Sanders bid for black vote in Baltimore highlights struggles to broaden appeal
By Ben Jacobs
A year to the day that the first people were arrested in protests over the death of Freddie Gray, a black man whose death in police custody later set off riots, Bernie Sanders brought his political revolution to Baltimore.
Sanders, who was preceded by a former head of the NAACP, a prominent local pastor and the actor Danny Glover, tried hard to convince African Americans that he was attuned to the problems of a majority black city with a history of racial tension. But the crowd of about 6,000 was mostly white.
Despite the efforts of prominent African American supporters and many mentions of his long support for the civil rights movement, Sanders’s campaign has struggled and sometimes failed spectacularly to appeal to African American voters. Exit polls have shown black voters favor Hillary Clinton by lopsided margins around the country, and the former secretary of state won among African Americans in New York by a 3-to-1 margin on Tuesday.
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Daniel Hall, an African American attendee from Cockeysville, Maryland, expressed disappointment about the mostly white crowd. “Even here there’s not even a lot of us and there should be.”
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A more typical attendee was Daniel Swann, a college student at Johns Hopkins University, who came to the rally in a bear suit and the message that he was “Bearnie Sanders, a socialist grizzly bear” who wanted to “redistribute the honey”.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/23/bernie-sanders-baltimore-black-voters-maryland-primary
= new reply since forum marked as read
can you see them from under there....
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