Castro makes push to woo black voters
African-American women an important bloc in Texas Democrat’s presidential campaign
WASHINGTON — When Julián Castro declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last month, he spoke of the Black Lives Matter movement and recalled Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., and other AfricanAmericans who died in confrontations with police.
On his campaign website, Castro paid tribute recently to Trayvon Martin, an unarmed AfricanAmerican teen who died seven years ago in a much-publicized Florida case in which the shooter was acquitted.
In early competition in the Democrats’ diverse field of presidential candidates, Castro, a former San Antonio mayor, is appealing broadly to minority voters and hoping that AfricanAmericans can bolster his longshot candidacy.
In wooing black voters, Castro intends to focus heavily on housing inequities and what he calls justice reform. His campaign is tailoring messages aimed specially at black women, a dependable voting bloc that has displayed increasing clout in elections around the country.
“We say after every election that black women showed up in droves,” said Castro’s campaign manager, Maya Rupert, who is African-American. “They are consistently voting not just for their own interests but for all progressive-minded people.”
She added: “I think he is really going to resonate with black voters.”
African-American women, who vote at a higher rate than African-American men, are an attractive target for Castro and other Democrats. Black women were credited with providing the margin that elected Alabama U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, in the December 2017 special election.
In the midterm elections last year, 94 percent of black women voted for Democrats, compared to 84 percent of black men, according to election-eve polling by an alliance including the AfricanAmerican Research Collaborative. In Texas, African-Americans overall voted 84 percent Democratic — including 86 percent for Democrat Beto O’Rourke in his strong but losing effort to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
Castro, who was housing secretary in the Obama administration, intends to campaign on an
array of matters related to housing, issues he sees as long-overlooked in national politics.
Rupert observed that African-Americans are less likely to own homes than whites and sometimes must pay half or more of their income on rents.
“That is debilitating across the board and particularly difficult when there isn’t family wealth to draw on. It is especially troubling among young people and especially young people of color,” she said.
Castro, speaking recently in early-voting New Hampshire at St. Anselm College’s “Politics and Eggs” forum, said he intends to make housing a major issue in his campaign.
“If we were to go and read the transcripts of 30 or 40 years’ worth of presidential debates, I bet you the issue of housing hasn’t even come up once,” he said.
Castro’s campaign received a boost recently when Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has Mexican heritage, announced that he won’t join the Democratic field — leaving Castro as perhaps the only Hispanic who will make the race.
In seeking to expand his minority backing, Castro believes that his background mirrors that of many African-Americans. He and his twin brother, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, grew up in San Antonio in modest circumstances, he tells audiences. They went to elementary and middle school across from public housing projects. Their mother and father never married, and their father was absent from the home after they reached the age of 8.
Castro was more revealing in his recent memoir, “An Unlikely Journey,” writing about the hardship of growing up without a car in the family and watching his mother’s friends drop off boxes of food.
In the campaign’s early going, Democratic hopefuls offer competing stories of difficult pasts sprinkled with appeals to minorities.
When Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared her candidacy, she talked of growing up in Oklahoma “on the ragged edge of the middle class. …When my daddy had a heart attack, my family nearly tumbled over the financial cliff.”
Speaking in the shadow of old mills in immigrantrich Lawrence, Mass., she added: “The path to economic security had gotten tougher and rockier for working families and even tougher and even rockier for people of color.”
As the son of IBM executives, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, an African-American, didn’t experience the hardships rivals talk about. Instead he recalled obstacles when his family tried to in move into a neighborhood with better schools “because of the color of our skin.”
“I am the only senator who goes home to a low-income, inner-city community,” Booker says in the video announcing his candidacy.
When Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota announced her candidacy last weekend on a Mississippi River island, she recounted that her grandfather had worked in an iron ore mine 1,500 feet below ground and stuffed money in a coffee can so her father could go to college.
The Mississippi, she said, leads to Memphis, Tenn., where the Rev. Martin Luther King “preached about the mountaintop where he’d seen the promised land.”
Even in the post-Barack Obama political era, race can become an issue in Democratic politics, as Sen. Kamala Harris of California found out last week when confronting disparaging comments about her heritage.
Harris is the daughter of an India-born mother and cancer researcher who immigrated to the United States and a Jamaican-born father who became an economics professor after arriving in California.
“I was born black, I will die black and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand,” she said, responding to an interviewer’s question about “the legitimacy of your blackness.”
In San Antonio, Castro made allies with AfricanAmericans as mayor and before that as a city councilman, according to interviews.
“It’s not just housing, it’s education, too,” said Dwayne Robinson, who helped Castro engineer the city sales tax hike in 2012 to support Pre-K in San Antonio.
Robinson said he worked among other African-Americans to build support for initiatives by both Castro brothers.
“There were a lot of concerns about the Castros,” he said. “But here are these two young men who basically come from a single-parent household, two inner-city kids with a father not being there, who overcame all of that, went to an Ivy League school and came back home to San Antonio. What I said was that if they were African-Americans, you would be proud of them.”
Jelynne LeBlanc Burley, a former San Antonio deputy city manager, recalled Castro’s role in directing $55 million in federal Housing and Urban Development grants to the city’s historically African-American East Side.
“His hands are dirty; he has been in the trenches,” said Burley, now president and CEO of the Center for Health Care Services.
Burley, who also is president of the National Forum of Black Public Administrators, said that Castro earned a reputation among AfricanAmericans as HUD secretary in the Obama administration for anti-discrimination initiatives, broadband expansion and other public housing initiatives.
“It’s who he is, always trying to right inequities. He searches for ways to improve opportunity for those who haven’t been granted privilege,” she said.