Michael Bloomberg received a frosty reception in Alabama just two days before Super Tuesday.
The billionaire former New York City mayor, 78, and Joe Biden, 77, visited Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma on Sunday morning to mark the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights activists violently clashed with Alabama State Troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“The people of Selma will struggle for the soul of the nation,” Bloomberg said during his speech as a diverse handful of protesters in the audience stood up and turned their backs to him.
Bloomberg has faced scrutiny for racially-tinged comments he’s made in the past about policies, such as stop and frisk and “redlining,” which critics have panned as being discriminatory to minority communities.
“It was my mistake, and I apologized for it. I’ve asked for forgiveness, but I can’t rewrite history, and I’ve got to make sure we don’t do it in the future,” he said specifically of New York City’s stop-and-frisk policing approach this week during a CNN town hall.
Alabama will present 2020 Democratic presidential candidates this Tuesday with the opportunity to earn some of its 52 pledged delegates, but the dynamic on display within the church Sunday doesn’t bode well for Bloomberg’s outreach efforts with black Democrats, a crucial, although not monolithic voting bloc within the party.
Here’s my video of congregants turning their backs on Michael Bloomberg at the Brown AME Chapel #BloodySunday service https://t.co/eaXJiBwBxr
— Daniel Newhauser (@dnewhauser) March 1, 2020
Bloomberg and Biden, the two-term vice president, will both participate in a reenactment of the walk across Edmund Pettus Bridge. Images of the violence that broke out at that spot 55 years ago helped build support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The pair, who are vying to dominate the center-left lane of the 2020 Democratic primary, will cross paths after Biden’s decisive win in South Carolina on Saturday, buoyed in part by his appeal among black Democrats in the first-in-the-South state and before they finally go head-to-head in 14 contests across the country on Super Tuesday.
