleas and Spanish moss in Savannah.
The aim was to create a district that was solidly black so that voters could, therefore, elect a black candidate to Congress. The redistricting achieved its purpose. Voters in 1992 and 1994 elected Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who became the first black member of Congress from the Keysville area since Reconstruction.
To people in Keysville, McKinney’s election meant they finally had a leader who would understand their problems. The battles over local representation had convinced many here that only a black person could truly represent their needs.
In the early 1980s, sections of this small southeastern Georgia town, which is 80 percent black, literally were falling apart, largely because of the lack of services. With civil rights veteran Herman Lodge, a county commissioner from nearby Waynesboro, urging them on, several black residents vowed to reincorporate their city and elect someone who would do something to improve it.
Whites fought the proposal bitterly in court. Living in unassuming ranch homes with nice green yards, they were able to pay for private wells and other services. They said they liked the community as it was and that re-establishing a municipal government would raise taxes.
After several court battles, blacks prevailed in 1988.
Now a new city hall, in a double-wide trailer, provides a library, education programs and health clinics. Down the road, there’s a city dump. Officials are working to install a new sewer system, which should be available in two years and erase the foul smell of sewage that sometimes permeates the tiny community of 415. They’re planning to pave streets and erect street lights and hope to soon start construction on a Human Resources Center to offer high school equivalency courses and programs for senior citizens.
“It has done made a whole lot of difference,” said Shawana Jackson, 26, sitting in front of the house trailer she grew up in, as her two children played in the front yard of red packed dirt. “Toting them buckets of water–it was heavy. And if we run out, we have to go get some more or either wait until it rains to get it.”
But the improvements can’t erase all the bitterness. Many blacks still resent the whites who resisted change for so long, and they note that only after blacks took office did their lives improve.
“It was sad. All these people said you ain’t going to get nothing,” said Gresham, who commands authority like the elementary school teacher she once was. “They didn’t believe being a city government would make them accessible to state moneys.”
In Gresham’s view, whites simply lacked sensitivity to the needs of blacks. What’s more, she and others said, some blacks find it more difficult to convey their problems to whites in power.
“If I were a Japanese person and I wanted someone to know my real problems, would I go to a black person to help understand my problems?” asked Gresham, who then answered her own question with a “no.”
Increased representation long has been a major focus of black leaders, who have been immersed in voting rights issues since the 1950s when the civil rights movement focused on voter participation, then registration after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Now, at a time when the searing image of burning black churches has refocused national attention on the South a generation after the civil rights era, some blacks in the region believe those gains are being threatened.
“The Voting Rights Act gave us a chance to come to the table and say, `Consider us,’ ” said Selwyn Carter, who directs voting rights programs at the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta. “Without question, there’s now clearly an attempt to repeal the civil rights revolution.”
Last summer and in rulings this June, the U.S. Supreme Court sharply limited just how far government can go in ensuring that minorities get elected to Congress.
The Supreme Court rulings come as a record number of minorities are in Congress because of special districts drawn to encompass as many minorities as possible. Real gains came in the early 1990s, when African-Americans joined with the Republican-directed Justice Department to urge states to draw majority-black districts.
In 1990, five blacks from the South were in the House. After the 1992 elections, that number increased to 17. The changes were particularly pronounced in Georgia, which created three special districts and sent three blacks to the Congress. The state now has one minority district, but that does not include Keysville, which will be represented by a white man after the November elections. Blacks in Keysville are disappointed.
“There are commonalities that we have with Cynthia McKinney because she happens to be the same color and look like us,” Gresham said. “The way she dresses, the way she wears her hair gives us a sense of `yes, I can talk to her. Yes, she’ll understand me.’ “
The previous white representatives “weren’t bad,” said Lodge, who is a commissioner in Burke County. But McKinney, he said, “would go get things for black folks.”
By all accounts, she did. She attended a parade through the little town and toured its city hall. She helped the area become part of an empowerment zone and to establish Keysville as a literacy community, so it could qualify for grants to fight illiteracy.
“Every child in Keysville knows Cynthia McKinney’s name,” Gresham said. “Her election gave people a pride, a hope: `If Cynthia McKinney can go to Washington, what can I do?’ That’s not prejudice. That’s racial pride.”
By comparison, Gresham and others can’t even recall the name of her white predecessor.
“We’re lost, first of all,” said Shirley Wright, a member of the citizens group that helped reactivate Keysville. “By being there, she (McKinney) gave us an opportunity to express what happened to us and is still happening. “
Indeed, the Supreme Court decisions now have civil rights activists predicting the long battle for voting rights three decades ago was all for naught. The issue, they say, is the most important one minorities face in the South.
“Unless the Supreme Court reverses its rulings of the past three years, we’re going to see a systematic erosion of African-American political representation across the South,” Carter said.
Long-time civil rights leader Rev. Joseph Lowery, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, goes even further.
“While people in white robes are burning churches in the South, people in black robes are burning our voting rights in the nation’s capital,” Lowery said, referring to the justices on the Supreme Court.
But there’s a flip side to the argument. Some, including Justice Clarence Thomas, say race-based districts do more harm than good. By concentrating minorities in one district, politicians no longer have incentives to build bridges and break down racial barriers.
What’s more, society is supposed to be colorblind, which should make the special minority districts unnecessary. Whites have elected black leaders and, some say, white leaders can ably represent black constituents.
McKinney is proof of that. She recently won the Democratic primary in her new district, the 4th, which encompasses Atlanta’s eastern suburbs and is 33 percent white.
“That was a key win for the concept that race-based representation doesn’t have to stay that way,” said Frank Williams, who directs the Boggs Rural Life Center, the headquarters for many of Keysville area’s new programs.
Civil rights leaders say that misses the point. In McKinney’s case, they insist that her victory is a testament more to the power of the incumbency than proof that voters are colorblind when they enter the voting booth.
Further, they caution reading too much into the victories of African-American Reps. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and Gary Franks of Connecticut, both of whom won in predominantly white districts.
“Are they saying only African-Americans who are the candidates of choice of white voters have a right to hold office?” Carter asked. “What about black voters?”
That’s one reason the court’s rulings strike many blacks as unfair, particularly in places like Keysville. To them, the court essentially has said that elections are the one area where race cannot be a major factor.
“Race is a factor in everything. I don’t care how you cut it,” Lodge said. “I go to the bank to borrow money, and they consider race. I can’t go out to the Waynesboro Country Club, I can’t join the Rotary Club because of race. Just always remember: Race is always, color is always–it’s always the No. 1 thing.”
