The Republican Party – Steadfast in Our Promises of Racial Equality

Dr. Timothy Johnson

To my good friend Dr. Thompson:

There is no doubt you have done a great job recapping the past 40 years and the elusive relationship the Republican Party, in general, has had with the black community overall.

However, I feel you did not provide your audience with enough information to include the fact that in 1966 Edward Brooke, a black Republican from Massachusetts, was elected to the U.S. Senate and re-elected in 1972. I find it even more interesting that you don’t mention it took 20 more years for another black person (and the only black woman), Senator Carol Moseley-Braun to get elected to the Senate and another 12 years before the election of Senator Obama.

While you are well versed in history, I find many people I speak with are not.

In 1854, when the Republican Party was founded, it was known as the anti-slavery party.
The 20 Congressional founders wanted to end slavery not because it was
the popular thing to do, but instead it because it was the right thing
to do. At the conclusion of the Civil War, the first blacks elected to
Congress were Republicans and from southern states. In 1898, when the
Wilmington riots took place, 2,000 blacks and 1,000 white Republicans
were lynched and forced from their homes by Democrats. The KKK was
started by the Dixiecrats, who were Southern Democrats, affectionately
known as yellow dogs.*

Coming into the present times, are you not going to acknowledge J.C.
Watts’ historic accomplishments, General Powell’s numerous
accomplishments, or Secretary Rice’s historical accomplishments?

Are you willing to be so partisan that you wouldn’t even acknowledge
the fact that President Bush has appointed more blacks to senior level
positions in his administration than any other president in history,
including the so-called first black president, William Jefferson
Clinton?

And this year alone, three blacks have been elected [to the Republican]
National Committee, men and women from South Carolina, North Carolina
and Michigan. Black Republicans are being elected around the country
and are current candidates for local to national offices. Furthermore,
black community activists, like myself, are being elected to lead our
local volunteers. Re-establish our rightful places, without forgetting
we are “black Republicans not Republicans who happen to be black.”

Finally, for those who love history, we know history keeps track of our
past. Those failing to acknowledge and learn from it are doomed to
repeat it.

Please do not think the Republican party is asleep at the wheel or
unaware of its past history and relationship with people of color. If
they reach out to us and we don’t reach back, we can’t and shouldn’t
expect anymore than we have traditional received.

Like you, I am proud of what Senator Barack Obama, the fifth black U.S.
senator and the second black Democratic senator in our nation’s
history, has accomplished. But, I am fearful for us, as black
Americans, submitting ourselves to this single minded thinking that the
Democratic party is and will be our only political option.

I am free to think, feel and vote my preference. I pray to God that the
mental shackles will free more of us to think for ourselves, seek out
the real truth and vote for the person who will actually represent us
without controlling us.

That’s what I continue to believe and think Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
was saying to us during his work for civil rights and that is the
legacy that remains with me.

As a lifelong Black Republican are his words useless and meaningless
because of his political affiliation?* I’ll leave that up to you to
decide.

Timothy F. Johnson, Ph.D.

*Editor’s Note: In the interest of accuracy, additional information about terms used appears below.
•    The KKK was established in 1865, immediately after the Civil War,
to oppose Reconstruction and keep blacks from gaining the freedoms they
had won. Known for its violence, it lasted five years and was destroyed
by the Civil Rights Act of 1871. A new KKK was founded in 1915, in part
to deny rights to blacks but also in opposition to Catholics, Jews, and
other minority groups. Like its predecessor, it carried out thousands
of lynchings and other murders. The KKK remained powerful for more than
50 years, throughout the era when southern Democrats opposed civil
rights. When the south became a two-party region beginning in the late
1960s and early 1970s, many KKK chapters disappeared; other KKK leaders
and hard-line racists, like David Duke in Louisiana, switched to the
Republican party. (Duke ran for office twice as a Democrat, in 1975 and
1988; he re-registered in December 1988 and has run for five different
offices as a “white nationalist” Republican.)

• “Dixiecrats” refers to members of the States Rights Party, formed in
1948, which supported South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s
presidential bid. They were southern Democrats so upset by President
Harry S. Truman’s executive order to racially integrate the armed
forces, and further angered by his support of the party’s civil rights
plank, that they left the Democratic party. Thurmond later became a
Republican known for his opposition to civil rights laws.

• “Yellow Dog Democrats” were so named because traditionally they would
vote for “a yellow dog” before they’d vote for a Republican. The term
dates to at least 1900 and probably a decade before. In the 1960s, in
line with Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” many long-time yellow
dog Democrats switched parties to vote Republican when the Democrats,
under President Lyndon Johnson, passed and began to enforce civil
rights laws.

•    Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not make public his voting
registration. His father, Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., was a registered
Republican for many years, even endorsing Richard Nixon over John F.
Kennedy in 1960. By 1976 he was a firm supporter of Democrat Jimmy
Carter and gave the invocation at both the 1976 and 1980 Democratic
national conventions.