Poll: Southern blacks believe Obama will aid race relations

McClatchy Newspapers

COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Barack Obama will help America rid itself of racial prejudice, nearly 75 percent of black Southerners surveyed said, an indicator of the high hopes black America has invested in Obama’s ability to improve race relations.

Since his election in November, Obama has made talking about race easier, said respondents in the latest Winthrop University/South Carolina Educational Television poll of the South. The poll surveyed blacks in 11 Southern states on issues, values, politics and the new president.

Obama-inspired optimism was tempered, however, by what poll respondents consider to be still-poor race relations south of the Mason-Dixon line. More than 50 percent of respondents think race relations in the South are generally bad.

“Race relations are kind of bad in the Deep South,” said Monethel Wilson, a Beaufort, S.C., health-care worker who participated in the survey. Wilson thinks that Obama has the “drive in him to move us past that.”

The poll, taken Feb. 6-22, was conducted exclusively among 659 blacks, from Texas to Florida and north to Virginia.

A month into the Obama administration, Southern blacks are the president’s biggest fans, giving the president a 90 percent approval rating, even as they watch the national economy crumble.

Obama’s approval ratings nationally hover around 60 percent, a drop since he took office Jan. 20.

“The poll results clearly indicate that Southern African-Americans are satisfied with President Obama and the way he is handling issues of the day,” said Adolphus Belk Jr., director of the African-American Studies Program at Winthrop University, a liberal-arts college in Rock Hill, S.C., and co-designer of the survey. “But there is something going on with race relations in the South and the nation overall.”

Though more than 60 percent of Southern blacks said real progress has been made since the 1960s in ridding the nation of racial prejudice overall, “that number drops almost 10 points when Deep South respondents looked at progress only in the South,” Belk noted.

The poll showed the economy to be the No. 1 issue on the minds of Southern blacks, registering about 50 percent, followed by unemployment and jobs at roughly 20 percent.

No other issue — not the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, energy or the environment — rose above 3.2 percent concern for Southern blacks in the poll.

About 85 percent said the U.S. economy is in “fairly bad” or “very bad” condition now, and barely half of those polled said their personal finances are fairly good.

Yet 70 percent of blacks who live in the South feel the country is on the right track.

“African-Americans are saying they feel the country is on the right track as a result of the election of Barack Obama,” said Scott Huffmon, the director of the Winthrop/ETV initiative, and a co-designer of the survey.