WHITE HANDS: Eighteen years ago this fall, Harvey Gantt, the popular black mayor of Charlotte, N.C., appeared poised to rid the U.S. Senate of its most overt racist officeholder. Gantt took on Jesse Helms, who had represented North Carolina since 1972, and polls showed him ahead by eight points two weeks before election day.
That’s when the infamous “white hands” commercial, credited to Cuban refugee and GOP racial smear artist Alex Castellanos, crept into the state’s livingrooms.
“The ad, which political analysts call the most race-baiting campaign spot of the modern era, featured the hands of a white man crumpling a job application,” wrote Sean Musselden in the Winston-Salem News-Journal shortly before Helms’ death July 4.
“A narrator intoned: You needed that job. And you were the best-qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.”
Helms won and continued to block civil rights progress and black appointments of all kinds until his departure in 2002.
In reaction to Helms death, Barry Sanders, another black columnist, wrote in the Raleigh News & Observer: “It’s no stretch to say that if he and his spiritual forebears had succeeded, I’d be in a field chopping cotton under a broiling sun and singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’”
In 1970, there were just 43,000 Latinos residing in North Carlina. and by 1990, there were only 76,000 — hardly enough to set off alarm bells on Jesse’s race-meter.
But as the new century began and Jesse’s power started to fade, his beloved Dixie began browning like a leaf in autumn. Now more than 600,000 Latinos are calling North Carolina home.
One has to wonder what their fate might have been had the migration north been attempted a couple decades earlier.
Oh, about Castellanos — Did I forget to mention to you that, according to on-line columnist Richard Prince, Musselden is sharing a warning that Castellanos is riding high as part of John McCain’s advertising council, advising the candidate on media strategy.
