By the primary election blacks were 51% of Macon County voters. Four black men were running for office in the May 31 run-off primary. Fred Gray, an attorney, ran for the Alabama House; Lucius Amerson, a Korean War veteran, ran for sheriff, two other black men ran for lesser county offices. Along with other SCLC staff I canvassed for all four, but I only ran into resistance to voting for Amerson. The voters I talked to expressed reservations about his qualifications.
I spent a lot of time explaining to new black voters why this black man was far more qualified than his white opponent. After many such conversations, I realized that his qualifications weren't the problem. The people I spoke with were uncomfortable with the idea of a black man in a power position. In rural Alabama counties, sheriff was one of the two power positions, (the other was Probate Judge, which was the chief county administrator). For rural blacks, sheriff was the most important elected official in the county. In 1966, blacks who had grown up with all political power being exercised by whites were uncomfortable with a black man in that powerful job.
Amerson also saw this reluctance. He later wrote that he was "more than aware that some Negroes felt the time was not right for a Negro sheriff." My canvassing taught me that even those blacks who were ready to vote didn't quite believe that a Negro should or could hold a power position like sheriff. I'm happy to report that Amerson did win that election, becoming the first black sheriff in the South since Reconstruction. But he got a thousand votes less than Fred Gray, who wasn't running for a power position.
Similar attitudes are behind the negative opinions so many people express about Hillary Rodham Clinton. She's just as trustworthy as the next politician, and more than most. She’s also just as likable, and just as honest. But the idea of a woman holding the power of the Presidency still makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. They just aren't just ready to say so.
As they did in Macon County Alabama, however, attitudes can change with exposure. In 1959, James A. Farley, former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and New York political boss, wrote an article entitled "Why We’ll Never Have a Woman President" for This Week magazine. The subhead elaborated: "One of the shrewdest political figures of our time says that despite our changing attitudes toward women in politics, we'll never put one in the White House — for three good reasons." They were: women's lack of broad, varied training in government, business or the military; women were too emotional and subjective; and military leaders wouldn't take her seriously as Commander-in-chief. Farley concluded that "most men and women wouldn't feel right or safe with a woman President today."
At the time he wrote, no woman had run for President, at least not visibly, since Victoria Woodhull and Belva Lockwood did so in the 19th Century. Yet only five years later, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith would become the first woman to seek the nomination of the Republican Party. One of her reasons for running was "to break the barrier against women being seriously considered for the presidency of the United States — to destroy any political bigotry against women on this score."
In 1972, Congresswomen Patsy Mink (HA) and Shirley Chisholm (NY) ran in several Democratic Party presidential primaries. By the time Hillary first announced her candidacy for President in January of 2008, over fifty women had run for President, both in the major party primaries and at the head of minor party tickets in the general election. Their efforts had slowly undermined Farley’s belief that "we will never have a woman President ... at least not within the lifetime of anyone reading this article."
Yet in 2015 eight percent of voters told Gallup pollsters that they would not vote for a well-qualified woman for President who was the nominee of their party. While this had dropped from the 39 percent who had said no when Farley wrote in 1959, it's not because the "political bigotry" about a female President is gone. It's just taken on a new form.
©2016 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
Editor's Note: Jo Freeman has published three books and many articles on women and politics. She is currently finishing a history and memoir of working for SCLC in 1965-66.
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