South Fall...

Watching My South Fall for Donald Trump

His popularity has revealed a dark truth about the region.

By Issac J. Bailey

The little white boy was 10 years old, maybe a few years younger. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and stood frozen next to a makeshift stage in the middle of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, as his older relatives, dressed in colorful Ku Klux Klan garb, yelled at a crowd through their bullhorns.

He didn’t want to be there and probably didn’t know why he was or why all those strange people in the crowd were calling his family members ugly names.

It was in the middle of the summer of 1990, just a short walk from Emanuel A.M.E. Church in a park where the country’s most prominent slavery proponent, John Calhoun, is honored with a three-story tall monument. The Klan was holding the rally portion of its parade after receiving a police escort in a march greeted by an interracial mob angry at the group’s audacity to remind residents of an ugly past that had faded into the background.

I can’t remember why the Klan showed up that day. Neither can I forget that little boy, who grew up immersed in a kind of hatred for his fellow man few can imagine. His image was the first that came to mind when news of Dylann Roof’s killing nine people at Emanuel in June began to spread.

The terrible irony is that the shooting actually allowed the South to claim racial progress. After the tragedy, there were no riots like there had been in Baltimore and Ferguson; the families of the nine victims forgave Roof; thousands held hands on Arthur Ravenal Jr. bridge in support of the church; the Confederate flag came down. But this year’s presidential campaign has swept that optimism away. The Republican South so far has rallied behind Donald Trump, a northerner without any of the grassroots evangelical credibility that is supposed to bind conservatives here—a candidate whose main appeal, in fact, has been coded appeals to the same hatred that drove Roof to pick up a gun.

Make no mistake, Trump’s embrace by millions of people in my region isn’t solely about economic angst. It is also about the kind of pent-up fear—made up of barely submerged racism and profound ignorance—that a reader in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, expressed to me shortly after Barack Obama’s election: “I think he’s gonna enslave us,” he said. “Look what we done to ya’ll.”

Trump was, in many ways, the optimal antidote for that fear, and the racism behind it. It was Trump who more than anyone kept “birtherism” in the mainstream through the first term of Obama’s presidency, feeding belief in the deep South that this oddly-named president was not even American. And now it is Trump who has brilliantly exploited and drawn out the racism that the civil rights movement drove underground 50 years ago, but which is now resurfacing.

All this has thoroughly removed the scales from my eyes. I grew up watching the South become more tolerant. My son will have far more opportunities here than my father did. But I now know just how deeply the region is stuck in our ugly past. I now realize that little boy I saw 26 years ago more likely than not grew up to harbor the same racial hatred his parents did. I’m not forced to sit on the back of the bus; I’m not restricted from swimming in some parts of the Atlantic. But too often, that overt progress has been used as an excuse by residents to pretend that further civil rights gains would be “giving” minorities something they don’t deserve.

Of course, the vast majority of Trump’s supporters aren’t going to follow in Roof’s footsteps and shoot up a church. But all together they can do way more damage, by standing in the way of the kind of transformational progress the region must undergo to become a “New South” in more than words. Perhaps we do have one thing to thank Trump for after all. His popularity has revealed a dark truth about the region: Even in the 21st century, white racial grievance, too often spoken of solely as economic despair, is alive and well and ready to be exploited.

He has awakened us to all that still needs to be done.

South Carolina, my native state, has always been a powerful symbol of the South’s troubled history. It was the only state in the Union in which more than half of all white households held black men and women in bondage during the height of slavery. It was the first to secede, firing the first shots in defense of slavery during the Civil War.

And so, in the wake of the Charleston church shooting that took nine lives, when no violence erupted and members of the victims’ families almost immediately forgave the young white supremacist charged in the murder, it was hailed as a great sign of racial progress.

Then the Confederate flag was taken off Statehouse grounds—a feat long considered impossible. It could have been removed only if an overwhelming majority of white Republican congressmen said so—and they did.

“The flag coming down was symbolic, but it was a very important symbol. That whole episode of the reaction in Charleston and the reaction throughout the state really was historic. And I really think what helped make it historic was the reaction of the families of Emanuel to the killer,” said Walter Edgar, maybe South Carolina’s most well-known and influential historian. “It was a proud moment in South Carolina history.”

But Trump’s rise in both South Carolina and throughout the South proves why celebrating that change—the removal of a flag that should not have been flying—was in many ways premature, if not misleading.

There’s little reason to pretend, as some are, that the anger Trump has tapped into in the South, which has propelled him to a near sweep of Southern states and to the top of Republican polls, is primarily about white Southerners’ anger about their changing economic fortunes. If that were the case, Southerners would also be embracing Bernie Sanders, another candidate seen as a political outsider running on a populist economic message.

Instead, while Sanders eagerly touts his civil rights past, Southerners—including those who long claimed the principles espoused by their conservative Christian faith influence their every decision—have picked the one presidential candidate who claimed (at first) he didn’t know enough about the Ku Klux Klan to have an opinion about it—the one candidate the Klan has said it is using as a recruiting tool.

They picked the one candidate who initially excused two white men who beat up a homeless Hispanic man, saying they were following Trump’s lead.

They picked the one candidate sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for telling employees to avoid renting property to black people.

They picked the one candidate who stoked the fires that helped lead to five young black men in New York being falsely accused and convicted in the Central Park jogger case in 1989.

They picked the one candidate who proudly said out loud what they’ve been saying throughout the entire Obama era in email chains and private discussions after Sunday morning church services: That the nation’s first black president isn’t a real American and needed to prove he belonged in a way no other president, or presidential candidate, ever had to do.

According to widely-cited exit polls and other surveys, 70 percent of Trump supporters in South Carolina wanted the Confederate flag to keep flying, compared with 31 percent of South Carolinians overall. Twenty-one percent of his voters in the state either believe whites are superior or aren’t sure; 20 percent don’t like the Emancipation Proclamation. Trump won about half the voters in the GOP primary who want undocumented immigrants immediately deported. In Arkansas and Alabama, about 80 percent of Trump voters are in favor of at least a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. Let us not forget that Mississippi, which Trump won by double digits, incorporated the Confederate flag into its state flag, and Georgia’s updated emblem, adopted in 2003, is similar to the flag for the Confederate States of America.

Yes, Trump’s coalition includes nonracists; a relative handful of black pastors; people who are just fed up and want to see major changes in Washington; those who feel disenfranchised by the emerging global economy that require skills they weren’t able to acquire, in large part because of school systems starved by a runaway disgust for government; and those fooled by Trump’s supposed high business IQ. But none of that can detract from the fact that Trump’s supporters also include white nationalist groups like the American Freedom Party and American Renaissance whether he wants them to or not. To them, Trump has come as close to sounding like former Klan wizard and Louisiana Rep. David Duke that a politician can—and still potentially win high national office. That should give pause to the millions of other Trump supporters, or would-be supporters, who are ignoring his bigotry because they are so desperate to see a political sea change.

That’s also why Edgar, who saw progress in the flag’s removal, isn’t convinced we’ve stepped into the post-racial era South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has been touting.

Neither am I. I’ve seen this rodeo before.

In 1990, I saw white people join black residents to loudly protest the Klan—but not commit to undoing deep-seated problems that have led to decadeslong racial disparities.

In South Carolina, racial progress has meant that a state holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. had to be paired with Confederate Memorial Day. It has meant that adding one African-American monument to the Statehouse grounds to honor those who fought in favor of civil rights supposedly balances out public space already dotted by remembrances and statues of the architects of Jim Crow and men who used the lynching of black people as a political tool—and bragged about it.

In June, the flag came down. But there was no promise to finally bring the “Corridor of Shame’s” mostly black and poor schools along Interstate 95 into the 21st century.

Governor Haley and Senator Lindsey Graham, after they had called for the Confederate flag to come down, didn’t initiate a true analysis of deeply entrenched racial disparities. Instead, the state patted itself on the back because there weren’t riots.

Never mind that Jamar Huggins sits in a South Carolina prison—he’s black like roughly two-thirds of the state’s prison population—convicted of a home invasion and sentenced to 15 years based on no evidence, the only witness against him a former crack-addicted woman who recanted on the stand.

But, hey, there were no riots.

Walter Scott is still dead, shot in the back by a North Charleston police officer while Scott ran away—an officer who faces murder charges only because a bystander happened to capture the shooting on video in a state that almost never convicts police of murdering people, no matter the circumstances.

But there were no riots.

Just weeks ago, a group of Citadel cadets pretended to be KKK members. The Citadel is the place that produced the men who fired on Fort Sumter and began America’s bloodiest war, one in which had they had their way, African-Americans would have been placed in a permanent state of slavery in the Confederate States of America.

But there were no riots.

South Carolina is still a state that debates whether Denmark Vesey, an early 19th century member of Emanuel A.M.E., was a hero or traitor for planning an insurrection to free black people from bondage—if he’s mentioned at all in the history books the state uses to teach its children. Most of the students who matriculated through South Carolina public schools in the 20th century (including me) were taught from history books written by a Confederate sympathizer who wrote about happy slaves.

But there were no riots.

The uncomfortable truth is that just months after people held hands on the iconic Arthur Ravenel Jr. cable-stayed bridge in an emotional interracial display that was designed to prove to Roof his plans for a race war wouldn’t be realized, many of the white residents who participated began attending Trump rallies with glee and couldn’t wait to vote for him in the primary.

That didn’t happen by accident. White Southerners have shown an uncanny ability to compartmentalize: They are increasingly more willing to break bread and work and go to school and pray with members of minority groups even as they are often unwilling to do the hard work necessary to uproot decadeslong racial problems too many of them believe were solved with the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

And black Southerners have shown that same kind of compartmentalization, willing to forgive and even defend the worst racial offenses in an attempt to hate the sin, not the sinner, which in its own way has made further progress harder to come by.

The families harmed by Roof chose forgiveness over bitterness in the face of a massacre, while a plurality of mostly white GOP primary voters turned their anger—economic and social—into support for a man whose rallies are increasingly becoming known for violence and racial angst.

Too many of us have been convinced that quiet equals peace. That’s the one good thing about the loudmouth that is Donald Trump. It’s hard to remain silent in the face of the ugliness he has highlighted like no other politician has in quite some time.

He isn’t Dylann Roof, deliberately targeting a single African-American church. No, he’s potentially more dangerous because he targets the vulnerable wherever they are. There aren’t enough Americans, in the South or the Republican Party, primarily motivated by hate to have fueled his rise. His presence on the national stage is scary because too many otherwise good people—the kind who would give comfort to a black orphan or pray for a sick Hispanic friend—are turning a blind eye to his peculiar brand of bigotry and angrily following his lead.