Election splits blacks in South

Obama vs. Clinton means hard choice

ATLANTA -- The People's Voice African-American Weekly News in tiny Roanoke, Ala., has not endorsed a candidate in the Feb. 5 Democratic presidential primary -- much to the frustration of the publisher, Charlotte A. Clark-Frieson, a Barack Obama supporter.

"I'm trying to get ready to endorse him, but my board is so split," Clark-Frieson said. Letters to the paper are almost unanimously in favor of Obama, she said. But the older of the state's two black political organizations, the Alabama Democratic Conference, endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in October.

So great is the tension, Clark-Frieson said, that many of the newspaper's board members have refused to betray their preference even in private.

Across the South, a fierce competition is afoot for black voters, who are expected to constitute from 20 percent to 50 percent of voters in the South Carolina Democratic primary Jan. 26 and in the four Southern states with primaries on Super Tuesday: Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Arkansas. In many counties, registration has spiked since Obama won the Iowa caucuses.

Chatter about Obama and Clinton -- both of whom have substantial claims to African-American support -- is constant on black radio shows and e-mail lists and at barbershops. Officials and ministers are coming forward with last-minute endorsements.

For several weeks, race has dominated the Democratic contest, prompting a flurry of angry words between the Obama and Clinton camps. That fight appears to have died down, but Southern black voters are still in knots over a contest that pits a woman they know well against a viable black candidate.

Husband against wife

The competition pits old loyalties against new passions and traditional kingmakers -- many of whom backed Clinton months ago -- against Obama's grass-roots energy. And as the Clinton camp doggedly pursues women, in some cases it is splitting families, like Rep. Sanford D. Bishop Jr., co-chairman of the Obama campaign in Georgia, and his wife, Vivian Creighton Bishop, a public official in Columbus, Ga., and a Clinton supporter.

In Atlanta, the race has also split old allies in the civil rights movement. The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery supported Obama, for instance, while Rep. John Lewis defended Clinton against accusations that she and her husband had denigrated Martin Luther King Jr. in an attack on Obama.

Another prominent Clinton supporter from the civil rights era, Andrew Young, also went on the defensive. "Hillary Clinton, first of all, has Bill behind her," Young said on a recent webcast devoted to African-American issues. "And Bill is every bit as black as Barack."

But a younger generation appears to be embracing Obama. Raphael G. Warnock, the 38-year-old senior pastor of King's home church, Ebenezer Baptist, extended Obama the honor of appearing there this Sunday, the day before the King holiday.

Roanoke, near the Georgia state line, is a stronghold of the Alabama Democratic Conference, which chose Clinton in part because its members thought that a black man could not be elected. But statewide, the group's support of Clinton may be tested by the Obama campaign's quiet insurgency.

"This is going to be another one of these watershed events in the black community," said Hank Sanders, a state senator and former president of the Alabama New South Coalition, a group that has endorsed Obama.

Gerald W. Johnson, the pollster for the Alabama Education Association, a powerful teacher's union that has also endorsed Clinton, said Obama's win in Iowa demolished Clinton's substantial lead among Alabama Democrats.

Fight over gender, too

The Clinton campaign hopes its candidate will appeal as strongly to black women as she has to white women in earlier primaries. In Atlanta on Sunday, at the annual Wild Hog Supper that kicks off the legislative session, Lucy Murphy, a defense-contractor employee and active Demo-crat, said she was "going with gender all the way." Murphy, 55 and black, said, "The working women will rise up. Black men believe if men take a stand, black women will follow. That's why we are fortunate to be able to go in the voting booth without them."

But female support for Clinton is not uniform. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, who had said she would remain neutral, made a surprise endorsement for Obama after hearing his victory speech in Iowa.

Some black women have complained that there are shades of chauvinism in the tide of support for Obama. But on a black radio talk show in Montgomery last week, several men called to repudiate the conservative host, Kevin Elkins, who said, "I don't understand how any man that's a man can want to hide behind the skirt of a woman for leadership."

But those same callers did not say they would vote for Clinton. One suggested that the recent flap over race in the campaign had eroded Bill Clinton's store of affection among blacks. "With him trying to force-feed us Hillary, I think it's jeopardizing his legacy," the caller said.