\
Cover Story
Black IrUc
4/
Votes As Election Nears
Graham received 303,605 votes, but
was 11,269 short of a dear majority.
Smith had received 250,222 votes, and
Reynolds, 58,752. Gov. Kerr Scott had
appointed Graham to the Senate after
the death of J. Melville Broughton in
1949.
Smith decided to call a runoff pri
mary, and his forces stepped up their
character assassination of Graham call
ing him a “Communist” and a “nigger-
lover."
Asbhy wrote that the Smith’s “Know
the Truth Committee,” had reprinted
100,000 copies of the front page of the
Carolina Times, a black newspaper in
Durham, showing a picture of Graham
with the headline, “Negro Press En
dorses Graham,” and a claim that more
than 100, 000 had registered.
The material was mailed to whites
with this information, “Notice, too, that
the Negro newspaper carried editorials,
reproduced on the back page of the
enclosures, advocating intermarriage of
the races and the admission of Negroes
to the state’s white institutions of higher
learning. Do you want these things to
come to pass?”
That and similar dirty tactics worked
as Smith defeated Graham in a close
election. Smith had 281,114 votes to
Graham’s 261,789- After serving three
years. Smith died in 1953. President
Harry Truman appointed Graham to the
U.S. Civil Rights Commission and later to
the United Nations as an ambassador.
Graham died in 1972 in Chapel Hill.
Claude Allen, Helms’ black campaign
secretary in 1984, said that Helms was
just a volunteer in the Smith campaign.
“He (Helms) has also said that he never
wrote any of the campaign material,”
Allen told The Daily Tar Heel.
Two veteran black politicians in
Raleigh disputed Allen’s statements at
that time, saying that Helms was an
active participant in the Smith campaign.
“Jesse was the architect behind the whole
campaign,” said John Winters Sr., a
Raleigh developer and former state
senator. “He might not have said that
racist stuff, but he masterminded the
whole thing.”
Former Raleigh Mayor Clarence
Lightner agreed with Winters. “I have
been in politics for 30 years,” Lightner
said in July 1984. “We were fightingjesse
Helms even then."
Following the bitter campaign. Smith
appointed Helms as an administrative
assistant to his Washington staff. Forty
years have passed since the Smith-
Graham race, and Helms finds himself in
close contest with a black architect from
Charlotte whose main appeal is to
blacks, liberal whites, women, farm
ers and other groups.
Gantt's candidacy has spawned
increased black registration in North
Carolina as black voters have regis
tered to vote at a higher rate than
whites since April 1990 and Demo
crats joined the rolls faster than Re
publicans.
The Associated Press reported on
October 24 that the number of N.C.
voters eligible to cast ballots in the
Nov. 6 election has grown by nearly
200,000 since April, based on figures
released by the State of Board of
Elections. There are 3,347,635 North
Carolinians eligible to vote in the
Gantt-Helms Senate election.
Democrats picked up 112,579 new
voters while Republicans registered
60,543. Another 26,646 registered as
unaffiliated. New voters include
135,484 whites and 60,886 blacks.
Susan Jetton, the spokeswoman
for the Gantt campaign, said the new
figures were encouraging and the
election will come down to which
campaign does the better job of get
ting its supporters to the polls.
“Obviously we want as many
people as possible to be registered,”
Jetton told the Greensboro News and
Record, “With that many of the eli
gible voters registered, now it’s our
job to get them excited about Harvey
Gantt and turn them out on Election
Day.”
Carter Wrenn, a top political aide
for Helms, said the increase in GOP
registration since 1984 is good for
Helms. “We got five percent more Re
publicans, which is very good news for
us,” he said.
The Helms campaign must get their
supporters to polls to ensure the sena
tor’s re-election, Wrenn said. “It looks
pretty close, like everything else in this
election,” he said. “Now it depends on
whose people turn out and vote. I hope
everybody that’s on the Helms team gets
the message that it’s going to close, hard
fought election.”
President George Bush’s recent veto
of the civil rights bill in Congress has
become a campaign issue in the Gantt-
Helms race.
Gantt said he supported the
legislation, which would have
circumvented six U.S. Supreme Court
decisions that have made it difficult for
women and minorities to prove they
have been victims of job discrimination,
The Charlotte Observer reported on
October 25.
Bush vetoed it on the grounds it
would lead to hiring quotas, and Helms
said he agreed with the president. The
U.S. Senate came up one vote short of a
two-thirds majority needed to override
Bush’s veto.
“That just goes to show you if Harvey
Gantt was in the U.S. Senate today, it
would have gone a different way,” Gantt
told more than 1,200 students and faculty
at the University of North Carolina at
Chadotte on October 24. “I support the
civil rights bill,” he said.
Helms has made an issue of Gantt’s
campaign contributions from
homosexual-rights groups in recent
campaign television commercials.
“That’s where Mr. Gantt’s money is
coming from,” Helms said at a rally in
Gastonia. “From the artists, the
homosexuals, the Molly Yard crowd,
People for the American Way and on
and on. Would you say I have all the
right enemies?” he asked three dozen
supporters. Yard is president of the
National Organization of Women.
Gantt responded to Helms’ accusation
that he is running a secret campaign
among homosexuals, saying that, “He
(Helms) insults the intelligence of the
voters North Carolina,” Gantt told TTje
Charlotte Observer.
“This is just another example where
Sen. Helms seeks to appeal to the worst
instincts within all of us," Gantt said. “I
won’t be a party to any effort on the part
of my opponent or anybody else to try
and put down one group of people in
our society. We need to find ways of
coming together.”