Debate highlights Mississippi's racial evolution

updated 4:24 p.m. ET Sept. 25, 2008

CORINTH, Miss. - On a small-town Saturday night, a half-block from the town square where a deteriorating Confederate statue stands guard, state Sen. Eric Powell walks into a restaurant for dinner.

Powell orders fried pickles. Bubba Carpenter, a Republican state representative, ambles over with his 5-year-old son, Noah. The two freshmen legislators make small talk about a Civil War reenactment and plans to attend Friday's scheduled debate between Barack Obama and John McCain at the University of Mississippi.

Noah wordlessly reaches his hand across the table, palm up. Powell gently slaps him five, his large brown hand swallowing Noah's tiny white one.

This is the new Mississippi — where Powell, a Democrat, is the first black person ever elected to the state legislature from a rural white district. Where a combination of the murderous past and the nation's largest percentage of black residents have, in some surprising ways, pushed Mississippi race relations ahead of the rest of the nation.

The specter of the past will rise when Obama visits the campus where segregationists fought federal troops to keep James Meredith from integrating Ole Miss in 1962. Obama is fighting his own historic battle for the presidency in the face of what polls indicate is racial prejudice. But the backdrop has changed as these story lines converge.

Bubba Carpenter, whose district adjacent to Powell's has only one stoplight, says people in the area "don't look at Eric as a black man. They knew his character, his beliefs, what he stood for. They elected a person, not a Democrat, Republican, black or white."

Make no mistake, though — Powell is black and knows it. Growing up near Corinth in Tishomingo County, which is 98 percent white, he and his father were once told to order at the back door of a hamburger stand. Recently, Powell and his son were left waiting half an hour for service at a barbecue restaurant.

Everyone in Mississippi, which is 37 percent black, understands that racism lives on. And what of the rest of the country, which is 12 percent black? In a recent AP-Yahoo poll that found racial attitudes could cost Obama a close election, 55 percent of whites said "a lot" or "some" discrimination exists, while almost all blacks felt that way.

Dave Martin / AP A statue honors fallen Confederate soldiers stands outside the Neshoba County Courthouse in Philadelphia, Miss.

Powell, 42, attended integrated schools and got hooked on politics after being elected class president at Tishomingo High in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades. He works at an integrated paper mill and lives with his wife and three children in an integrated neighborhood. He saw blacks elected mayor of Corinth and come within four votes of being elected Tishomingo sheriff.

So when Powell was first asked to run for state Senate in 2003, he was unfazed by his district's 91 percent white and solidly Republican population. Powell lost then by 630 votes. Last year, he ran again and received 8,571 votes, 497 more than his opponent.

"Part of the new Mississippi is you have a group of older people, white and black, that always cared about black people," Powell says. "They're not going to say a whole lot. But they go to the polls and vote."

Echoes of the Civil War
The Civil War Explanatory Center in Corinth documents the pivotal battle for control of the town's railroad junction, which controlled access to a huge swath of the South. "Many northerners viewed slave labor as unfair competition and a threat to their right to make a living," reads one placard at the entrance to the museum. "Few northern whites supported abolition or equality for African-Americans."

Shortly after the battle of Shiloh a few miles to the north, Union troops defeated Confederate forces at Corinth amid carnage that shocked both sides of the young nation. In the museum, photos of Col. William P. Rogers, whose statue stands in the local square, show him lying dead next to his slain horse.

"Other issues remain unresolved," reads an exhibit near the end of the tour. "The debate continues."

There cannot be new without the old.

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