155, 000

155,000 MORE Black voters.

They were moved. They were stirred. I happen to believe they looked at those children, and said, ‘We have to believe…if only for them.’

Make no mistake: What happened in South Carolina today was a moral reprimand delivered to Bill and Hillary Clinton by a united Democratic Party–but especially by the African-American segment of that party.

I chased the Clintons around South Carolina yesterday and the absence of black faces at their rallies was striking–eerie almost, the absence a palpable presence, as if the rooms were filled with ghosts. In Penn Center on St. Helena Island, which has been a historic nexus of the civil rights movement going back to the civil war–a place where Martin Luther King Jr would sometimes go to live in a rude cabin, and to write and think–Bill Clinton looked out on a lily-white crowd and he must have known what he was seeing: a silent, decorous protest against him by a segment of the Democratic Party that was always there for him in the past, the churchified African-American middle class, a group that represents the Democrats’ canary in the coal mine when it comes to injustice.

We tried and tried to tell people but most just didn’t want to listen. If you look around at what many are saying on some white political and other blogs, though… it seems many are listening *now*.

I love the story about the youngster and the tree too. Also, it’s almost as if some think that all this happens by magic (maybe Magic Negro magic) or something, or with soaring words… it’s not often mentioned about the tremendous on the ground work that is done, and is being done in the later states.

I’m curious to see how that plays out on Feb 5.