The Democratic Party had a choice: incorporate progressive “special interest” elements of Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition platform—such as single-payer universal healthcare, living-wage policies, and alternatives to incarceration—or ingratiate itself to “ordinary Americans”—the white electorate—through scarcely hidden, racially encoded appeals to continued white political dominance. At the urging of the DLC, the Party chose the latter. Although the DLC officially closed its doors in 2011, many of its former members are now part of the Obama administration, and there is ample evidence that the DLC’s white-dominated racial legacy lives on within today’s Democratic Party.
On March 1, 1992, just a week before Super Tuesday—itself a DLC invention to address the supposedly outsized role that “issue activist and interest group leaders” had come to play in the nomination process—the DLC held a Clinton campaign event at the Stone Mountain Correctional Institution in Stone Mountain, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The event took place in the months between Bill Clinton’s peregrination to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black prisoner with documented intellectual disabilities, and his “Sister Souljah moment” in May, when he vocally distanced himself from Jackson and radical black activism.
A striking photograph from the Stone Mountain event, which Wypijewski describes as “the iconic image of ’92,” shows “Clinton and [DLC leader] Senator Sam Nunn posing at Stone Mountain, Georgia . . . and in the middle distance, a group of black prisoners.” Directly behind Clinton stands Georgia Governor Zell Miller, who made headlines in 2004 when he crossed party lines to support George W. Bush instead of John Kerry. Flanking Clinton opposite Nunn is Georgia Congressman Ben Lewis Jones, former star of The Dukes of Hazzard and outspoken defender of the Confederate flag.
Perhaps even more consequential than the photograph’s mise en scène is its location. Stone Mountain, is Georgia’s “most renowned historical marker,” as Somini Sengupta points out, and “one that many people would rather not remember.” The modern Ku Klux Klan was born in 1915 at a Stone Mountain rally celebrating President Woodrow Wilson’s White House screening of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s movie, often credited as the first feature-length film, is a white supremacist hagiography narrating the Klan’s Reconstruction-era “protection” of white women from the uncontrolled sexual aggressions of free black men. For the next fifty years, Stone Mountain was the site of an annual Labor Day cross-burning ceremony. It is also home to the Confederate Memorial Carving (begun in 1923 but only completed in 1972), a Mt. Rushmore–style grotesquerie that depicts three leaders of the Confederacy: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.