Black Americans Overwhelmingly Back Democrats. There’s a Reason For That

Stephen A. Smith once said Black Americans “disenfranchised ourselves”  and were “suckers” for unflinching support of Democratic Party candidates for office. This year, Black supporters of Black Republicans like Byron Donalds of Florida are saying much the same thing.

But an examination of the historical record would make clear that Black Americans have not always been Democrats, nor is their current support for Democrats unconditional.

The election of 1868 was the first in which some Black Americans were allowed to vote. Their choice in that election was Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican Party nominee.

The reason isn’t hard to understand. Grant had led the Union armies to victory over those of the Confederacy, which had sought to continue and expand the enslavement of Black Americans – a policy embraced by Democrats of that time.

So, back the guy who backed your emancipation, or roll with those who’d have you in chains? The Black vote in 1868 didn’t have jack to do with party; it was basic common sense.

For the next 60 years, Black Americans generally voted for Republicans. Again, that wasn’t because they were blindly loyal to Republicans. It was because they were blindly loyal to a set of principles holding that the federal government should be a guarantor of minority safety and security and that its revenue should be used, in part, to aid the aged and infirm.

Those stopped being the guiding principles of the party in the late 1920s under Herbert Hoover, who watched with intellectual detachment as Black and other Americans caught hell in the aftermath of the crash of the stock market and the onset of the Great Depression.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised during the 1932 campaign to put the government to work to help those who were suffering. In other words, FDR picked up the mantle of government protection and support that Republicans had laid down.

So, Black Americans began to vote for Democrats.

It is certainly true, as Black Republicans enthusiastically point out, that Democrats once backed slavery and, later, segregation. Some of that mindset remained in place even after FDR’s ascension, particularly in the South.

Some of this country’s most infamous bigots, including knuckle-draggers like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, were Democrats.

But many of those politicians eventually switched to the Republican Party when Democrats embraced civil rights. FDR’s successor, Harry S. Truman, desegregated the U.S. military in 1948 and backed a civil rights plank in the party’s platform.

Not surprisingly, 1948 was the first year a majority of Black Americans identified themselves as Democrats, according to a study from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Some Black Americans continued to vote as their parents and grandparents had, but support for civil rights became seen by other Black Americans as an expression of the federal government’s commitment to the physical safety and advancement of Black Americans in much the same way Grant and other Republicans had called for in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The switch Black Americans made to the Democratic Party hardened into what we’re likely to see again on Tuesday, when something like nine out of 10 Black voters across the country will back Democratic candidates.

That’s not blind loyalty. It’s not self-disenfranchisement. That’s steely-eyed support for candidates who support what they support – however tepidly at times.

Black Republicans may be big mad that their brothers and sisters don’t back the candidates they do, but castigating them as blind followers or suckers ignores and twists history. 

Wayne Washington is a veteran journalist in Florida who has covered race, government and politics throughout his career.