JACKSON — No doubt to the delight of the state GOP, the Mississippi Democratic Party has once again gone into a suicidal mode that threatens a return to its pre-1976 era when racially split state Dems became a non-player in national Democratic Party councils.
As state political history shows, that era saw the biggest exodus of white Mississippi Democrats to the Republican Party.
A rump group of state Democratic Executive Committee members, led by Vice-Chair Barbara Blackmon, who is black, held a special meeting on March 21 with a goal of ousting several previously chosen white leaders of the state party — a move that had classic signs of driving white Democrats out.
Removal of state Democratic Chairman Jamie Franks was in the air, but the group decided only to sack their other target, state party Director Sam Hall, and replace him with Blackmon’s hair dresser. Both Franks and Hall are white.
In a further insult, the rump group voted to restore controversial Ike Brown to the executive committee, despite a federal court finding that Brown violated the Voting Rights Act by intimidating white voters as a Noxubee County party official.
Franks immediately disavowed the rump meeting and its actions. Then, a week later he convened a session of the administrative committee to formally put Hall back on the payroll as the state party director. At the same time, the committee hired Christopher Smith, who is black, as the party’s field man. Smith gained creds last year working in the successful campaign of 1st District Democratic U.S. Rep. Travis Childers.
Formerly a Northeast Mississippi state legislator, Franks, now a Tupelo lawyer, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 2007. Hall, a former weekly newspaper editor, managed the successful 2008 campaign of Jim Kitchens in unseating state Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Smith. Before going on the Supreme Court, Smith had been a Republican activist in Rankin County.
Franks attributed the rump session to a “small faction” on the committee that, for whatever reason, “didn’t want Sam Hall, or me for that matter.” Later, Franks said, “we hope we’ve gotten the party straightened out.” Still, he announced that a meeting of the full 80-member executive committee will be held April 4.
Many Mississippi Democrats had high hopes that the election on Nov. 4 of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president would bring new energy for a resurgence of the state Democratic Party, after years of seeing the state trending Republican.
When the 1965 Voting Rights Act enfranchised thousands of black voters in Mississippi, they flocked to the Democratic Party as the party of their heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. They became the backbone of the state party, but for a decade the party ranks were riven by a racial split.
In a historic reconciliation, the division between the black-white wings of the state party was healed in 1976 when they united behind Jimmy Carter as the party’s presidential standard-bearer at the Democratic National Convention in New York City.
Though the 1976 racial alliance has been tenuous at times over the years, it has held together. That’s why rumblings of a revolt by the Blackmon faction against Jamie Franks’ leadership of the party bears ominous signs of a new, self-destructive party split. Incredibly, it comes at a time when Republicans are leaderless at the national level and are quarreling over the voter ID issue on the state level.
Not only would it be senseless for black Democrats to threaten a new party split at a time when Democrats have the best opportunity ever to finally build a viable state party organization, but renewal of fratricidal warfare within the party could endanger rural white Democrats holding on to their critical seats in the Legislature. Right now, those 25 or so Democratic lawmakers are the bulwark against Republican Haley Barbour totally dominating the Legislature.
