Birmingham Bernice
| 🙏🏿 | |
| Era | The Seventies |
|---|---|
| Age | 64-69 |
| Home | Birmingham, AL |
| Demographic | Southern, Black, church elder |
| Lean | Strong Democrat |
| Race | black |
A retired laundress and church deaconess in her late sixties who registered after the Voting Rights Act and has not missed an election since. She is the cast's Southern Black voter, the most loyal Democrat in it.
Who they stand for
Bernice stands for the Black church vote of the Deep South, which the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enfranchised in practice for the first time. Black voter registration in Mississippi rose from under seven per cent in 1964 to nearly sixty per cent by 1967. The new voters organised through the same institutions they had always used. These were the churches that had supported the Birmingham campaign of 1963 and had buried the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. By the 1970s, this bloc was the one group in the South that Nixon's Southern strategy failed to win over. Their turnout is why Jimmy Carter carried the South in 1976 while losing most white Southern voters. Maynard Jackson's election as mayor of Atlanta in 1973, and Richard Arrington's election as mayor of Birmingham in 1979, show the same voters moving from protest into elected office.
Bernice differs from Motor City Moses in the institution behind her politics, not in the politics itself. His political organising happens through the trade union. Hers happens through the church, which is the older and more stable of the two institutions.
Playing to them
Bernice responds well to federal enforcement of civil rights. This includes Justice Department lawyers working in Southern counties, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare holding school districts to desegregation orders, poll watchers at elections, and judicial appointments that keep the federal courts sympathetic to civil rights. She also cares about Social Security and the quality of her grandchildren's schools. She does not forgive a president who courts the voters who supported George Wallace, who slows desegregation to please them, or who treats the renewal of the Voting Rights Act as open to negotiation. She regards symbolic gestures made without real enforcement behind them as an insult.
Winning her support tends to cost the support of Delta Earl, who lives a few hours away and opposes almost everything she wants, and Macomb Bev, for whom any school-busing order ends the conversation. Coalfield Roy is uneasy about this but can still be kept through economic policy. Motor City Moses tends to agree with Bernice on every question, so a president who has one of them as a supporter usually has both.
Where they live
The five states where Birmingham Bernice makes up the largest share of the electorate in the seventies:
- Mississippi
- Washington DC
- South Carolina
- Alabama
- Georgia