Motor City Moses
| ✊🏿 | |
| Era | The Seventies |
|---|---|
| Age | 42-47 |
| Home | Detroit, MI |
| Demographic | urban, Black, union and church |
| Lean | Strong Democrat |
| Race | black |
Moses is a Detroit autoworker and church deacon who came north from Alabama after the war. He is the most reliable Democrat in the cast, representing the Black industrial working class of the Northern cities, organised through the union and the church.
Who they stand for
The second wave of the Great Migration filled Detroit's auto plants with Black workers in the 1940s. By 1973 the city was on the edge of having a Black majority, and it elected Coleman Young as its first Black mayor. Moses's bloc is that electorate. It is made up of Black autoworkers with seniority in the United Auto Workers, members of the NAACP, and church deacons. They voted almost as one for Humphrey, McGovern and Carter. The decade tests the slow, institutional political path that Moses chose. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers organised young Black workers at Dodge Main against both the union and the company. The Detroit police STRESS unit killed young Black men until Mayor Young abolished it in 1974. The Supreme Court's ruling in Milliken kept the suburbs out of Detroit's school desegregation plan. Wallace had won Michigan's 1972 Democratic primary on the issue of busing. Birmingham Bernice's vote was also never in doubt. What was tested for Moses was his patience. His fight was over the skilled-trades apprenticeship, the mortgage, and the police, rather than over the ballot itself.
Playing to them
Moses is easy for a president to keep and costly for a president to lose. A president who enforces open housing, directs the Justice Department to act against discrimination in the building trades and in Northern police departments, and defends the Voting Rights Act keeps his support easily, and the same policies keep the support of Birmingham Bernice. He does not forgive the Southern strategy. A president who courts Delta Earl and Macomb Bev with promises of neighbourhood schools and law and order, or who lets Wallace set the political terms, is read by Moses as taking the side of management against Black workers. He is also not won over by militant rhetoric, so a president who indulges the Black Panthers gains nothing from him and frightens Bensonhurst Sal. Winning his support costs the support of the white backlash bloc. It costs the support of Southie Sean, whose access to the building trades is the target of the Philadelphia Plan's affirmative-action rules. It also costs the support of Macomb Bev over busing and Delta Earl over federal judges. His UAW membership makes him and Hamtramck Stan allies on everything except which trades are open to apprenticeship.
Where they live
The five states where Motor City Moses makes up the largest share of the electorate in the seventies:
- Washington DC
- Illinois
- Delaware
- New York
- Michigan