The cousin of "Nell" Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was named the Pendleton County (West Virginia) 2008 Democrat of the Year.
He was one of the few Democrats of influence in rural eastern WV to declare his support for Barack Obama early this past winter. For decades, he was the political right arm in Alabama of Sen. John Sparkman. He was a player when the Solid South became the GOP's presidential base and the spiritual home of Republican social conservatism. Now he's watching as key Southern strongholds realign behind the presidential candidacy of a liberal bi-racial Democrat. Here's Rob's story.
Franklin, West Virginia's Rob Locklin was in Charleston for this year's big Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner to be recognized as Pendleton County Democrat of the Year.
His history as a fire-breathing, yellow dog Democrat began almost 80 years ago in the Deep South, in the era of Jim Crow and, as Rob puts it, "much worse than that." (He knows "much worse" on a firsthand basis, having seen an uncle bull-whip a black man for not picking cotton properly.)
Rob Locklin's life and that of his family have been intertwined with this country's racial politics for more than a century.
He grew up to people of substance on a cotton plantation near Monroeville, AL, during the Depression and the Second World War. His great-grandfather was a steamboat captain who ran the Union blockade on the Alabama River between Mobile and Claiborne. His grandfather was a delegate to the state's 1901 constitutional convention, when the document Alabama is governed by today was drafted, and helped draft provisions easing some of the state's hardships on black citizens.
After military school, Locklin went to the University of Alabama, finding liberation from rigid discipline, as--what else?--an English major, and unless one judges success by standards other than class attendance and sobriety, his undergraduate career was an undistinguished one.
Making good on his promise to the law school dean that his louche ways would be as summarily discarded as chance acquaintances in an after-stupor dawn, he graduated third in his class and went home to Monroeville to practice the law.
That would have been about six years after civil rights had divided the Democrats in 1948, when Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats stormed out of the national convention after Sen. Hubert Humphrey's civil rights plank was adopted into the party platform.
Locklin is a Moore on his mother's side, and the Monroeville Moores are related to the Harpers.
And so it was Locklin's cousin, Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which in important ways helped shape attitudes for the better in the early days of the civil rights movement. The film did the same, and Gregory Peck's career-defining portrayal of the iconic Atticus Finch entered history as the embodiment of small-town honorableness and the American creed of "justice for all."
Locklin tried his first case in the same balconied courtroom as the one shown in the film, and his client, too, was a black man, except that his defendant was guilty and went to jail, although the man's fate, Locklin says, could have been much worse.
In 1961, the ambitious Locklin, affiliated with the "Big Jim" Folsom political machine, was tapped by the local bosses for advancement. The old pros (the main one around Monroeville, Shorty Millsap, a mule trader, was the subject of an early Truman Capote short story in which he was called "Judge Tallsap") had an eventual run for Congress in mind for the young lawyer, who set about rounding up the support he needed to be appointed US Attorney for Alabama's Southern District.
However, Alabama's powerful senior Senator, John J. Sparkman, owed a debt of friendship to an old buddy from law school days and instead appointed that man's son. To make things right with "Big Jim's" people, Sparkman invited Locklin to join his staff in Washington, DC. Sparkman's position was comparable to that of WV Senator Robert C. Byrd in his heyday, and Sparkman was Adlai Stevenson's running mate in 1952.
In 1967, Locklin became Sparkman's chief of staff. That was two years after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
So it was not from a distance that Locklin saw the Solid Democratic South become the spiritual home of GOP conservatism and presidential base politics. It was from the perspective of being Sparkman's hard right arm in the home of George "segregation then, segregation now, segregation forever" Wallace.
In 1969, Locklin discovered rural life in West Virginia's eastern mountains. Twenty-three years later he retired from liberal Wisconsin Senator Bill Proxmire's staff and made Pendleton County his home.
A year ago, the number of influential Democrats in rural West Virginia who believed Hillary's candidacy to be less than a sure thing was small. Smaller still was the number believing Obama could defeat the "invincible" Clinton machine and have a fighting chance to be elected this fall.
Locklin is one who did, and he declared his support for Obama early this past winter.
Even more than Obama's oratory, it's his intellect--Locklin's daughter, Eleanor, a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, believes it may be the equivalent of Thomas Jefferson's--temperament, grassroots organizing skills and powers of social perception (as David Brooks terms them) that Locklin finds astonishing.
If Obama's elected, the opportunity will be his to achieve greatness, Locklin believes. After all, great presidents come to power in times of grave national crisis and rise to meet the challenges.
"But remember," Locklin says, "they have to meet the challenge. We wouldn't consider Lincoln a great president if he hadn't won the Civil War. Politically, I believe Obama's a genius. He played the Clintons to perfection. He knew they had nowhere to go after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. He knew how to be cool and collected when the economy, and John McCain's campaign, went to hell this fall. In foreign affairs, I know he'll be able to repair American's standing in the world, including the Arab world. And Putin's very likely met his intellectual match in Obama. Plus, Obama will bring to the table a worldwide following that Putin can only dream of ever having."
Asked if his political life has come full circle as he studies an electoral map showing Obama with a lead in Virginia, a slight lead in North Carolina and trailing by only seven or so in Georgia, Locklin answers, "Yes. We're seeing the beginnings of the biggest political realignment in this country since 1932...if we win...if Obama can just win now."