Dawson is a race-baiting race-pimp pol working the upper end of the educational spectrum with some retail bloody-shirt politics.
He's scared to death, like all his liberal pals, that culturally conservative Southern blacks and whites will eventually reach some sort of down-home modus vivendi without liberal supervision......and that it might prove tough, later on, to split the vote in Southern States along racial lines by talking about "them" (sc., redneck knuckle-dragging etc. etc. honkies etc. etc.).
Splitting up the South is what liberal urban politics has been about since about the beginning of the 20th century. Splitting off other conservatives from the Southern white conservatives who elected the "Class of '94" freshmen, is what the liberals and Democrats have had as Priority One ever since the Reagan Revolution showed them how irrelevant they are. Remember, The New York Times began the campaign against the Confederate flag in the early 1990's, even before the '94 conservative victory in Congress. The termites were already at work.
This article highlights one of those liberal termites munching away on new wood. The contrast between his hate-propaganda and the attempts of the black legislator in Alabama to work with people and get things done is the real lesson here.
In my opinion that was the goal of Reconstruction Republican policies. But a independent yeomanry of the freed slaves politically allied with the white yeomanry was not in the economic interest of the Democratic plantation class and their desire for a "disciplined" labor force. Thus they condemned the South to a long term condition of us versus them tribalism.