INSIDE MISSISSIPPI TRANSCRIPT
What would Dr King and Abraham Lincoln have to say about the fact that next week there's a very real possibility that a black man will be elected president of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth. But the politics of that are actually very tricky. Will enough white Americans ultimatly vote for a black man? And that said, do Afro-Americans think that Barack Obama is black enough? Here's Ginny Stein in the Deep South.
REPORTER: Ginny Stein
It's football season in America, and Jackson State University is taking on it rivals from neighbouring Alabama. JSU, as it's known, has historically been a black university. Decades after students and activists took to the streets demanding and achieving an end to segregation, here on this football field, not much has changed. Football may be a national obsession, but just as there are no white supporters here, Republican voters are equally scarce.
WOMAN 1: I'm voting for Barack Hussein Obama. I think he shows a vision for the future of the US of A. And he wants a future for everyone. And a new day for us all.
MAN 1: Obama, I look to him to be the next president of the United States and I am looking forward and I will do whatever I can to assist in that happening.
When Democratic candidate Barack Obama came to Jackson earlier this year seeking support to topple his Democractic rival, Hillary Clinton, he got it.
BARACK OBAMA: How's it going, Mississippi? I promise you, we will not just win Mississippi, we will win this general election.
But it was a victory based in part on ensuring he was never portrayed as an African-American candidate. And to such success, that some veterans of the civil rights movement asked if he was "black enough", or whether he had done his time. Andrew Young - former mayor of Atlanta, former congressman, and the United States' first African American ambassador to the UN - still won't endorse Obama, although he now says he will vote for him.
ANDREW YOUNG, FORMER ATLANTA MAYOR: I said that I would prefer Hillary Clinton, and I still would prefer Hillary Clinton. But Barack Obama's campaign was much better run. And so I think that says to me that he's perhaps better prepared to run a government. Or at least that's what the indications are.
If the Democratic Party hopes to win, it is going to have to win white votes and wrest away some southern states from the Republicans. The last time that was done was by Bill Clinton.
REPORTER: In Jackson in Mississippi, how do people traditionally vote?
PROFESSOR D’ANDRA OREY, POLITICAL SCIENCE, JACKSON UNIVERSITY: Well, they vote along racial lines. Blacks tend to vote one way, whites tend to vote another way.
Political scientist, Professor D'Andra Orey, says Barack Obama knows he must run a deracialised campaign to have any chance of winning.
PROFESSOR D’ANDRA OREY: Well, blacks are only 12.5%, if you will, of the United States population, and even lower as it relates to turnout. And so you cannot focus on racial issues because, simply put, the numbers are not great enough.
The city of Jackson is predominantly black, due in part to most whites having fled the city. But the state of Mississippi is still dominated by white voters. Gene Young is both an Obama supporter and a veteran of the civil rights era.
DOCTOR GENE YOUNG, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: This was just a big, open space and we were just on the floors and stuff, lying around in here. And there were so many of us, they couldn't incarcerate us in the actual jail facility, so they put up a makeshift facility here at the livestock compounds on the grounds of the Mississippi state fair and we were separated along the lines of gender and race.
By the age of 12, he was already a seasoned civil rights protester. Those who challenged segregationist laws that treated African-Americans as second-class citizens faced arrest, violence or death. Now just two generations later, the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas is narrowly leading the polls to become the most powerful politician in the world.
DOCTOR GENE YOUNG: And in my lifetime, we talked about the possibility of one day it happening. But for this man to actually receive the nomination from an official political party, that's historic in itself.
Given the country's painful recent past, many Americans prefer not to mention the race issue. But not Charles Evers.
CHARLES EVERS: That's Bobby Kennedy. And that was the day, the night he was killed. He was coming through Watts, we'd been on tour. This was when he was running for the Senate in New York. He and I were together. And we were very close with the Kennedys.
Charles is the brother of slain activist Medgar Evers, one the civil rights movement's first martyrs. It may seem unusual, given his activist credentials, but Charles has been a long-time Republican. But John McCain won't be getting his vote.
CHARLES EVERS: I'm not switching from the party, I'm just a Republican supporting Obama, who happens to be a black qualified person. And the thing that I've fought for and my brother died for over the years to get us to this point. I'd be less than a man if my brother, my friends thought I would not support Obama.
REPORTER: If a Democrat, a white candidate, was in the job with the same qualifications as Barack Obama, would you vote for them?
CHARLES EVERS: No. I'd vote for McCain.
REPORTER: It's a matter of race?
CHARLES EVERS: Oh, yeah, with me it is. Race and qualification, with me, yes, it is.
In this most unconventional of elections, even the extreme right and white believe Barack Obama is headed for the White House, whether they like it or not. Meet Richard Barratt, a staunch supporter of segregation, and one of the country's most prominent white supremacists. Barratt met Obama when he came to Mississippi.
RICHARD BARRATT: He went to the negro college and there were only four white people in the room. I was one of them. And he came up to me and he got as far as you are away and I thought, "Oh my goodness, how am I going to do this?" So as he got this far I went... and he looked and he went that way. So no, I am not going to say I am supporting him, but we are going to use him as the agent for change.
He believes a Democratic victory will serve as a wake-up call to Americans and bring new recruits to the supremacist cause.
RICHARD BARRATT: A lot of people don't really realise he is going in, but he is going in, and when he does, then they are going to say, "What have we done?"
In modern Mississippi, such views are increasingly marginal. Getting people to vote remains the greatest challenge.
MAN 2: If you just change one mind today about voting, just imagine, you know.
The Obama campaign's priority is to sign up young people and the black community, two groups that have traditionally had low voter turnout.
JOANNA GOMEZ: These are people who are registered to vote, OK. So anybody else on this street is not registered.
PAULA BASS: Is not registered, so it's open.
JOANNA GOMEZ: So this is a good street for us to go down.
Joanna Gomez and Paula Bass are both converts to the Democratic cause. Their job today is to register people to vote. At this house, these two women have already made up their minds. While Obama's support here is strong, polls have regularly overestimated support for black candidates.
PROFESSOR D’ANDRA OREY: The argument is that a candidate, an Afro-American candidate, has to be up by at least 10% before he can actually really seriously be considered as a potential winner.
Andrew Young says while few are willing to talk about it openly, race could decide this election.
ANDREW YOUNG: If they were all the same colour, I don't think there would be any choice. I think America would be willing to move forward with the Democratic ticket.
He believes that America, the land of the brave, is being put to the test just as it was during the Freedom Ride summer almost 50 years ago.
ANDREW YOUNG: The election in many ways a referendum on how courageous we are able to be about the future. And it's a frightening future for Americans. We've never had a weak dollar, we've never not been in control of the price of oil. We have never felt that close to half of the world hates us. But I think the election of Barack Obama would change the view of America by sun-up.
Reporter/Camera
GINNY STEIN
Editors
WAYNE LOVE
MICAH MCGOWN
Producer
ASHLEY SMITH