Birmingham Rosa
| 👩🏿🍳 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 40-55 |
| Home | Birmingham, AL |
| Demographic | Southern, Black, domestic worker |
| Lean | civil_rights |
| Race | black |
A Black domestic worker in Birmingham, Alabama, in her forties, kept from the ballot by Jim Crow. She stands for the Southern Black population whose treatment decides a president's standing on civil rights, whether or not it can vote for him.
Who they stand for
In 1960 roughly a quarter of voting-age Black Southerners were registered to vote. In Mississippi and Alabama's Black Belt counties, it was a few per cent or none. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and the threat of losing a job or being killed kept them off the rolls. Domestic service was the largest occupation for Black women in the South, and this voter worked inside white homes in Birmingham, one of the most violently segregated cities in the country.
The civil rights movement organised directly among people like her, beginning with the Birmingham campaign of 1963, when police commissioner Bull Connor used dogs and fire hoses against demonstrators. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that year killed four girls. The Selma campaign followed in 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the decade's response to her situation. Black registration in Mississippi rose from under a tenth to a majority of voting-age Black residents within three years of the Act. Harlem James already had the vote and was losing patience with the pace of change. She gained the vote during the decade and voted for the party that delivered it.
Playing to them
She judges a president by his actions when a Southern governor defies him. She wants to see federal marshals sent to enforce a school integration order, a voting rights bill introduced and fought for in Congress, and a Justice Department that prosecutes a church bombing. Words about patience or gradualism cost him support with her. She has been told to wait her whole life. She responds to a president who stands publicly with Dr King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to faith spoken sincerely, which she shares. A president who is silent while Wallace stands in the schoolhouse doorway has taken Wallace's side.
Winning her means losing Dixiecrat Dale and the Bible Belt Reverend. It also unsettles Suburban Betty and Levittown Larry, who are sympathetic in principle but nervous about their own school districts. Harlem James and South Side Dorothy move with her without additional cost to the president, and Faculty Eleanor and Campus David approve of the same enforcement.
Where they live
The five states where Birmingham Rosa makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Washington DC
- Mississippi
- Alabama
- South Carolina
- Georgia