By many measures, Greenwood has made remarkable strides in race relations. So has the state. Another Mississippi town with a cruel segregationist past, Philadelphia, made nationwide headlines last month when it elected its first black mayor.
On Tuesday, the atmosphere here was perfectly friendly. Marquii Washington, one of a handful of blacks standing by a Perkins sign on the north side, said whites asked after him throughout the hot day, offering him cold drinks and shade.
But as Washington watched whites flock to their polling places, he encountered a number of blacks who told him they weren't going to vote.
On the south side, Perkins volunteer Mac Henry was trying to combat black apathy, roaming around the tumbledown homes of the Baptist Town neighborhood in a van and shuttling voters to the polls.
Henry used the old Malcolm X formulation about "field Negroes" and "house Negroes" to explain why whites didn't like the ruling black clique: People like Sen. Jordan, he said, were from the field -- fighters, not pushovers. The mayor, he said, was from neither house nor field, but a "breakout" character who could bring real unity.
At dinnertime, Perkins' supporters gathered in a church basement and fell silent as they watched the poll results roll in like a bad storm: 57% for McAdams, 43% for Perkins. In the north, Perkins received 54 votes.
Perkins, arriving a few minutes later in a sundress, tried to keep things upbeat. Losing, she said, must have been God's plan for her.
Across the river, McAdams' backers toasted in the white-columned mansion of a local lawyer. The beaming McAdams spoke briefly, promising a "united front" for Greenwood.
A few black faces mingled happily in the crowd. McAdams had earned about 270 south-side votes: Some of them had grudges against the mayor, and some simply thought she had done a poor job.
At one point, a group of black women burst into a few bars of a song that had been on everyone's lips back in 1964: "A Change Is Gonna Come."
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richard.fausset@latimes.com
