But a year later, Davis is finding that racial prejudice is not the biggest obstacle to presiding at the Capitol where Governor George C. Wallace once proclaimed “segregation forever.’’
Among those criticizing him are Joe L. Reed, founder and longtime chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference - a black political caucus - and former Birmingham mayor Richard Arrington, who was that city’s first black mayor.
Across the South, a legitimate black candidate for governor is a rarity, but finding old-fashioned political opposition within black political ranks is not.
Ferrel Guillory, a specialist in Southern politics at the University of North Carolina, said there is a “generational cleavage’’ caused by the emergence of black leaders like Obama and Davis who are too young to have been part of the civil rights era. Those who were on the front lines of that movement want to maintain their influence.
Davis, a three-term congressman who was Obama’s campaign chairman in Alabama, is no stranger to the phenomenon. Reed and Arrington opposed him in 2002 when he recruited strong white support to beat an incumbent black congressman with a long civil rights resume, and again in 2008 when many black leaders at first supported Hillary Rodham Clinton over Obama, warning that America was not ready to elect a black president.
“There is a group of insiders in this state who benefit from protecting the status quo,’’ Davis said.
D’Linell Finley, a specialist in minority politics at Auburn University Montgomery, said some Democrats are also concerned that if Davis tops the ticket in November, some white voters will cast straight Republican tickets and doom other Democrats.
“They may have some merit,’’ Finley said.
After all, Obama received only about 10 percent of the white vote in Alabama, according to some exit polls, and did worse among white Alabama voters than John Kerry four years earlier. In modern times, no black candidate has won any statewide office in the executive branch of Alabama’s government. Only about 25 percent of the state’s registered voters are black.
