M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico via AP Images
Pete Buttigieg at a Sunday service in Rock Hill, South Carolina, October 2019
This past Monday, Pete Buttigieg wanted to show solidarity with predominantly black Charleston, South Carolina, McDonald’s workers marching for higher wages. Instead, he got an earful of “Pete can’t be our president; where was $15 in South Bend?” chants from members of the Black Youth Project 100, a social-justice advocacy group that disrupted the photo op. Bolting from the scene, Buttigieg quickly told one persistent protester that he had a plan to address sub-minimum wages, before his handlers bundled him into an SUV and drove off.
South Bend remains an open wound for Buttigieg, marring his ability to attract the black voters he needs to demonstrate cross-racial appeal in a cross-racial party. By the time votes are counted on Saturday night, the euphoria of Buttigieg’s Iowa and New Hampshire showings will likely be distant memories. If Buttigieg aimed to make inroads with African Americans in South Carolina, he should have cracked open that window by now—but he’s still stuck. The mayor of the 308th-largest city in America may sputter beyond Super Tuesday, but his presence in the presidential race would grow steadily harder to explain—save, perhaps, as Joe Biden’s understudy.
Buttigieg has dutifully visited black churches and other locales where South Carolina’s black Democratic voters are to be found. But the audiences that turn up at his public appearances have been predominantly white. A February 21 Winthrop University poll of likely Democratic voters in Saturday’s primary found a minuscule 1 percent of African Americans supporting him—and just 7 percent of all Democrats.
In South Carolina, when Representative James Clyburn, the state’s first African American elected to Congress, post Reconstruction, talks, black folk (especially older black folk) listen. Clyburn has endorsed Joe Biden and, with one in five black voters undecided, Buttigieg is unlikely to be the major beneficiary of many new black supporters.
“There’s a class of black voters that will look at him and say, you’re a mayor and you’re running for president? It seems to us you’ve skipped a lot of steps,” says Adolphus Belk, a professor of political science and African American studies at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. “You’re able to do this when black mayors of much larger cities would not be able to?”
Buttigieg’s rise into the stratosphere of Democratic presidential contenders has only served to spotlight his South Bend controversies. It’s quite likely that the imbroglio over former police chief Darryl Boykins, and Buttigieg’s responses to the Eric Logan shooting, capped by his disrespectful remarks to an older black woman at a local protest, have made it into the phones and homes of black South Carolinians.
For decades, Democratic presidential hopefuls have touted proposals to help the black community. Buttigieg’s offering is his “Douglass Plan,” which purports to address institutional racism in education, health care, and the criminal justice system, among other areas. Under the heading “Equal Employment and Business Opportunity,” the Douglass Plan would aim to create a federal “entrepreneurship fund” to invest in entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds. The plan would help students create businesses, award funds to underserved communities, and set up task forces to research and report on the ongoing effects and new remedies for systemic racism.
But the Douglass Plan raises as many questions about Buttigieg as it dispels. As chief executive of a small city with deep pockets of poverty, he may not have had much fiscal leverage to undo the consequences of centuries of carefully constructed economic discrimination and willful neglect. But in South Bend, he had other powers, including the ability to remove institutional barriers in municipal employment and contracting with minority businesses—problems his Douglass Plan pledges to attack. Yet Buttigieg did next to nothing to help African Americans, who comprise more than 25 percent of all residents, overcome those barriers when he had the chance as mayor.
In 2012, Buttigieg’s first year in office, three black businesses received roughly a quarter of a million dollars in municipal contracts. Three years later, the city failed to execute any contracts with black businesses. By 2017, only one African American business received a contract for just $707.88 out of about $100 million in total municipal contracts that year. It would be hard to defend a record like that if he were seeking a statewide office (and Buttigieg lost a race for Indiana state treasurer), much less running for president.
Frederick Douglass, the inspiration for Buttigieg’s plan, said, “Man’s greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.”
Given the discrepancies between Buttigieg’s South Bend tenure and his newfound zeal for binding up the wounds of institutional racism, it’s worth asking if the Douglass Plan is an action plan born of electoral necessity or some exquisite act of atonement. Either way, the response of African Americans in South Carolina and elsewhere isn’t likely to be We’ll vote for you; now let’s see what you and your Douglass Plan can do, but rather Go back to South Bend and see what you can do to make things right for black folk there. You can check back then and update us on your progress.
