South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg held a self-described grassroots campaign rally in Bronzeville on Tuesday night, but the overwhelmingly white audience he drew to the event in a historic black neighborhood reinforced the difficulty the Democratic presidential hopeful has had in connecting with African American voters.
Buttigieg did not acknowledge the makeup of the audience in his remarks or in answering questions from the 1,000 people at the sold-out event, but did touch on it briefly as he closed the hourlong rally with a plea for his supporters.
“Find the people who don’t look like most of you in this room and let them know they have the chance, not just to support this campaign, but to shape it,” Buttigieg said.
During the event, the mayor largely stuck to his usual stump speech, emphasizing the need for a return to American values in the wake of a divisive Trump presidency and his pitch for a new generation of leadership through various policies.
As part of discussing those proposals, Buttigieg touched on his Douglass Plan, named after abolitionist Frederick Douglass, that he calls “a comprehensive investment in the empowerment of Black America.”
The plan calls for tripling the number of black entrepreneurs within a decade, awarding 25% of all government contracts to minority business owners, creating rules to foster more diversity among teachers, increasing funding for historically black colleges and universities by $25 billion, and establishing “health equity zones” to ensure better health care for black Americans.
Among other provisions, Buttigieg’s proposal also calls for reducing the state and federal incarceration level by half, offering tuition-free college for low-income students and “massively increasing” federal resources for Title I schools, those with the largest concentrations of low-income students.
“The American black experience might as well put you in another country, and we can no longer allow this to exist,” Buttigieg said to a round of applause. “You cannot suddenly replace hundreds of years of racist policy with a neutral policy and say, OK, you got them done and expect inequity to work itself out of the system.”
Buttigieg backers made contributions as low as $25 and $50 to the candidate’s campaign to gain entry to the event while some paid up to $1,000 to attend a pre-event reception with the mayor. Before the doors opened, a long line of supporters stretched down Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and down a nearby side street.
Many of the supporters held “Chicago for Pete” signs, and wore bright yellow and blue “Mayor Pete” and “Boot Edge Edge” T-shirts (the campaign’s way of helping with pronunciation of the candidate’s last name).
“Whoa, where are they all coming from? I’ve been in this neighborhood for 20 years, and I ain’t never seen nothing like that before, all these white folks lined up over there. Never,” Ruby Laster said, pointing at the line of supporters as she waited for the bus across King Drive. “All I know about him is he’s a young man from Indiana. He should get some credit for coming down here, but you got to let the people know what’s going on. He needs to get some flyers in the businesses around here. I didn’t hear anything about it.”
Buttigieg has struggled to gain support from African Americans. A CNN survey last month found him polling at 0% nationally among black voters. A Monmouth University poll conducted last month in the key early voting state of South Carolina, where 61% of Democratic primary voters are black, found Buttigieg polling at just 1% among African Americans.
In an interview earlier Tuesday at the South Loop loft that houses his Chicago campaign office, the mayor said he’s found his Douglass Plan has been “extremely well-received,” but that getting it in front of more people is the challenge.
“It’s a matter of making sure we show we’re serious and introducing it to as many people as we can,” Buttigieg said, his voice echoing in a tiny conference room. “The number of voters who still say they haven’t really formed an opinion, it’s pretty large. The good news is it means we’ve got a high ceiling. But the challenge is we’ve got to get out there in a way that maybe would be different if I’d been a national figure for a couple of decades. We’re going to be doing it in a quick amount of time.”
Buttigieg’s efforts to reach out to black voters has been complicated by the fallout from the fatal police shooting in South Bend of Eric Logan, a black robbery suspect who authorities say was armed with a knife. There was no police camera footage of the shooting, which remains under investigation. The mayor spent much of July back in his northern Indiana city of 100,000 holding meetings with community members, including an emotional town hall that placed a frayed relationship with some black residents on full display.
While Buttigieg has acknowledged the difficulty of navigating the issue, he also has noted that his role as mayor places him closer to the issues and challenges black residents face. He said what makes his Douglass Plan unique is its acknowledgment that so many of the challenges that face black Americans are interwoven.
“Part of it is connecting the dots between all these different things. In South Bend, whenever we have a conversation about a challenging subject like policing, almost inevitably it winds up also being a conversation about economic empowerment, and seeing how health and education, voting and justice, entrepreneurship and home ownership are all connected,” Buttigieg said. “I think it’s a really key part of the plan.”
Asked before the event why his campaign chose to hold it at the Harold Washington Cultural Center, Buttigieg responded, “Well, certainly it reflects the importance of reaching out to diverse voters, but I also think it’s just very Chicago.”
Afterward, Cordaro Johnson, who was one of a handful of black supporters in the room, said it’s no secret Buttigieg has an uphill battle to attract more African American voters — particularly since former Vice President Joe Biden has such a strong commitment from many of them. Johnson arrived undecided but left a Buttigieg supporter, citing his command of the issues and a Barack Obama-like ability to relate to real people.
“I feel like all the black supporters are with Joe Biden. He is riding the wave of being Barack Obama’s vice president,” said Johnson, 32, who lives in Bronzeville. “So, he needs to find a way to reach those people, people like me, that he has actual real issues and real solutions to the problems that they’re facing. That’s the way he will get them.”
Outside the venue, Darnell Perkins couldn’t help but shake his head in wonderment.
“This is a good, middle-class black neighborhood. I’m glad he’s here,” said Perkins, 53. “But he needs to get some brothers to help him out next time and get some more black support.”
The Rev. Chris Harris, who introduced Buttigieg at the event, acknowledged as much and called on the hundreds in attendance to help diversify the support of Buttigieg’s campaign.
“Next time we have an event in Bronzeville, we need some more black faces up in here. We need some more brown faces up in here,” Harris, pastor of the Brightstar Church of God in Christ, said as the crowd cheered. “Next time, you can’t leave your black and brown friends at home. And if you don’t have some, you need to make some!”
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Twitter @BillRuthhart
