Times: Race matters less in South

An interesting story in today's issue of The New York Times highlights how race matters less and less politically in the South in, of all places (the story says), Alabama.

The story highlights how voters in an Alabama county that is 96 percent white chose an African American man to represent voters in the Alabama House of Representatives -- a first in the state for a black to represent a majority-white district. From the story:

Yet in a state once synonymous with racial strife, there is no denying this milestone, for all its tentativeness. Everyone — the voter in Cullman, the Alabama politician, the local historian — is rubbing his or her eyes, a little.

“It strikes me as a real watershed event,” said Samuel L. Webb, a historian at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.