Bershidsky: In SC Democratic primary, black voters take center stage

Anyone who thinks that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders can’t win black votes should have seen him at a prayer breakfast in Columbia on Tuesday. He may not have enough time to erase the big lead that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enjoys with the state’s African-Americans, but he’s far from hopeless on that front. It helps him that Clinton’s support, as elsewhere, is pragmatic rather than inspired.

Allen University, where the prayer breakfast took place, is a small, historically black school with a four-year graduation rate of just 5 percent and a loose admissions policy, where every student gets at least some need-based financial aid. A few professors were pretty much the only white people in the audience, and Sanders was the only white person on stage.

Sanders, who was brought up Jewish, has said he’s not “particularly religious,” but the people next to him were ministers, and when one asked the audience to bow their heads in prayer, the senator bowed too. When R&B star Shirley Murdock, a born-again Christian invited to sing at the gathering, asked those who had a dream to raise a hand, Sanders’ hand shot up with the others.

Sanders is an unlikely choice for the people who welcomed him at Allen. State Rep. Joe Neal, D-Richland, who is also a Baptist pastor, had to come up with a creative way to integrate the senator’s stump speech into what was essentially a prayer meeting. He recalled Sanders responding to a question about his faith by saying, “My spirituality is that we are all in this together.”

“That resonated with me,” Neal said.

Clinton’s better name recognition is still part of the reason she has such a large lead in South Carolina. The other part — Clinton’s pragmatic, step-by-step approach to the progressive agenda — may turn out to be more important to black voters in South Carolina than it was to almost exclusively white ones in Iowa and New Hampshire.

I talked about it with Ken Riley, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association’s Local 1422, which counts about 850 members, almost all of them black. Riley is a charismatic 62-year-old Charlestonian who fought his way through segregated schools and a harsh four years at Charleston College (then almost all white) to become an important union organizer. South Carolina has a Republican-dominated Legislature, and unions have a hard time in the state. “If someone wants to bring union jobs here, these guys say, ‘We don’t want them,’” Riley says.

Riley isn’t a Clinton fan in the way Sanders’s supporters are fans. “I’m not feeling the movement, not even seeing any signs or anything,” he complains, though a Clinton staffer told me that volunteers have spent 20,000 hours knocking on doors and calling neighbors.

If it were up to Riley, the labor unions would set up a third party and pick their own candidates. “Somehow that only ever comes up a year before a presidential election,” he says. Stuck with the Democrats, though, he just hopes for an easier battle in the general election: “If Bernie wins the nomination, we’ll support him, too, but we will have to pray and fight really hard for him to beat the Republicans.”

This kind of support for Clinton doesn’t amount to a “firewall” — a term that has been used to describe her advantage in more ethnically diverse states than Iowa and New Hampshire. I can’t help thinking that had Sanders been more active in the South before, he could have broken through the skepticism of important African-American leaders such as Riley. As it is, his effort is impressive but it probably comes too late both for South Carolina and for the Southern states that will vote on Super Tuesday. Clinton’s superior preparation counts for more here than it did in the first two states. African-American voters’ experience has taught them that it’s harder to get things done than to break things. They want a president who can make progress.

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 4:00 PM.