In a recent essay in RealClearPolitics entitled "Main Street of the Realignment," author Charles F. McElwee takes the reader on a tour of Pennsylvania where he delineates just where President-elect Donald Trump gained ground that proved enough for him to capture the Keystone State's 19 electoral votes.
In reporting on historically Democratic Philadelphia, McElwee points out that in the city's 114 majority Latino precincts, "Trump's vote share grew from 6.1% in 2016 to 21.8% this year."
But Trump scored his best performance in the city in a South Philadelphia ward, "where he earned nearly 74% of the vote from a heavily Italian electorate that had seen, in the [President Joe] Biden years, the boxing of a Christopher Columbus statue and the removal of a statue of Frank Rizzo, a still-revered former Democratic mayor."
It was actually a mural of Rizzo, onetime police commissioner of Philadelphia (1967-71) and two-term Democrat mayor (1971-79), in the Italian Market in South Philadelphia that was painted over in 2020 on order from the city's Mural Arts Commission. The statue of Philadelphia's first Italian-American mayor was actually miles away in front of the city's Municipal Services Building. Amid charges that Rizzo had been insensitive to the needs of his city's minorities, the statue was removed in 2020.
Last month, the voters in "Rizzo Country" responded with a resounding vote for Trump.
"The parallels between Rizzo and Trump are striking," McElwee pointed out, "Polls, for example, failed to capture support for both figures … because voters would not admit their true intentions. Rizzo, like Trump, was also a media maestro prone to bombast, hyperbole, and gaffes."
The six-foot-three inch, 250-pound Rizzo rode into City Hall on his boast that he had been "the toughest cop in America." In contrast to such sites of urban warfare as Detroit and Newark, New Jersey, Sal Paolantonio wrote in his critically acclaimed biography of Rizzo, "[I]n the summer of 1967, Philadelphia did not burn."
"My Dad was a friend to people of all races," Frank Rizzo, Jr., son of the late mayor and himself a former Philadelphia city councilman, told Newsmax. "Dad was aggressive in protecting the city of Philadelphia, but he was no racist. He didn't see people in terms of Black or white but whether they were law abiders or lawbreakers."
"In the summer of 1966, when a black family moved into all-white Kensington [a Philadelphia neighborhood]," wrote biographer Paolantonio, "[Commissioner] Rizzo personally went to the neighborhood to observe the police officers sent there to protect the family."
Nearly a quarter century after his death (when Rizzo had just won the Republican nomination for mayor and was seeking a comeback), he remains a revered figure in South Philly. Following the death of his widow Carmella in 2018, the estate sale at the former Rizzo home drew over 40,000 people.
"I think a lot of people remain loyal to my Dad, even after all these years," Frank, Jr. told us, "And I think they were really, really angry when his statue was removed and his mural was painted over. And they showed this anger by voting for someone like him — Donald Trump."
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.