TONE MOUNTAIN, Ga., Dec. 22 — Thad Mayfield, 47, was not happy with the remarks that led to Trent Lott's demise as Senate Republican leader. But as a native of Greenwood, Miss. — just 20 miles from Mr. Lott's birthplace — he says he understands where Mr. Lott was coming from. He also says he believes he understands why the Republicans forced him from his leadership post.
"It certainly goes against what the president wants to project as the Republican image," said Mr. Mayfield, a black management consultant who now lives in Lithonia, Ga. "Like at the Republican convention, when African-Americans giving the speeches far outnumbered the black delegates. It's image control."
In interviews in a dozen cities and towns across the country this last-minute-shopping weekend, black Americans eagerly welcomed the chance to talk about the furor surrounding Mr. Lott's comment on Dec. 5 that the nation would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948 when Mr. Thurmond was an adamant segregationist. But their responses to Mr. Lott's removal ranged widely, from a newfound approval of President Bush to a renewed hostility toward him and all Republicans.
In a sign that the White House's public scolding of Mr. Lott and its thinly veiled efforts to depose him may indeed help the Republican Party mollify black voters, some credited Mr. Bush with engineering Mr. Lott's resignation as Senate Republican leader, and many expressed a measure of affection for Mr. Bush.
Yet others, including Mr. Mayfield, expressed distaste for the way the White House had handled the situation, saying it smacked of disloyalty and pandering. They said that Mr. Bush's forceful denunciation and undercutting of Mr. Lott seemed directed more at white swing voters than at blacks, and said the proof of the president's sincerity would rest on whether he now begins a national conversation about race in earnest or seeks merely to put the whole subject to rest.
Mr. Mayfield, who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George Bush in 1988 but did not support George W. Bush in 2000, said he saw Mr. Lott's ouster more as an intramural Republican power play than as a gesture to African-American voters.
"The bottom line is, I didn't think he should have resigned," he said while shopping here. "Actually, I think what happened had nothing to do with whether he's racist. Anybody born in Mississippi at the time he was, if not a racist, has at least some racial biases. I'm just not sure that the Republican leadership was comfortable with Trent, and this was their opportunity."
Stone Mountain, a quaint village on Atlanta's outskirts where the Ku Klux Klan once held cross-burning rallies, has in recent years become a lure for middle-class blacks. Zettia Harris, a teacher who grew up here, said Mr. Lott's remark came as a rude reawakening. "A lot of times my friends wouldn't want to come visit me because of the K.K.K.," she said. "What he said, Lott, really hit home, because you think you're ahead of all this, and then it's like taking you back to the past."
Ms. Harris, who said she was a committed Democrat, said she nonetheless took the president at his word on the subject of race and believed he was "trying to show black Americans that he can be sensitive."
But Mr. Mayfield said he was concerned more with "substance" in politics than with words, and cited among other things Mr. Bush's recent nomination to a federal appeals court of Charles W. Pickering, a Mississippian with his own much criticized record on race. He also pointed to the president's endorsement of Georgia's governor-elect, Sonny Perdue, despite Mr. Perdue's vociferous opposition to removing the Confederate battle emblem from the Georgia state flag. "Substantively, if you look at many Republican voting records, they wouldn't be dissimilar from Trent Lott's," Mr. Mayfield said.
"I wouldn't say it's hypocritical of the president, but in my mind, nominating a Charles Pickering was much more of a statement than what Trent Lott said at a party for Strom Thurmond," Mr. Mayfield continued. "It's disingenuous for Bush to be so dramatic in his denouncement of Trent Lott. And to take it a step further, it's also interesting — whether Sonny Perdue would acknowledge it or not — that the president could campaign so forcefully for Sonny Perdue given the flag issue surrounding Sonny's campaign. It just seems inconsistent to me."
Along the boardwalk in the Venice section of Los Angeles, Gregory Jackson-Collins, 44, a displaced Mississippian, said he had not been so offended by Mr. Lott's remarks. "I didn't think he meant it that way," he said, while peddling his paintings to beachgoers. "I thought he got caught in the moment." Mr. Jackson-Collins said he has been a Republican for 20 years, ever since he voted for Mr. Reagan. "It's more of an American party," he said. "Certain values like pride in your country, family — black people are down with that."
His feelings about affirmative action have led him in the same direction politically. "When I was in school, people would say, `The only reason you're here is because of affirmative action,' " he said. "Affirmative action makes you a second-class citizen. The Republican Party says forget all that. That's why I like the Republican Party."
Mr. Jackson-Collins is impressed by the prominent roles blacks play in the Republican Party. "You've got Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser," he said. "How many Democrats get that kind of love on the international stage?"
Still, Mr. Jackson-Collins said that though he liked Mr. Bush, he would not vote for him. "It all comes down to money," he said. "Democrats have more social programs. Republicans say you've got to get your own."
A main premise of Republican strategists appeared to be that blacks would be appreciative of Mr. Bush for deposing Mr. Lott. And in Richmond, Va., Galene Williams, a property manager, said she was.
"I didn't expect him to take the stand he did," Ms. Williams, 30, said, minding her 2-year-old as her mother and sister shopped at Victoria's Secret. "He's probably going to get a lot more black votes."
Yet many blacks interviewed said they disapproved of Mr. Lott's removal. "The one thing I found out about the Republicans that I think is interesting is the way they actually know this is his philosophy, but just because it became public, they have abandoned him, and that kind of disturbs me," said Elijah Pringle Jr., an analyst for Prudential Life Insurance in Philadelphia.
"It tells me the Republican Party — or the people who are in charge of the Republican Party, not the people at large — have no sense of loyalty," he said, after emceeing a youth dance performance in Mount Airy, a racially diverse neighborhood. "Even though Lott said things that were completely off the wall, I still think they should stand behind someone. Right or wrong, you stand behind them. Because if I make a mistake and I fix my mistake, I am a better person. But abandon me because you are afraid you'll lose some votes? Come on. That's not sincere. It is absolutely pandering."
Clearly, in some parts of the country, the Republican choreography that led Mr. Lott to step down as leader did little to mitigate the damage done by his remark.
In the Bronx, LaShanda Bell, 23, a Democrat, said the whole affair actually relieved her of a little guilt. "At times I felt I was being narrow-minded about how I felt about Republicans, but after that statement I don't regret how I feel about them," she said while sipping a white chocolate mocha drink at the Barnes & Noble in Co-op City.
"I don't think that black Americans have felt that Republicans truly stand for them and want to help them succeed." She added, apparently unmoved by the party's history, "I'm pretty sure that if they had it their way we'd all be enslaved still."
Moe Blackwell, 28, a Detroit clothier, said he believed most Republicans harbored views like Mr. Lott's. "He's just the only idiot in front of a camera that would say something like that," Mr. Blackwell said.
Marvina Johnson, 32, a health-insurance coordinator who was shopping in a Nashville mall, was even blunter. "When you think Republican," she said, "you think racist."
But those who said they viewed Mr. Bush and all Republicans as no less hostile to blacks than Mr. Lott were also more likely to cite old grudges to bolster their arguments: Mr. Bush's record as governor in Texas, where executions of blacks were commonplace, for example, and Mr. Bush's accession to the presidency only after a Supreme Court decision that several interviewees said set aside black voters' overwhelming preference for Al Gore.
"We didn't put him in office," Raymond Lewis, 33, a Richmond foundry worker, said. "So our votes don't count."
Even those who praised Mr. Bush for his handling of the Lott situation made clear that it would take much more for him to win their support in 2004 — and they invariably said that matters like war and economics would play a bigger part in decisions.
"If the economy doesn't change, he'll be like his dad, a one-term president," said Tommy Brittain, 53, who was walking to a computer store in Stone Mountain to get his Palm Pilot fixed. "We can't get Osama, we can't get Saddam. If we don't get either one, we go to war, and the economy's in the pits, he's out again."