South Side Dorothy
| 👩🏿🏫 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 35-50 |
| Home | Chicago, IL |
| Demographic | urban, Black, teacher |
| Lean | civil_rights |
| Race | black |
A Black schoolteacher on Chicago's South Side, a churchgoer and NAACP branch member who moved north during the Great Migration. She represents the Black middle class of the Northern cities, working to change the political system from within it.
Who they stand for
Chicago's South Side was the second-largest concentration of Black Americans in the country, with its own newspaper, the Chicago Defender, its AME churches, and the political wards controlled by Congressman William Dawson, whose voters helped carry Illinois for Kennedy in 1960. The Daley political machine took those votes but gave little back. Superintendent Benjamin Willis kept Chicago's schools segregated using mobile classrooms, and on Freedom Day in October 1963 about 225,000 pupils stayed home in protest. In 1965 the federal Office of Education withheld new school funding from Chicago over that segregation, but Daley demanded its restoration and Johnson restored it within days. This bloc learned that even a Northern Democratic mayor could limit what it received.
Martin Luther King's 1966 Chicago campaign ended in a summit agreement the city never kept. The Contract Buyers League, formed in 1968, organised against a fraudulent instalment-sale system that sold Black families houses at inflated prices without legal title. Harlem James is losing patience with this approach, while Dorothy documents each setback and keeps working within the system. Birmingham Rosa attends a similar church a thousand miles south, but without the right to vote.
Playing to them
She responds well to enforcement that reaches the North. This includes federal Title VI education funding withheld from segregated Northern school districts and kept withheld, a strongly enforced fair housing act, the Voting Rights Act applied outside the South, Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court, and a president who meets the NAACP as readily as big-city mayors. She is patient with a president making progress, but exacting with one who has stalled, and counts legislation that passes rather than legislation only proposed.
She does not forgive a president who gives in to Daley over school funding, who lets Hoover's FBI run a campaign against Dr King, or who offers law and order without a housing bill to make it fair. Winning her support loses Dixiecrat Dale and the Bible Belt Reverend. A school desegregation order in the North costs Levittown Larry, Suburban Betty and Teamster Sal, because it would reach their own districts. Catholic Mary is uneasy about Boston's schools. Union Hall Frank is divided between the party and his own neighbourhood of Dearborn. Harlem James and Birmingham Rosa support a president alongside her.
Where they live
The five states where South Side Dorothy makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Washington DC
- PR
- Illinois
- Maryland
- New York