Clinton picks up emotional endorsements from black women in South Carolina

[Purveyor]

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton gathered emotional endorsements Friday from two prominent black women who implored blacks to set aside their excitement about her rival Barack Obama’s campaign to be the first black president.

In the run-up to Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic primary, the first in which blacks could play a pivotal role, Clinton has spoken to mostly white audiences while her husband, Bill, the former president, has courted blacks. But that changed Friday when she made an explicit pitch for black support in a speech at a historically black college in South Carolina’s state capital surrounded by prominent black supporters.

The New York senator was welcomed to the stage by two black colleagues from her home state — former New York Mayor David Dinkins and House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel — who praised Clinton as a public servant and friend.

Polls show blacks strongly supporting Obama in the state, while Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards roughly split the white vote.

Stacey Jones, a Benedict College Dean who described herself as "a woman, an African American, a size 9 wide and any other label you choose to use," said she understood why many blacks might pause before voting Saturday for Clinton.

---eoe---

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/2008/view.bg?articleid=1068976

[LisaM]

1. Perhaps they should consider this

(I got this from the PBS website, re the documentary on women's suffrage, "Not For Ourselves Alone").


~snip

It was only in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Republican politicians introduced the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution extending citizenship and suffrage to former slave men, that suffrage gained the central place in the battle for women’s rights. Then former abolitionist allies, including those who had long advocated women’s rights, divided over the movement’s priorities. Many abolitionists initially advocated universal suffrage, for both African Americans and women. When that was made impossible by the insertion of the word male in the 14th and 15th amendments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, with support from African Americans like Sojourner Truth, campaigned against any amendment that would deny voting rights to women. Among their opponents were former allies like Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass, who argued that it was “the Negro’s hour” and that women’s suffrage would have to wait.

snip~


I feel as if we are still fighting this battle. I have to admit, until the infighting began, I did not realize how much of a feminist I was! There were some really latent feelings buried there.

[BeyondGeography]

2. Did they tear up and everything?

:scared:

[ccpup]

3. you gotta love a women who's proud of being a size 9 wide

:thumbsup:

[Rock_Garden]

4. I'll bet they're all fed up to here with labels these days.

[tandot]

5. WTF? "emotional endorsements"

I guess we women folks can't give just an endorsement...it has to be "emotional" if we do it.



:thumbsdown:

[mzmolly]

6. "a woman, an African American, a size 9 wide and any other label you choose to use,"

:toast: Good for Stacey Jones! The labels are getting very tiresome.