Hints of Change in the Heart of Virginia

At the Black History Month family festival here Saturday, two white deputy sheriffs were confronted with a sensitive racial matter. One of their own had shown up wearing a T-shirt printed with a Confederate flag.

"What do you think we should do?" James Harvey, the senior deputy, asked his colleague.

"Well, he does represent the department, and it doesn't look good," the colleague replied.

"Then either he takes it off," said Harvey, "or we ask him to leave."

In the annals of American racial progress, the decision by the two deputies might strike some as insignificant or, at best, an easy call. But that would discount the complexity of the problem they faced.

In a state where civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson were honored on the same day, a white deputy sheriff wearing a Confederate flag to a black history month celebration would probably seem okay to more than a few white citizens.

Nevertheless, times are changing.

Who would have thought, for instance, that voters in Chesterfield -- one of the state's most conservative and reliably Republican counties -- would turn out in droves for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) during last week's presidential primary?

During the Civil War, Chesterfield was a formidable Confederate shield against Union attack on Richmond; now it has given a black man from the Land of Lincoln nearly as many votes as all other candidates from both parties combined.

"It's the most amazing thing, and I don't think we have enough tea leaves to read that could explain it," Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder (D) said. In 1990, Virginia voters made Wilder the nation's first African American governor since Reconstruction. But he did not come close to taking Chesterfield.

This is not to take anything away from Obama's rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). She, too, has many supporters and might yet end up as the Democratic nominee. But Obama's campaign has provided a unique opportunity to examine the state of race relations in America. And few places are better for taking the pulse than the heart of Virginia.