- Originally published in The New York Times September 19, 2004
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
By Henry Louis Gates Jr..
The
moment when the Republican Party lost black America can be given a
date: Oct. 26, 1960. Martin Luther King Jr., arrested in Georgia during
a sit-in, had been transferred to a maximum-security prison and
sentenced to four months on the chain gang, without bail. As The Times
reported, John F. Kennedy called Coretta King, expressing his concern.
Richard Nixon didn't.
''It took courage
to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this,'' King's father said
about Kennedy at a church rally. ''I've got all my votes and I've got a
suitcase, and I'm going to take them up there and dump them in his
lap.'' In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower had received nearly 40 percent of the
black vote. (I myself sported an ''I Like Ike'' button in first grade.)
In 1960, Nixon received 32 percent. A few years later, as the
civil-rights era heated up and the G.O.P. pursued its ''Southern
strategy,'' blacks effectively became a one-party constituency.
But at what cost? Speaking to a National Urban League audience in July,
President Bush quoted an Illinois legislator's piquant remark that
''blacks are gagging on the donkey but not yet ready to swallow the
elephant,'' and went on to pose a series of questions that black people
themselves have been asking: ''Does the Democrat party take
African-American voters for granted? Is it a good thing for the
African-American
community to be represented mainly by one political party? How is it
possible to gain political leverage if the party is never forced to
compete?''
Of course, such questions have an unspoken corollary: Why support a party that has written you off?
Some black Republicans will tell you that however important the legal
reforms of the civil-rights era had been 40 years ago, blacks today
will be well served by the party of school reform and faith-based
programs, the party of the so-called ownership society. ''These are
going to be the pillars of the black community,'' Condoleezza Rice told
me. ''In my little community in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 50's and
60's, there were black-owned businesses everywhere, and everybody owned
their own homes. That made our community strong. We've got to get back
to that.''
Karl Rove, President Bush's
chief political strategist, says the Republicans' low levels of black
support are unhealthy for the party -- once the party of Lincoln, after
all -- and for the African-American community. Part
of what's gone wrong, he told me, is that Republicans don't advertise
in black media markets. ''If the conversation in the community is
predominantly Democrat, and we don't make the argument on urban radio
and we don't pay attention to the African-American
newspapers, and if we don't campaign in the community, then why are we
surprised when people don't hear our arguments and don't vote for our
candidates?''
What's more, many blacks
are evangelical Protestants, and tend to be more conservative than
their white counterparts on ''social'' issues like gay rights and
capital punishment. ''The Democratic Party is not 90 percent more black
friendly than we are,'' Rove exclaims.
Why, then, are blacks such down-the-line Democrats? My Harvard
colleague Michael Dawson, a descendant of a black Democratic
congressman from Chicago, agrees with Rove that black people are
socially conservative. But the issues they vote on are racial and,
especially, economic.
When it comes to race, he points out, parties have multilevel
strategies. Republicans can appeal to white moderates by signaling a
measure of compassion about problems of race. ''On the other hand,''
Dawson observes, ''you can go into places such as Florida and try
systematically to disenfranchise poor black votes.''
The real watershed, in his view, was the 1980 election. Richard Nixon
and Gerald Ford tried to build up, and win over, a black middle class;
the Reagan team figured they could do better by shutting out the black
political establishment and mobilizing white conservatives. ''Black
elites were shocked to find out that with Reagan and his advisers,
there were no longer 'good Negroes' and 'bad Negroes,''' Dawson says.
What the big-tent rhetoric ignores is that a more ''black friendly''
G.O.P. might pay a price in white support. ''The Republicans would lose
more white votes than they would gain black votes,'' Dawson says. And
so blacks, as a one-party constituency in a two-party system, get
sidelined.
It isn't that the candidates won't call. It's just that they're calling collect.