Janice Liddell could be describing a romance when she talks about her relationship with the ballot box and the Democratic Party.
At first she resisted getting involved. When she finally relented, she was filled with excitement and passion. Now, 28 years later, she is committed and comfortable.
A self-described "radical" who tried to dress the part with a big Afro and a lot of fringed suede, Liddell, 55, spent her college years on the edges of the Black Panther movement. She didn't trust the political system, and she never voted.
That changed in 1976, when her father, a Toledo, Ohio, barber who had marched on Washington with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., told her he believed in a candidate named Jimmy Carter. She cast her first ballot that year in Ann Arbor, Mich., where she was a graduate student. She remembers thinking, "My vote is going to help elect the president."
She hasn't missed a chance to vote for a Democrat since — a pattern that places her, along with her African-American sisters, at the core of the party's constituency. Studies of voting patterns show that black women are the most loyal Democrats of any demographic group.
"I think what the Democrats represent is much more in keeping with what black folks want in this country," said Liddell, a playwright and director of the center for faculty development at Clark Atlanta University.
Mary Parker, 76, a retired cafeteria worker in Reynolds, a town surrounded by cotton fields in rural Middle Georgia, puts it more plainly: "It looks to me like the Democrats always treat colored people better than the Republicans."
Their enthusiasm — and that of other black women — for the party nominee could determine the next occupant of the Oval Office.
In Georgia's 2000 Democratic presidential primary, 31 percent of the voters were black women — the highest percentage of any group. And in the 2000 general election, 94 percent of African-American female voters — regardless of age, geography or economic status — voted for Al Gore, according to an analysis by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based African-American think tank.
| Continue Gayle White's Atlanta Journal-Constitution article "Black women form backbone of Democratic Party support"
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