South Side Marcus
| 👨🏿🏭 | |
| Era | The Fifties |
|---|---|
| Age | 33-39 |
| Home | Chicago, IL |
| Demographic | Black, Great Migration, urban |
| Lean | civil_rights |
| Race | black |
Marcus is an assembly-line worker in his thirties on Chicago's South Side who left Mississippi for a wage and a ballot. He belongs to his union, his church and the NAACP, and represents the Northern Black vote, Democratic since Roosevelt and no longer guaranteed.
Who they stand for
Chicago's Black population nearly tripled between 1940 and 1960 as the second wave of the Great Migration filled the South Side. Restrictive covenants confined Black residents to that area until the Supreme Court struck them down in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, and white violence followed at Cicero in 1951 and at the Trumbull Park housing project in 1953. Unlike Black residents of the South, the migrants could vote, and they did so through the machine wards run by Congressman William Dawson. Their votes had been Democratic since 1936, and Truman earned their support again in 1948 with a civil rights platform that drove the Dixiecrats from the convention and an order desegregating the armed forces. The decade tested that loyalty. The Senate's Southern bloc buried every fair-employment and anti-lynching bill introduced, Brown v. Board of Education came from a Chief Justice appointed by a Republican President, and the murdered teenager Emmett Till was a Chicago boy. In 1956, Eisenhower's share of the Black vote rose sharply, and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 passed under his presidency. Delta Pearl in the South still waits for the ballot. Marcus already has it, and he is deciding what it is worth.
Playing to them
Marcus judges a President by what actually reaches the plant gate and the housing office, not by what is said at the party convention. A fair-employment order with real enforcement power, a federal anti-lynching bill brought to an actual vote, enforcement of court housing rulings, and visible Black appointments to government posts each move him toward support. A speech asking for patience moves him the other way. He knows that civil rights measures usually die in a Senate committee chaired by a Southern senator, so a President who lets a bill die there and then blames the Senate has broken a promise to him. Winning Marcus's support means losing the support of Dixiecrat Dale and Minute Women Vivian outright, and it unsettles the support of Steel City Stan and Cannery Carl, whose union locals and neighbourhoods are on the front line of housing integration, and of Park Forest Phil and Park Forest Peggy, whose suburban streets are white by design. His loyalty to organised labour is real, so a President who is good on wages but silent on race keeps his support lukewarm rather than turning him hostile.
Where they live
The five states where South Side Marcus makes up the largest share of the electorate in the fifties:
- Washington DC
- Maryland
- Illinois
- New York
- Michigan