[W]hen Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders planned this month’s 2020 presidential campaign swing through the Southern states of Alabama, Georgia and North and South Carolina, he hoped to draw voters of color through calls for racial justice and public school reform.
Then the first two states adopted the nation’s most restrictive laws on abortion.
“All across this country at this very moment there is a well-funded attack coordinated by right-wing extremists to deny women the right to control their own bodies,” the Democratic primary candidate told an Asheville, N.C., crowd Friday in a speech livestreamed on YouTube. “It is not an exaggeration to say that banning legal medically assisted abortion and forcing women back into the arms of quacks will quite literally kill women.”
Sanders went on to lament public school underfunding and segregation as he unveiled a national grade K-12 reform plan on the 65th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling against “separate but equal” facilities.
“Every child has a right to a quality K-12 education, regardless of your race, regardless of your income, and regardless of your zip code,” he said upon offering a livestreamed speech Saturday in the same region of South Carolina where the case began. “For too long, we have seen devastating education funding cuts used to pay for massive tax breaks for a handful of corporations and billionaires. When we are in the White House, that greed is going to end.”
Sanders has prepared to share his school plan for some time, but made just as many headlines for his last-minute speech addition calling out Alabama and Georgia lawmakers who recently adopted increased restrictions on abortion, going so far in the Cotton State as to not exempt victims of rape or incest.
“How grotesque is that?” he told an Asheville, N.C., crowd of more than 2,000 people on the first stop of his four-day Southern tour.
“The goals of these laws is nothing less than overturning Roe v. Wade,” he said of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion. “Make no mistake about it, these laws are incredibly dangerous, they are regressive and they are blatantly unconstitutional.”
Sanders called many legislators who support such efforts “total and absolute hypocrites.”
“Day after day I hear my Republican colleagues coming to the floor of the Senate and they say, ‘We are conservatives, we believe in small government, we want to get the government out of the lives of the American people’ — except when it comes to half of the population and the right of women to make their own personal decisions.”
Sanders moved on to Orangeburg, S.C., on Saturday to unveil his “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education and Educators,” named after the late lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education before becoming a Supreme Court justice.
Sanders’ proposal calls for investment that serves high-poverty communities, supports special needs students, supplements local efforts to integrate school districts and secures universal school breakfast and lunch for every student year-round and annual starting educator salaries of at least $60,000.
The plan also would stop federal funding of new private charter schools and ban the small proportion that are for-profit models, introduce new charter school regulations to increase transparency, limit the pay of leaders and insure such efforts don’t siphon money from public institutions.
“Sanders’ plan makes him the only 2020 candidate to stand with groups like the NAACP in demanding an immediate moratorium on federal funding for new charter schools, which are exacerbating educational segregation,” his campaign said in a statement.
Resulting national news headlines have ranged from BuzzFeed News’ “Bernie Sanders Has a Plan to Fix Racial Segregation in American Schools” to New York magazine’s “Bernie Sanders Wants to Destroy the Best Schools Poor Urban Kids Have.”
“His proposed prohibition on for-profit charter schools and temporary ban on government spending on new nonprofit charters is a foray into the most divisive piece of the education reform debate,” Vox.com summed up the plan. “Charter schools have been a source of debate for years between mainstream liberals who see charters as a promising alternative to the traditional public schools and the labor left that considers them an attack on teachers unions because charters are typically unorganized.”
Sanders hopes his proposal will appeal to people of color he had difficulty attracting during his first presidential primary run in 2016, when exit polls found eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton won almost 80 percent of the black vote.
The southern swing’s impact, as seen in the press, so far is mixed.
“Nothing has changed because nothing has changed with Sen. Sanders,” Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative turned CNN commentator, told North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer. “It’s more than just saying, ‘I marched with Dr. (Martin Luther) King.’”
But Sanders, who’s set to wrap up his tour Monday in Alabama, found others were receptive.
“People are waiting to see if he is who he says he is,” Wade Jackson, a black voter in a crowd of nearly 1,600 people in Augusta, Ga., told that state’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He’s got to come to our communities and ask for our support.”
