This month, Fayette County’s school board and board of commissioners voted — albeit reluctantly — to stand down in a long-running legal fight to keep at-large elections.
Fayette was the latest county embroiled in a civil rights lawsuit meant to expand black residents’ chances of electing one of their own.
More than 22 percent of Fayette’s 110,000 residents are black — twice that of 2000. But the lawsuit alleged it was impossible to elect a black candidate to either of the two boards named above. The compromise created geographical voting districts, which caused many whites, and a few blacks, to grumble they are the ones being disenfranchised because they can’t vote in all races.
Black citizens getting shut out in electoral matters is an old tune. But in Fayette, a well-heeled county where airline pilots like to live and people commute in golf carts, some of the old racial mores carry a twist. Black residents, who mostly live in the north end, have an annual family income $7,000 higher than whites, according to the Census. The Republican chair is black, the Democratic chief is white.
So, I visited Fayette and interviewed four leaders who have had a hand in this saga through the years. All have fascinating back stories. They are:
— County Commissioner Steve Brown, a gushingly enthusiastic conservative who supported fighting the suit to the bitter end, losing in a 3-2 vote to settle. Brown, who is white, was once a “dues paying” member of the NAACP and is married to a black woman. “We’re at that transitional stage now,” he said of Fayette. “It’s a fascinating tale of where we are now and where we are going.”
— Fayetteville Mayor Ed Johnson is the first black resident in the county to win an electoral seat from scratch (a black man earlier was appointed magistrate and later won). Johnson, a pastor and former NAACP president, won a council seat in 2011 with tea party help and beat the incumbent mayor last year.
— John E. Jones, an airline pilot who heads the local NAACP, was point man for the lawsuit filed in 2011. Jones, who does a pretty good rendition of Martin Luther King Jr. at gatherings, sometimes worries the copyright-crazy King family might come looking for him.
— County Commissioner David Barlow evoked “the almighty name of Jesus” at a meeting while going off on “liberal demon-crats” as newly elected Pota Coston, the commission’s first black member and a Democrat, sat nearby. Despite the odd welcome, the two became close friends and board allies and voted together to oust Brown as board chairman.
I visited Brown at the county office and realized it would be dangerous to sit next to him because of his constantly waving hands.
Brown, the former mayor of Georgia’s golf cart capital, Peachtree City, said those pushing the lawsuit were waging another era’s fight.
The Voting Rights Act was 50 years ago. “How is that relevant to today?” he asked. “Back then you couldn’t vote. Now (black county residents) have a higher average income than whites and tremendous access. The civil rights era was about inclusion — integrating schools and neighborhoods. Now we are in an era of self-segregation.”
He often asks black residents, “You can live anywhere you want, why do you live where you are?”
“To a person they say, ‘I want to live in a subdivision where people are like me,’” Brown said. “But if you self-segregate and then blame the other side for not supporting you, then I don’t buy that argument.”
The county capitulated in the case, he said, because his colleagues worried federal judge Timothy Batten after a trial would jam through district voting. Batten, in earlier rulings, created the district that allowed Coston’s election. She died last year after months in office.
Residents here, probably most, say they like at-large voting because it lets them elect all five commissioners and school board members.
Brown argues Johnson’s election last fall as Fayetteville mayor shows white voters will overlook race. The city (which was not included in the lawsuit) has a population that’s 34 percent black.
I visited Johnson at City Hall. Sitting in his mayor’s office, the retired naval commander answers questions like he’s being deposed.
Johnson came here 22 years ago because of the superior schools and soon headed the local NAACP. But he left his leadership post a decade ago after his counterparts started talking lawsuit. At the time, a white guy who ran a transmission shop beat four black candidates, including a conservative Republican.
Johnson calls himself a conservative Democrat and was disappointed no black candidate won. Still, “I thought we could sit down and discuss it and compromise” rather than sue.
“We just didn’t give it a chance. Both sides got stuck in their positions. It began to polarize the Fayette community along political lines, as well as racial.”
Jones, who followed Johnson at the NAACP’s helm, said compromise never would have occurred without the lawsuit.
NAACP members tried to reason with commissioners about getting district voting, Jones said, “but they looked at us like we were fools.”
Other counties were having black majorities and that stiffened the opposition to district, he said.
“They say with black people comes mass transit, crime and lower property values. Do you really think we’d want to do something that would ruin our standard of living?
“I don’t want white people to leave because of me,” Jones said. “I want people to know that. But if we’re not at the table, they won’t know that.”
David Barlow, a relative newcomer, moved from Mississippi because his daughter lives nearby. He adamantly opposed district voting but was a swing vote in the settlement. The county was fighting a costly, uphill battle that cost Fayette $800,000. And it will cost the school board and commission another $225,000 to offset some of the NAACP’s legal costs.
Barlow’s start in politics is classic: He got mad at a commissioner he deemed arrogant.
“Tip O’Neill said all politics are local. I say all politics are personal.”
They are that.
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