Reverend William Barber was one of the minister's leading the opposition to Amendment One.
O
ne hundred black ministers in North Carolina formed a coalition urging people to vote for the state’s Amendment One in the run-up to last week’s the election. The defense of marriage amendment passed, of course, with 61 percent of the vote. But there was one group of black North Carolina voters who did not all heed the minister’s directive. Urban black voters largely voted against the amendment, according to an analysis by The American Prospect. The magazine reports:
In each of North Carolina’s five largest cities, voters in majority-black precincts rejected the measure: Charlotte (52 percent), Raleigh (51 percent), Greensboro (54 percent), Winston-Salem (55 percent), and Durham (65 percent). Durham’s results were dramatic: Not a single majority-black precinct supported the amendment. Several crushed it by margins of 3-to-1 and even 4-to-1.
The magazine challenges the narrative that black voters are to blame for the passage of defense of marriage laws. The article argues that the fault line in North Carolina was not racial, but urban versus rural.
Yet even in rural areas some majority black precincts rejected the amendment, the article says.
The amendment failed 2-to-1 on the African-American side of Scotland Neck, a village that has witnessed forty years of civil-rights struggles stretching from a landmark
school-desegregation case in the 1970s to the recent
stun-gun death of a black bicyclist. The result, says former Mayor James Mills, is an “organized and sophisticated” black electorate. “We were able to communicate was that this really had nothing to do with same-sex marriage,” he says. “What this has to do with is hate.” The measure also failed, albeit narrowly, in a black precinct of nearby Warren County, where in the 1980s hundreds were arrested during
protests against a PCB landfill that sparked some of the earliest discussions about environmental racism.
