South Carolina’s primary: What moving it up would mean to Black voters

In just over a year, Democrats will break a 52-year tradition of kicking off presidential jockeying with the Iowa caucuses. Instead, pending approval from the full Democratic National Committee, South Carolina will host the first Democratic primary on Feb. 3, 2024. 

Admittedly, I did a double take when I read that President Joe Biden had called for this change. His primary reason? “Voters of color.” 

As he expressed in a letter to fellow Democrats, “For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process. … It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”

My cause for surprise wasn’t because I’m a native of the Palmetto State. It came from my political experiences in a Republican stronghold, and my home state’s sordid history of racial injustice. Last January, on the day before the state’s General Assembly convened, I dropped off letters to each state House and Senate member, petitioning for the removal of a white supremacist monument. I still haven’t received a response from a single member. 

That personal angst combined with Mr. Biden’s push to reshape the primary season reminded me of a more noble group of South Carolina state legislators – the mostly Black delegates who convened in Charleston in 1868 to draft a state constitution. The Reconstruction-era document was groundbreaking for that time in its attention to detail regarding Black South Carolinians and overall social uplift.

As the South Carolina Encyclopedia explains, “Race was abolished as a limit on male suffrage. Disfranchisement could be only for murder, robbery, and dueling. The Black Codes that had flourished under the constitution of 1865 were overturned. There was no provision against interracial marriage, and all the public schools were open to all races.”

The gains made in 1868, however tenuous, would be entirely overturned by a wave of white violence less than a decade later. In July 1876, the Hamburg Massacre started a series of events that ultimately yielded Jim Crow. The monument I wanted to have removed – honoring the one white man killed in the melee – is a harsh and ahistorical reminder of that massacre.

It’s important to remember the reasons for that violence. The “threat” was Black equality – or rather, Black equity. Black people were gaining essential civil rights: basic needs such as housing, food, and education. 

Over a century and a half later, too many Black people are still seeking those rights. The inequities between the haves and have-nots are vivid. More than presidential primaries, more than political platitudes, Black people in South Carolina, and all over the country, desperately want equity.

The failure of voting to level the playing field is a point of frustration for Black folks, as expressed in a January 2022 Associated Press story reporting that poll numbers for Mr. Biden among Black Americans had dropped 30 percentage points over the preceding year.

“I’m perplexed. At some points, I’m angry. I’m trying to see if there is anything redeeming,” George Hart, an English instructor at Benedict College, a historically black school, told AP. “I’m just so disillusioned, I don’t know what to say.”

If that’s a growing feeling among African Americans, as the poll suggests, could beginning the presidential primary process in South Carolina offer hope? 

At the very least, it’s a clarion call for Black people in South Carolina to organize around urgent issues and mobilize around the outlets who speak on behalf of basic needs. 

When the presidential primary came to the state in 2020, candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer lent their support to Denmark, South Carolina, a small town besieged with water contamination issues comparable to those of Flint, Michigan. 

This year marks the 155th anniversary of the 1868 convention. Black people in America continue to impact democracy in a way that benefits all of us. When Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, one phrase attributed to Black folks was that we “helped to save American democracy.” 

It is time America returns the favor. Promises of political diversity, or a louder voice in the presidential primaries, should not be seen as the endgame. I am reminded of the words of Robert Smalls, a South Carolina state representative during Reconstruction and later a U.S. congressman for several terms.

“My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be equal of any people anywhere,” Smalls said. “All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”