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Can Artur Davis become Alabama’s first black governor?

If Barack Obama has given black politicians reason to reconsider shattering the glass ceiling, Artur Davis  may be the man — aside from the president himself — who has taken up the most audacious hammer. He hopes to become Alabama’s first black governor.

Davis, the black Democrat who has represented Alabama’s seventh district in Congress since 2003, is running a shrewd campaign, with Jere Beasley, who once served as lieutenant governor under George Wallace, as his campaign chairman.  Several polls have shown Davis either leading or keeping up with Republican contenders, while easily besting a Democratic challenger.

“We didn’t get into this race on a quixotic, last-minute whim,” Davis told me. “. . .The polling says my candidacy has established a foothold. The voters are judging me on the issues that a governor is going to deal with.”

Still, Davis has a tough job ahead of him if he is to persuade his state’s white voters, who view black politicians and Democrats with skepticism, to put him in the governor’s office, once held by a fiery segregationist named George Wallace.  While John Kerry received about 20 percent of the white vote in Alabama in 2004, Obama only pulled ten percent.

The state no longer automatically embraces candidates who use blatantly racist appeals, but it continues to support adamantly conservative  office-holders. Former Gov. Fob James, for example, once loped across a public stage mimicking an ape to accentuate his disdain for the theory of evolution. Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore  — known for his defiant insistence on public displays of the Ten Commandments — retains a sizable core of support and is running for governor.

But it’s not just a conservative white electorate that poses a challenge for Davis. It’s also an aging black political establishment that isn’t ready to give up its outsized role in political affairs. As Obama had to co-opt or outmaneuver older black political figures who had thrown their support to Hillary Clinton, Davis is having to contend with a longtime kingmaker named Joe Reed, 72, who has never shown any enthusiasm for the ambitions of the younger Davis, 42. Their uneasy relationship broke into open warfare recently, when Reed publicly berated Davis for being the only black House member who voted against health care reform legislation, suggesting Davis’ stance was a betrayal of black voters.

In truth, my home state of Alabama is among those whose citizens would benefit most from health care reform. About 31 percent of its residents under the age of 65 went without health insurance for all or part of 2007-08, according to a report by Families USA.

Still, Reed might have disagreed with Davis over health care reform without injecting racial undertones. But Reed— an egomaniac who has long enjoyed his role as the Bwana, or Big Man, in the state’s black electoral politics — is among those who still believe he has the authority to determine who is behaving in a manner which is appropriately “black.” That’s nonsense — an outdated and irrelevant standard that ought to be retired, much like Reed himself.

It’s no great surprise that Davis has to put up with criticism that suggests he is not authentically “black” — as Obama did. Like Obama, Davis is a post-civil-rights-era over-achiever with a law degree from Harvard University. (Davis also received his undergraduate degree from Harvard.) He tends to be thoughtful and analytic, without the bombast that the black old guard has come to expect from its self-appointed “leaders.”

But Obama showed that black gatekeepers no longer have the power they once did. Indeed, Davis shrewdly responded to Reed’s criticism by noting that Reed remained an enthusiastic backer of Hillary Clinton in last year’s Democratic primary, while Davis was an early Obama supporter.

The road to racial progress has never been sure and steady; it’s a potholed and unpredictable path. But whether or not Davis can make history as Alabama’s first black governor, he can made headway on racial equality just by ushering Reed and his cohort off the public stage.

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