Last Saturday in Linn Park in downtown Birmingham, a 41-year-old Congressman who went to Harvard and then graduated from Harvard Law School, announced that he was running for governor of Alabama in 2010.

There were red, white and blue signs with his name on them and a diverse crowd of about 500 cheered on the candidate. There was a little white girl, her face painted like an orange cat. There were black and white retirees in lawn chairs, sipping on soft drinks and bottled water. Then there were the business owners, lawyers and politicians—black, white and brown.

The candidate, Rep. Artur Davis, is black.

The multicultural campaign launch is noteworthy, of course, because it’s happening in Alabama.

This, after all, is where George Wallace stood in the door of the state’s flagship university in an attempt to keep blacks from registering for college; the state where civil rights marchers were beaten on a bridge in Selma when they tried to march to the state capital to highlight inequality in voting rights; the state where four little girls were killed in a church on a Sunday morning by a bomb planted by Klansmen. This, after all, is Alabama.

Davis seems undaunted by history. In his 15-minute speech on Saturday, he talked about the racial divide only briefly and focused instead on trying to move beyond it.

“... No matter what you think of what Alabama used to be, no matter what you think of what some people outside of Alabama say about our state, the Alabama we have now is a new one, the best one we’ve ever had and the one that will take us places we’ve never been.”

He’s not the only Alabamian who feels that way. Many now claim that the state has changed, and race doesn't matter in the same ways it used to. That may be true, but Davis has considerable obstacles to overcome. Only twice since Reconstruction have blacks been elected to statewide office in the state. First in 1982 when Oscar Adams was elected to the state Supreme Court, and then in 1994 when Ralph Cook was elected to the same office, after being appointed earlier as Adams’ replacement.