Ellis Cose

Opinion columnist

NBA great Charles Barkley said it best. “We've got to stop looking like idiots,” he told Alabamians while campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones. Tuesday night, Barkley pronounced himself “proud of my state” after Jones defeated Roy Moore, even as he acknowledged that Alabama still had plenty of “rednecks” and “ignorant people.”

For much of the nation, Moore’s loss was a huge relief. Moore, after all, is a man with problems. And that’s putting it mildly. As a thirtysomething prosecutor, he seemingly preferred the company of young girls to adult women. He "probably" believes homosexuality is criminal, Islam is a false religion, and America should be a Christian theocracy. He also seems to favor doing away with all constitutional amendments beyond the Bill of Rights — including, presumably, the amendments that eliminated slavery and granted the vote to women and blacks. Moore is, in short, a backward-looking, self-righteous religious bigot who symbolizes much that was foul about the Old South. And he was running against someone who has dedicated much of his life to delivering the South from darkness.

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As U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, Jones reopened an old, festering wound. He took on the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of a black Birmingham church that left four little girls dead and made Birmingham into an internationally detested symbol of bigotry. In 2001, he prosecuted and convicted Thomas Blanton, one of the perpetrators of that crime. Jones had long been interested in those 1963 murders and, for him, the trial was an important reckoning — an essential part of a healing process. “They say justice delayed is justice denied. Well, folks, I don't believe that for an instant. Justice delayed is still justice, and we've got it right here in Birmingham tonight,” he said after the jury delivered the guilty verdict.

It was a poignant moment for Birmingham and for America, a moment when an enlightened son of the South repudiated the racial ugliness that had long defined the region. At the time Moore, recently elected chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, was on the verge of illegally installing a more than 5,000-pound granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the state Judicial Building. Such religiously themed stunts brought Moore increasing fame and ultimately resulted in his removal as chief justice. He has spent the years since making outlandish statements, preaching to his fan base, and doing absolutely nothing to prove his suitability for public office. We should be glad that Alabama got this election right, but we should not mistake how and why that happened.

The only reason Alabama avoided the disaster of electing Moore is that blacks turned out and voted in droves. The National Election Pool exit poll found that blacks made up 30% of Tuesday’s electorate and voted overwhelmingly (96%) for Jones. Moore won 68% of white votes and even won a majority of white women’s votes — although 45% of college-educated white women voted for Jones.

All of this raises an uncomfortable question: Have we advanced at all since 1991, when the good white folks of Louisiana would have made a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan their governor had black votes not interceded?

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I suspect we have moved forward, but not nearly as much as we like to think. It’s heartening that a lot of white Alabamians found Moore too toxic for their taste. It’s likewise encouraging that the flimflam tag team of President Trump and Steve Bannon could not stir up much enthusiasm for him. And it’s somewhat reassuring that close to a majority of educated white women could not countenance putting an accused sexual predator in office — that almost a majority, in other words, did not let bigotry (or partisanship) trump decency. But it says something distressingly damning that so much of the New South’s virtue is dependent on blacks rescuing whites from their worst impulses. And it says something equally damning that so many Southerners remain so reluctant to making the South’s future better than its past.

As fate would have it, the United Nations sent its special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to Alabama as Moore and Jones faced off. (A rapporteur is someone assigned to gather information and report back.) After visiting a poor, largely black community in Butler County and witnessing wretched living conditions there, including raw sewage flowing from homes, Philip Alston pronounced himself surprised. Such sights, he said, were “very uncommon in the First World.”

Much of this country — and certainly much of the American South — has long been better at figuring out whom to hate and whom to marginalize than it has been at figuring out how to provide all its citizens with a decent life; better at finding scapegoats than solving societal problems; better at supporting candidates telling grandiose lies than at determining what is in America’s best interests.

To the extent that Jones’ victory signifies a resolve to move beyond such blinkered thinking, it is something to celebrate. But it would be a mistake to confuse one anomalous election with real and fundamental change.

Ellis Cose, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is author of The Rage of a Privileged Class and is working on An Uneasy Conscience, a 100-year history of the American Civil Liberties Union and civil liberties in America. Follow him on Twitter @EllisCose.