Helms’ Black Rival Has Uphill Fight : Politics: Harvey Gantt becomes a rallying point for North Carolina progressives, but the three-term senator is still a legend in rural areas.

WILMINGTON, N.C. — In his battle to make history in North Carolina, Harvey Gantt draws upon events a continent away, rallying a group of supporters with the power of positive speaking.

“You know, when you look at the people in Poland and in Czechoslovakia and you see what they threw off in the course of less than a year, I know that in North Carolina we can throw Jesse Helms off,” he tells an enthusiastic crowd of about 200 in the nearby town of Bolivia.

As they clap and cheer, even Gantt’s supporters may suspect that persuading Eastern Europeans to shuck communism is a cakewalk compared to persuading North Carolinians to dump the three-term Republican.

Nevertheless, Gantt, a 47-year-old architect who was the first black student to attend Clemson University and the first black mayor of Charlotte, believes he can become the first black Democrat ever elected to the Senate.

During a recent campaign swing through conservative eastern North Carolina, Gantt talked like a man who has seen the future. “The thing that I envision is on election night--from Wilmington to Raleigh, to Asheville to Charlotte--there will be rejoicing in the land.

“We will have elected Democrats at the local level, we will have sent some great people to the General Assembly, we will have kept our congressmen in office, and we will have retired Jesse Helms.”

In an interview, Gantt contended that “Jesse Helms has never been an invincible man.” Helms, 68, is more vulnerable this year because he won’t have Ronald Reagan’s coattails as he did in 1984, and East-West relations are improving, Gantt said. In past elections, “Helms could always scare the hell out of folks by simply saying, ‘The communists are coming, the communists are coming.’ ”

The election is drawing nationwide attention because of Gantt’s historic candidacy, and because Helms has become the man the nation’s liberals love to hate.

The race is also a referendum on North Carolina’s progressiveness. Thad Beyle, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, cites two opposing forces: one symbolized by the influx of liberal new residents who are drawn to urban centers like Charlotte, the other by conservatives still dominating rural areas.

If Gantt wins, “This election could be a bellwether of change,” said Beyle, who, like everyone else around the state, acknowledged that Helms remains a legendary figure with “the boys at the gas pump.”

While Gantt and his supporters believe the state is embarrassed by Helms’ bashing of homosexuals, his opposition to civil rights and his anti-communist rhetoric, everybody knows he has a lot of history on his side.

“This is a racist state,” said Bill Smith, a white former state senator, now a lawyer in Wilmington. “We’re still fighting the Civil War down here.”

That is exactly the war Gantt does not want to wage. Gantt is deemphasizing racism and other “hot-button issues” such as abortion and the death penalty. E. Lawrence Daniels III, state chairman of the Democratic Party, predicts that Helms will focus on these issues in an effort to “divide up the Democratic Party.”

Gantt agrees that he must define himself in the public mind before Helms does it for him. To that end, Gantt tries to steer his audiences onto broad, unifying themes. His spokeswoman, Susan Jetton, says he never uses texts, lending a quality of spontaneity to his speeches. Speaking conversationally, intensely, he is at ease before audiences, which are usually well-integrated racially.

Gantt, a Charleston, S.C., native, frequently recalls his impoverished beginnings and his hard-working father whose job in a Naval shipyard enabled his family to reach the suburban dream.

After graduating from Clemson, Gantt earned a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been married to his wife, Cindy, an accountant, since 1964. They have four children. He casts himself as a redeemer of America’s middle class ideals, voicing the need for better health care, improved education, more jobs, protection of the environment.

“I’m going to reverse the trend and spend less on the military and more on us,” he told the crowd in Bolivia.

Ironically, while Gantt tries to stay away from hot-button issues, some of his supporters are almost certain to push them to the forefront. Abortion rights advocates are mobilizing, as are homosexual groups and those in the arts who are incensed at Helms’ campaigns to restrict federal grants for art works he deems obscene.

In Winston-Salem, Ted Potter, executive director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, declared that “it’s time to put Helms out to pasture” and reported that some North Carolinians are displaying bumper stickers that read: “I’m an artist, and I vote.”

Helms sent out a fund-raising letter recently saying: “Because I voted against their pet spending bills, the special interests--the ACLU, the homosexual crowd, the Hollywood fat cats, People for the American Way, the so-called National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood and the union bosses--all of these have poured money into North Carolina to defeat me.”

Since defeating Mike Easley, a district attorney in the eastern part of the state, in the June primary, Gantt has continued to run hard. Helms, on the other hand, has barely campaigned in the state. Carol Donaldson, who chairs the Mecklenburg Republican Party, said she expected Helms to begin personal campaigning after voters return from summer vacation and that it “may be silly” to start earlier.

So far Helms’ campaign officials have refused to grant interviews because, a campaign spokeswoman asserted, “the press in this state has been so awful” to Helms. Meanwhile, Helms has amassed a potent financial war chest. By June 30, he had raised $7.9 million, while Gantt had raised $808,000.

Helms recently launched a radio ad campaign in which he takes his first direct swipe at Gantt, calling the Democrat a free spender who will raise taxes.

But he got more attention from a news release issued two weeks ago by his aide James Meredith, who was the first black person to attend the University of Mississippi. Meredith alleged that many NAACP delegates to the recent convention in Los Angeles used illegal drugs and are immoral and criminal. The next day he charged that a cadre of white men control leaders of black activist groups.

In a statement, Helms defended Meredith’s “right to express his opinion.” Helms said he did not authorize the release but only faulted his aide for using Senate stationery and free mailing privileges.

The Meredith story forced Gantt into a response on one of the hot-button issues. When asked about the matter during interviews, Gantt sighs deeply and rushes through his answer, urging reporters to move on to substantive matters.

“It’s an outrageous statement,” he said the other day. “It’s racist, and to suggest that Helms doesn’t know anything about it is to be naive in the truest sense.”

Gantt believes that during the course of the campaign there will be “more to come” in the same vein.

Even without Meredith, there would be no getting away from race in this contest.

Only three black people have ever served in the Senate, all Republicans: Hiram Revels, who represented Mississippi from 1870 to 1871; Blanche Kelso Bruce, Mississippi, 1875-1881, and Edward W. Brooke, Massachusetts, 1967-1979.

Any black person “gives up quite a few points because of his race,” said Milton Morris, director of research at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which focuses on black political issues. “Gantt definitely has an uphill battle.”

Gantt said he plays down the issue of race, but he does not deny it exists.

“Every race I’ve been in, I calculated race into the equation,” he said. “If you’re in America, you calculate it into the equation. It is a factor. I never make it an issue. I don’t run the campaign wearing it on my sleeve, but I don’t run away from it either.”

He reminds skeptics that he won mayor’s races in 1983 and 1985 in Charlotte, where 75% of the voters were white (He lost his third campaign in 1987.) and that he defeated a white opponent in the Senate Democratic primary.

In each of these races he has had to walk the thin line between holding onto his base of black support and reaching out to non-black voters. Now, against Helms, he must attack the senator’s record in order to energize his own supporters, while at the same time portraying himself as keeping to the high road.

Gantt said his own polling shows that 24% of voters would cast their ballot for him because he is black, while another 24.5% would not vote for him because he is black. Of the latter figure, he said, “That’s a big difference from what it would have been in 1965 or 1960.”

Helms was first elected in 1972, defeating Democrat Nick Galifianakis, 54% to 46%. He was reelected in 1978, beating John Ingram, 55% to 45%, and in 1984, getting by Jim Hunt Jr., 52% to 48%. North Carolina’s other senator is Terry Sanford, a Democrat and former governor, elected in 1986.

Political watchers around this state say that practically anybody can pull 40% to 45% of the vote against Helms, but getting the rest is the hard part.

Why? Like a hunter stalking his quarry, Gantt has studied Helms for years and has some answers.

“He came along at a time when people felt . . . helpless, particularly here in the South,” said Gantt, adding that Southerners’ “whole existence and way of life were threatened, and here comes Jesse Helms who said things they didn’t have the courage to say or were scared to say . . . ‘boo’ to the liberals and the blacks and to everybody else.”

Why will that not continue to work?

Gantt asserts that after three six-year terms, voters finally realize that Helms is not a friend to the common people but rather to big business and that he has stood by while the state wallowed in decline, symbolized by its last-place ranking among states on Scholastic Aptitude Test scores last year.

Gantt’s supporters hope he is right.

“It’s time to give our people a chance,” said William Brunson, a black man who lives here and is a retired longshoreman.

“I think it would a good statement for us to elect a black person to a position of power and influence,” said Lanelle Clontz, a white realtor here. “I never thought (Helms’) kind of attitudes reflected the heartfelt feelings of the people of this state.”

Staff researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.