Experts: Plot Detracts from Racial Progress in South

By: Andrew DeMillo and Woody Baird

HELENA-WEST HELENA, Ark. - Shades of the region's racist past came creeping back this week just as the South could be poised to play a pivotal role in electing the nation's first black president.

An alleged plot by two young white supremacists to go on a killing spree and assassinate Barack Obama, though far-fetched by most accounts, may conjure images of the Jim Crow era for some. But it doesn't necessarily reflect the modern South, which in recent years has seen a huge influx of immigrants and transplants from other regions, as well as the empowerment of a black electorate that could decide the Nov. 4 election.

"These incidents, isolated though they are, serve as a reality check," said journalist John Seigenthaler, 81, who was U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant and was attacked with the Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights era.

"Yes we've changed in significant ways, but there are those that haven't," said Seigenthaler, who also was editor and publisher of The Tennessean in Nashville and founded the First Amendment Center.

The alleged plot "should serve as a low voltage electric shock. We're a new South, but there are elements of the old South still under the surface."

Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., who are accused of dreaming up the plan to behead blacks across the country and assassinate Barack Obama while wearing white top hats and tuxedoes, were likely too disorganized to carry out the plot. They have a federal court hearing scheduled for Thursday morning in Memphis.

Experts: Plot Detracts from Racial Progress in South....