Real Reconstruction

Weeks of energetic politicking behind him, Lucius Amerson sat in a Tuskegee office on election day fidgeting over the latest returns. At 8:15 p.m., a young campaign worker hung up the phone and exultantly pounded a fist on the table. "You won!" the youth cried. "You won!" Amerson leaned back and laughed with relief. By a 387-vote margin, the stocky ex-postal clerk had be come the first Alabama Negro to win a Democratic nomination for sheriff since the misty days of Reconstruction.

Amerson, 32, a onetime Army paratrooper and father of two, was forced into last week's runoff for Macon County sheriff when neither he nor white Incumbent Harvey Sadler won a majority in Alabama's May 3 Democratic primary. The county has the highest proportion of Negroes (84%) of any in the U.S., and Negroes hold a 7,000 to 2,000 voter registration advantage. Amerson's showdown victory was still a considerable accomplishment. Few men in the rural South are more powerful than the local sheriff, and the office is the most sacrosanct of white preserves. With no declared opposition remaining, Amerson seems certain to win the November general election.

Few candidates of his race did as well in other Alabama runoffs. Negroes managed to win Democratic nominations for two lesser offices in Macon County and for a school-board post in predominantly Negro Greene County; otherwise, 22 Negro office-seekers were defeated, including Tuskegee Lawyer Fred Gray, 35, who had been favored to succeed in his bid for the state house of representatives. But although many whites continued to resist the inevitability of full-scale Negro political participation, there were heartening signs of reasonableness. Amid warnings of violence uttered by embittered Macon County whites, Sheriff Sadler took pains to call his defeat "fair and square" and to wish Amerson luck. "I think the white people knew," said Sadler, "that sooner or later there would be a Negro elected to this office."

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