Sanders Can Win Black Voters Away From Clinton
Feb 17, 2016 11:08 AM EST
By Leonid Bershidsky
Anyone who thinks that Senator Bernie Sanders can't win black votes should have seen him at a prayer breakfast in Columbia, South Carolina, on Tuesday. He may not have enough time to erase the big lead 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's hand shot up with the others.
Sanders is an unlikely choice for the people who welcomed him at Allen. State Representative Joe Neal, 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 of his faith by saying, "My spirituality is that we are all in this together." "That resonated with me," Neal said.
Sanders is a white guy of 74. At one point in the meeting, he asked the audience whether any of them were around during Martin Luther King's march on Washington. "It makes me feel really old," he said, when no hands went up. "I was there."
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