The swinging pendulum -- Have we come full circle? White mayor in office; whites play the race card. Black mayor in office; blacks play the race card.

In a 10-28-09 post entitled "'We have met the enemy . . . and he is us'" I wrote:

I don't have a dog in the current Atlanta mayor’s race, but like most matters involving Georgia politics and races, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of important elections.

I was shocked this evening when I read Jim Galloway's post in the ajc's Political Insider entitled "State Democrats jump into Atlanta mayor’s race against Mary Norwood."

I remain just as shocked after reading the post. I just don't understand the motive, the role, the reason for the party feeling it had to get involved . . . .

The word shock and degree of being shocked are relative. I don't have an appropriate word to describe my reaction to Jim Galloway's latest post reporting the following from Bunny Jackson-Ransom, ex-wife of the late mayor Maynard Jackson (in truth I do; it is disgust):

During the next few weeks, I intend to do whatever I can to wake up those African Americans who have become “bamboozled” into believing that a moderately educated, southern white woman will do something for them. Obviously they have forgotten what Atlanta was like for our people before we had a Black Mayor. Yes, mistakes have been made; but we are surely not where we used to be.

My personal goal is to seek out one Black Norwood supporter each day to remind and inform them.

Days before Atlanta elected Maynard Jackson (who was then serving as Vice Mayor) as its first black mayor in 1973, incumbent mayor Sam Massell placed an ad in the Atlanta Constitution depicting a vacant downtown with the headline: “Atlanta’s Too Young to Die.”

The racial implication was clear; Massell's strategy was roundly criticized; and Massell lost in a mayoral runoff in a landslide to Jackson. (See this ajc article.)

Jim Galloway's most recent post linked above suggests that there will be more of such talk on the issue of race (and you have to hand to do Jackson's ex-wife, she doesn't imply as did Massell; she spells it out loud and clear). (Galloway put it this way: "The conversation surrounding Atlanta’s mayoral runoff between Mary Norwood and Kasim Reed has already begun.")

If this is going to be the tenor of the race, and such is going to be the tenor of and from the Reed camp, then most assuredly -- and even though I do not have a vote -- I will have a candidate, and such candidate will be more in the keeping of the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. who on August 28, 1963 is his "I Have a Dream" speech said:

[G]o back to Georgia . . . knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

[L]et freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! . . . When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"