Candidate challenges Democrats to reclaim RFK legacy

By Shawn White Wolf
Diversity Institute Fellow

10.29.02

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A Democratic congressional candidate from Alabama told about 70 people at Vanderbilt University Wednesday that his party’s best strategy for increasing voter turnout might be to draw from the example of one of its celebrated leaders.

Artur Davis, 35, referred to what he called Robert F. Kennedy’s vision of politics to explain his own view of how important it is for Democrats to promote an agenda that emphasizes building America from the bottom up.

Davis, who graduated from Harvard University with honors, is part of what some observers see as a new movement of younger African-Americans seeking election to public offices and doing so independently of their older counterparts in the Congressional Black Caucus. Davis defeated five-term incumbent Earl Hilliard in the Democratic primary and is expected to win the general election next month.

“I think that for the last 34 years we’ve been missing something in politics,” said Davis, referring to Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination. “What died that day was the sense of politics and morality being intertwined, the sense of public-policy and morality being intertwined.”

He said that Kennedy’s understanding of morality meant having “compassion for people in our society that were left behind.”

Davis said that simple philosophy could be translated into a progressive political strategy today that seeks to include people who go unheard in society, people who have largely been untouched by the economic prosperity that’s moved this country forward in the last 50 years.

“There are people living in conditions that most of you in this room will never see, and sometimes I think that it is difficult to talk about the people we don’t see,” said Davis. “It is easy to sweep under the rug the people that have been hurting in this society.”

The greatest decline in participation in voter turnout over the past three decades occurred among the poorest, youngest and least educated Americans, according to a 1996 finding by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The study also indicates that older African Americans continue to identify most closely with the Democratic Party while about one-third of younger African Americans declare themselves as political independents.

Davis said he sees firsthand the challenges associated with attracting the poor and uneducated into politics because the district he seeks to represent is one of the country’s poorest.

He believes that new leaders relying on time-tested values will be the key to turning the tide in such areas.

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Articles by fall 2002 Diversity Institute Fellows
Collection page for news stories written by members of the fall 2002 Diversity Institute class.  10.29.02