"He demonized the nomination of an extremely well qualified jurist by falsifying his record and by misrepresenting his ideology," says Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, executive director of the umbrella civil rights group the Black Leadership Forum.

"I suspect Ashcroft underestimated what the importance was," says David Bositis, senior policy analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, a think tank focusing on issues important to African-Americans. "He'd been able to win elections as governor and senator with just a handful of votes from blacks so he probably thought it wasn't going to be that big a deal. Instead, it turned out to be why he lost reelection."

Indeed, blacks didn't just get mad, they got even. "Our efforts to defeat the senator began on the day Ronnie White's nomination was denied," says Rev. Sammie Jones, pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church in St. Louis. "Across the state we began making phones calls and to make plans to let Senator Ashcroft know come election time our voices would be heard. The Ronnie White situation is kind of our Alamo. We will remember that every time we hear Ashcroft's name."

In one of the clearest examples of retaliation voting, African-Americans, whose Missouri voter turnout rate reached record levels last November, turned Ashcroft out of office despite the fact that his opponent, Gov. Mel Carnahan, had died in a plane crash three weeks before the election. "Maybe Ashcroft thought we'd take it like we took it for so many years. He certainly didn't think he'd lose the election," says the Rev. B.T. Rice, pastor of the New Horizon Seventh Day Christian Church in St. Louis.

Rice claims Ashcroft had never been a friend to minorities. In a now-famous interview with Southern Partisan magazine, Ashcroft praised the "honor" of Confederate commanders and praised the magazine for making clear the Confederacy was "not a perverted agenda."

Ashcroft is widely known for opposing St. Louis' plans for school desegregation, blocking the nomination of Bill Lann Lee to head up civil rights enforcement at Janet Reno's Department of Justice, as well as Clinton's choice of Dr. David Satcher, the black nominee for surgeon general. But it was the senator's opposition to White that galvanized the black community. "We sent a very clear message that that kind of demagoguery would not be tolerated," says Rice. (He concedes that having voted Ashcroft out of office only to see him nominated for attorney general simply adds to blacks' frustration.)

Conventional wisdom suggests Ashcroft lost because his dead opponent's widow was chosen to succeed him and garnered sympathy votes. But Bositis argues Ashcroft, thanks to passions stirred by the Ronnie White saga, was headed toward a narrow yet decisive defeat even if the governor's plane had not perished. "The election was a referendum on the incumbent and he came up short," he says. (Interestingly, Bush won Missouri by 80,000 votes; Ashcroft lost by 50,000.)

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