Black Politics

By Omar H. Ali
 

In the decades following Reconstruction, African Americans continued to push for an expansion of their democratic rights, despite facing increasing political marginalization and economic hardship. Growing debt, low commodity prices, and low wages kept most African Americans dependent upon large landowners. By the late 1870s most former slaves had become sharecroppers, indebted to local landlords and merchants on whom they relied for supplies, credit, and land on which to farm. Even though many black men and women had secured land after Emancipation, this usually consisted of small plots—making it difficult for them to compete with cash crops in a global marketplace. Brazil, Egypt, and India for instance had become major cotton-producing nations, pulling down prices and requiring farmers in the Cotton Belt to grow ever larger harvests in order to make a profit.

The collapse of Reconstruction in the late 1870s came with the reassertion of the Democratic Party in the South—then home to over 90 percent of African Americans in the nation. Forcibly removed from offices, African Americans and their remaining Southern white Republican allies were left to defend themselves against the old plantation class as the leaders of the two major parties negotiated what later became known as the Compromise of 1877. In that year the national Republican Party, in a bargain with the Democratic Party over contested Electoral College votes in Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Oregon, took the U.S. presidency in exchange for Congressional assurances that the last federal troops in the South would be withdrawn—definitively ending Reconstruction.

With few exceptions, notably North Carolina's Second Congressional District (one of several Republican strongholds in the south), the Southern Democracy—the planters, white-dominated courts, law enforcement, and paramilitary forces affiliated with the Democratic Party—had retaken control. African Americans sustained a significant legal blow in 1883, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Law of 1875 unconstitutional. Through a series of court cases the Supreme Court weakened the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of black citizenship, narrowing federal protection of the right to vote among African American men twenty-one or more years old, as guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Black voter participation plummeted as a consequence: in South Carolina it fell from 96 to 26 percent between 1876 and 1888; in Georgia black voting fell from 53 to 18 percent during the same period.

Black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers responded to the stripping of their political rights by organizing their communities to act. Tens of thousands of Southern African Americans migrated west; for instance, in the Exoduster movement between 1877 and 1881, seventy thousand men, women, and children left the south and settled in Kansas. Other African Americans challenged the Democratic Party by joining white independents and running third party and independent-Republican fusion campaigns; still others recommitted themselves to building community-based institutions of mutual support and education.

Independent black-white electoral coalitions—such as those formed in the Virginia Readjustment Party, the Texas Greenback Labor Party, and the Mississippi Republican-Greenback fusion in the late 1870s and early 1880s—mostly ended in defeat. The electoral failures in the years following Reconstruction, economic instability, and the erosion of civil and political rights led many African Americans to shun electoral politics altogether and focus instead on strengthening their own local communities. African Americans spread public schools; hundreds of Baptist and African Methodist Episcopalian churches were established in the countryside, as were benevolent societies and fraternal orders such as the black Freemasons and the Order of Mosaic Templars. The networks these institutions created in turn lay the base for the emergence of a broad, black-led agrarian movement for political and economic reform.

Black Populism

By the mid-1880s African Americans had established a series of agrarian and labor organizations that included the Colored Wheels in Arkansas, the Cooperative Workers of America in South Carolina, the Knights of Labor in North Carolina, and the Colored Farmers Alliance in Texas. Fed by overlapping membership in the black churches, fraternal orders, and mutual aid groups, these rural organizations formed the nexus of black populism. The movement took electoral form in the early 1890s through the founding and subsequent development of the People's Party and through fusion efforts with the Republican Party, which commanded the loyalty of most African Americans. Leading black populists included the Reverend Walter A. Pattillo, state lecturer for the North Carolina Colored Alliance, and John B. Rayner, known as the “silver-tongued orator of the colored race,” who served on the People's Party's state executive committee in Texas. Few black women held official leadership positions but several women did serve in such capacities, including Lutie A. Lytle and Fanny “the Queen” Glass.

The Southern Democracy responded to the rise of black populism with a vengeance; their response included propaganda warning of a “second Reconstruction,” legal maneuverings to disfranchise African-American voters, manipulation of votes at the polls, and escalating violence. The white press fueled fear among its readers of “Negro rule” to create divisions among black and white independents. Lynchings, often organized as public spectacles advertised ahead of time, soared in number, as did attacks on and assassinations of independent political leaders, black and white. Throughout the 1890s more than a hundred lynchings were reported annually, with a chilling effect on political efforts to challenge the Democratic Party.

Democrats responded to the growth of independent politics by legally disfranchising African Americans by rewriting state constitutions, beginning in Mississippi in 1890, followed by South Carolina in 1895 and Louisiana in 1898. African American electoral participation fell dramatically as a result of grandfather clauses stating that only those whose grandfathers could vote prior to the Civil War were eligible to vote, poll taxes (a fee charged to cast a ballot), white primaries in which African Americans were excluded from the first round of voting, and other discriminatory laws.

In the midst of local and state-based attacks on African American voting rights came the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which sanctioned segregation, not only providing its legal justification but also placing the imprimatur of the nation's highest court on the policy. The Court's majority decision supported the practice of having separate public facilities for black and white people (in this case, railway carriages in Louisiana). With the backing of the Supreme Court it was only a matter of time before Jim Crow—the legal disfranchisement and segregation of African Americans, primarily in the south—took hold. By the turn of the century most public facilities were segregated along racial lines and most African Americans were disfranchised in the south, as were tens of thousands of poor whites unable to pay poll taxes.

The Southern Democracy had succeeded in crushing the political threat posed by black and white populists in the 1890s; now it even had the backing of the federal government to help ensure against future threats that independents would come together at the ballot box. Many African Americans expressed their reluctance to engage in the electoral process, fully aware of the repercussions for challenging the Southern Democracy. It was in this context that Booker T. Washington, and the philosophy of accommodation that became attached to his name, gained prominence.

Washington and DuBois

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), a former slave from Virginia, led the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from the early 1880s through the turn of the century. He became the nation's best-known black leader, taking the exalted place of Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895. That year, at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, Washington publicly supported segregation in combination with industrial education for African Americans. As he put it, “In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” His views were generally embraced by southern white leaders (and his programs funded by northern white businessmen) since they largely posed no political threat to the established order, serving instead as a counterweight to black leadership that demanded the full rights and prerogatives of citizenship for African Americans.

While preaching accommodation and a rejection of black political participation, Washington backed candidates for public office through his “Tuskegee Machine,” the name given to his considerable political and economic influence. Moreover he privately financed legal cases against electoral discrimination. For instance he challenged grandfather clauses enacted in Louisiana and Alabama. Washington, with his focus on economic self-help and industrial education, is often contrasted with W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), who spoke out against Jim Crow and urged African Americans to take direct political action. In practice however their political differences were less obvious than has usually been claimed.

As Southern Democrats consolidated Jim Crow through state constitutional amendments and municipal codes, Du Bois, a middle-class, Harvard-trained historian who grew up in the north, became one of Washington's most vocal critics. Du Bois deplored Washington's urging accommodation over political action, despite having initially praised him for his extraordinary personal success in rising out of slavery. Du Bois, who would come to be regarded as the twentieth century's most influential African American before Martin Luther King Jr., grew increasingly militant in his call to halt the erosion of black civil and political rights.

A new generation of black leaders, many of whom took their cues from Du Bois, began to emerge. These leaders, most of whom eventually established themselves in northern cities, included the suffragist Ida B. Wells, most famous for her anti-lynching journalism; William Monroe Trotter, the fiercely independent advocate for black civil rights; Cyril Briggs, founder of the African Blood Brotherhood and later a Communist Party leader; Marcus Garvey, the eminent Black Nationalist who led the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); and A. Philip Randolph, the socialist labor organizer who headed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union (BSCPU). Fueling the growth of black political action—broadly defined—in the north was the massive demographic shift under way as African Americans moved out of the rural south to urban centers in the north.

The Great Black Migration

In the early twentieth century African Americans migrated out of the south in the hundreds of thousands, then millions. In what became known as the Great Black Migration they moved to Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and other thriving northern cities. Black migration out of the south, driven by economic depression coupled with Jim Crow (and later with the increasing use of the mechanical cotton picker), accelerated with the advent of World War I as factory jobs were opened to black workers. Although economic incentives and greater political freedom drew substantial numbers of southerners to the north, the vast majority of African Americans remained in the south.

In the north, Du Bois organized a small group of black men and women in 1905, dubbed the Niagara Movement. They renounced Washington's accommodation policies and demanded—as Du Bois put it—“full manhood suffrage.” Their short-lived organization established thirty local branches, enrolling African Americans who began to speak out on civil and political rights. The Niagara Movement's most valuable contribution lay in serving as the immediate forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), established in 1909, which became the preeminent civil rights organization of the twentieth century. Through its numerous legal campaigns, the NAACP helped to erode Jim Crow by challenging the constitutionality of local and state laws in the south.

While legal challenges to Jim Crow were under way, many black leaders, chiefly Du Bois, argued that the participation of more than 400,000 black soldiers in the armed forces during World War I, and their wartime sacrifices, had entitled African Americans to first-class citizenship. Such demands, and the manner in which they were made, inspired the “New Negro”—African Americans, especially younger ones—to assert themselves. Centered on Harlem, this new political energy was enhanced by Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant whose UNIA would come to include four million or more members, with chapters across the United States, in the Caribbean, Central and South America, England, and Africa.

In the years following World War I Garvey commanded the largest following of black people in the nation's history up to that time. His arguments for economic self-sufficiency and his articulation and projection of black pride through Black Nationalism reinvigorated the African American community. This was at a time when lynching of black men and women continued unabated, and “race riots” led to the death of dozens of African Americans at the hands of white mobs (East Saint Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919, and Tulsa in 1921). Garvey, who sharply criticized Du Bois and the integrated NAACP for its elitist leadership, brought life and dignity to millions of poor and working-class African Americans. Long after he was deported in 1927 on trumped-up charges of mail fraud, Garveyism served as an inspiration to black people throughout the African Diaspora.

By the late 1920s more than two million African Americans had moved north. In 1900 only 22.7 percent of African Americans were living in urban centers, but by 1950 this had increased to 61.7 percent. The influx of Southern African Americans into cities such as Chicago and New York in the early part of the century led to greater black political influence in those places. One sign of this development was the 1928 election of the Chicago-based Republican Oscar DePriest to Congress, making him the first African American to enter the U.S. House of Representatives since the North Carolina Republican George H. White's departure from Congress a quarter of a century earlier.

From Republican to Democratic Identity

Although most African Americans identified themselves as Republicans, the Great Depression of the 1930s saw a significant shift in party identification among black voters toward the Democratic Party. Mass social action during the early years of the Depression in response to the deepening economic crisis (including black unemployment reaching 60 percent) took organizational form in the Sharecroppers Union, Southern Tenant Farmers Association, and Congress of Industrial Organizations. Social discontent fueled support for a number of third parties which African Americans joined and helped to lead—the Socialist Party under the grassroots leadership of Frank Crosswaith, the Communist Party (which ran African American James Ford for U.S. vice president in 1932, 1936, and 1940), and the American Labor Party (which helped to elect the popular Harlem minister Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to Congress from New York).

Threatened by unrest and by growing support for independent parties and labor organizations, Democrats and Republicans were forced to make certain concessions to poor and working people. In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a northern Democrat, worked with Congress to enact laws that gave labor unions the right to organize, limited the workday to eight hours, established a minimum wage, and guaranteed Social Security and unemployment insurance. (First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt would also encourage the organization of a “Black Cabinet,” which included the educator Mary McLeod Bethune). The African American electorate consequently broke with the party of Abraham Lincoln and began to support Democrats in the north; the southern branch of the Democratic Party however remained explicitly white supremacist. The 1934 congressional elections would see the first wave of black support for the Democratic Party; by the 1936 presidential election most African Americans were casting their votes for Roosevelt and his party. Together with organized labor, black voters would form the backbone of the “New Deal coalition” which sustained the Democratic Party for the next seventy-five years.

Federal relief programs under the New Deal provided jobs, financial aid, and government-financed housing to many African Americans, but the programs also hurt rural black families and individual workers. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration aided large-scale farm owners, virtually all of whom were white, while ignoring the plight of sharecroppers and agrarian workers. Many of the latter were fired when farm production was reduced as government subsidies helped to stabilize commodity prices. Likewise the Social Security Act provided for industrial workers, albeit unevenly (initially, women did not receive any retirement benefits) but denied financial assistance to the farmers, sharecroppers, and domestic workers who comprised over 65 percent of all black workers. Jim Crow, often portrayed as a strictly southern phenomenon, was nevertheless rampant in the north: African Americans continued to earn lower wages, pay higher rent, earn fewer promotions, and face greater restrictions to higher education than did their white counterparts.

With the rise of third parties in the 1930s the Democratic and Republican parties closed ranks by instituting a series of local ballot access laws to make it more difficult for independents to compete in the electoral arena. Onerous petitioning requirements were passed, as were filing fees and other measures that structurally discriminated against independent candidates and third parties. In 1931 Florida abolished all means for independent candidates and new parties to get on the ballot; in 1937 California raised the signature requirement for new party petitions from 1 percent of the last gubernatorial vote to 10 percent. But even as growing numbers of black voters flowed into the Democratic Party, African Americans supported and fielded independent and third party candidacies.

Political Independence

Du Bois was briefly a member of the Socialist Party and throughout most of his life actively supported independent electoral options for the black community. In 1950 he ran for the U.S. Senate on the Progressive Party line in New York; two years earlier Paul Robeson—the black All-American football player, actor, attorney, and progressive leader—had been considered for the vice-presidential spot on the Progressive Party ticket with Henry Wallace. (Wallace's candidacy in 1948 spurred an independent presidential run to the right of the Democratic Party by the “Dixiecrat” segregationist Strom Thurmond, marking a shift among southern white voters away from the Democratic Party and, in years to come, toward the Republican Party).

A number of African Americans who rose to top leadership positions within the burgeoning modern civil rights movement affiliated with third parties. Ella Baker, who had served as field secretary for the NAACP from 1938 to 1946, ran for New York City Council on the Liberal Party ticket in 1953. However, the attack on political independents following World War II spurred by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist red scare forced many progressives underground and out of the electoral arena. Despite efforts to isolate and suppress voices of dissent, the modern civil rights movement gained traction.

One year after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (overturning Plessy v. Ferguson), the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama sparked a decade of intense and broad-based civil rights activism. This included sit-ins, marches, petitioning, further boycotts, and the creation of a number of independent organizations—from the Montgomery Improvement Association to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. By the mid-1960s the civil rights movement (also known as the Black Freedom Movement) succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow. Tens of thousands of African Americans, mobilized by King and dozens of lesser-known leaders, including Ella Baker and Edgar D. Nixon, pushed for the restoration of civil and voting rights. Federal intervention into the south, along with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, would however help to ensure African-American loyalty to the Democratic Party for the remainder of the twentieth century.

By the 1960s a convoluted maze of state election laws had also been concocted to keep independents off the ballot. Still, in 1964 the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), principally under the leadership of black women—Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray—arose to challenge the seating of the “regular” (whites only) state Democratic Party at the national nominating convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The MFDP delegates, who held a nationally televised protest outside the main convention hall, were eventually awarded two at-large seats—but without voting rights. They rejected the offer; the Democratic Party would in coming years rewrite its delegate apportionment rules to include women and other minorities. Some viewed this as a positive move, while others saw it as a way to appease dissidents by keeping the particular selection of such delegates in the hands of top-level partisan operators.

As the “War on Poverty” at home was overshadowed by the bipartisan escalation of the American war in Vietnam, the late 1960s saw a flowering of independent parties. Rooted in a combination of the antiwar, civil rights, and early Black Power movements were California's Peace and Freedom Party, the Wisconsin Alliance, the Chicano La Raza Unida in the southwest, the Puerto Rican Young Lords in Chicago and New York, and most notably, the Black Panther Party, which began organizing in Oakland, California, but soon had a significant presence in every major northern city. In 1968 the Peace and Freedom Party ran the Black Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver for U.S. president. Cleaver however was wounded in a shootout with Oakland police and, facing criminal charges, fled the country.

King, who was considering an independent presidential run just before his assassination in 1968, and Malcolm X, in his “the ballot or the bullet” speech a few years earlier, recognized that growing African American dependence on the Democratic Party was a central and problematic issue that needed to be worked out as part of a broader strategy for the empowerment of the black community. Malcolm said, “I'm not trying to knock out the Democrats for the Republicans. We'll get to them in a minute. But it is true; you put the Democrats first and the Democrats put you last.” A strategy to begin developing new alliances and electoral options however would need to be pursued by a new generation of African Americans; the radicalism of the 1960s was being undercut by Democratic (and Republican) co-optation and reactionary law enforcement, expressed in increased police attacks and the covert activities (later disclosed) of the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

The Gary Convention and Black Empowerment

Since the late 1960s, there has been ongoing disagreement and debate among African Americans over which political direction black voters should take. In March of 1972, at the height of the Black Power movement, and the same year that the voting age was lowered to eighteen by the Twenty-sixth Amendment, a National Black Political Convention was held in Gary, Indiana. African Americans from across the country met to discuss the state of black politics and possible future directions. Organized by Gary's mayor Richard Hatcher, Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit, and the New Jersey-based activist Amiri Baraka, the convention debated whether it was more advantageous to increase the number of African Americans elected to office through the Democratic Party or to build a political alternative. Among the seven thousand delegates and observers in attendance, younger participants favored an independent political strategy. However, the convention adjourned still divided on the issue of which electoral path to pursue, and the Democratic Party reform option prevailed by default.

Since the Gary convention several approaches to black political empowerment have been put forth. Black-led reform of the Democratic Party was advocated by the Reverend Jesse Jackson throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the same vein, in 2005 William Fletcher called for a “Neo-Rainbow” movement “to move the party to the left,” despite the party's ongoing shift to the right. The formation of an all-black party was proposed by Ron Daniels and the National Black Political Party in 1980, by Joseph Mack and the Black Nationalist United African Party in 1990, and by New York City Councilman Charles Barron in 2004. The Reverend Al Sharpton created an eclectic approach—He ran in the Democratic Party's presidential primary in 2004 but years earlier had supported the Black Nationalist Joseph Mack and promised but then declined to run for state office on the pro-socialist New Alliance Party line. A final approach—independent and fusion politics—has been promoted by Lenora Fulani since the 1980s. This approach has entailed supporting independent and pro-reform major party candidates who agree to back measures that help to democratize the electoral process while simultaneously creating a multiracial, multi-ideological electoral base to give political independents greater visibility and leverage.

In reaction to the strategy that came out of the Gary convention to reform the Democratic Party, Black Nationalists such as Ron Daniels launched an effort to establish an all-black political party in 1976. Building on the networks created by the National Black Political Assembly, they held a convention in Philadelphia in 1980 at which approximately 1500 delegates formed the National Black Independent Political Party. Lecturers were dispatched around the country to help build the party, but as quickly as their efforts were initiated, they ended. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, most abandoned the project and rejoined the Democratic Party in a “united front against fascism.” With mounting frustration and deepening poverty in the black community, some saw the 1983 victory in Chicago of Harold Washington's insurgent independent mayoral candidacy as a model for reforming the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction. The hope was to replicate the success of the Washington model nationwide. An apparent opportunity came the following year, when Jesse Jackson decided to seek the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Running as an insurgent Democrat, Jackson spoke passionately about the twin issues of poverty and injustice in the nation. Millions of people were inspired by his candidacy, which garnered more than 3.5 million votes in the primaries. Just as significant as the number of votes was the incipient rebellion against both major parties expressed by Jackson's candidacy. A survey conducted by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research that year revealed that 57 percent of the people who voted for Jackson in the primary said they would have supported him in the general election had he decided to run as an independent—which he did not do. Four years later Jackson ran again, this time with a much stronger national organization and fundraising base than in his first run (he raised over $21 million, compared to $11 million the first time). He garnered twice as many votes in the 1988 Democratic primaries, but he was again denied the party's nomination; the national convention in Atlanta would hold out little promise of a leftward shift in the party's political trajectory.

Among those who encouraged Jackson to break with the Democratic Party was Lenora Fulani, then emerging as a national advocate for black political independence. Toward this end her 1988 independent presidential campaign promoted a strategy of “two roads are better than one.” She urged her supporters to vote for Jackson in the Democratic primary and then—in the probable event that he did not receive the party's nomination—to vote for her as a third-party candidate in the general election. After gathering nearly 1.5 million signatures (nearly forty times the number required by the major party candidates), she became the first woman and first African American presidential candidate to get on the ballot in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. (In 1969 Shirley Chisholm had become the first African American women elected to Congress; she subsequently ran for U.S. president as a Democrat, but was never nominated and therefore did not appear on the ballot.)

In 1992 the white billionaire H. Ross Perot called on Fulani's legal team for counsel as he initiated his independent presidential bid, centered on a critique of the two major parties. A CBS News poll in May of that year showed that at least 12 percent of African Americans said they supported Perot's independent candidacy, compared with 22 percent support among all voters. Despite bipartisan attacks, ridicule, and disparagement, 7 percent of African Americans voted for Perot at the ballot box (nearly 800,000 votes). Perot received an unprecedented 19 percent of the overall vote (nearly 20 million votes). Never before had so many Americans voted for an independent candidate. The winner that year was the Democrat and Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. He was later called the “first black president,” despite following his Republican predecessors by rolling back, or altogether ending, a number of gains won by the civil rights movement (including affirmative action, low-income housing, and welfare) while boosting corporate dividends and engaging in overseas military ventures.

In the wake of the 1992 election black and white independents around the country sought to create new political alliances that could challenge not only the bipartisan establishment but also ideologically driven politics. Out of these efforts, in 1994 a new national party—the Patriot Party—was formed, bringing together independents from across the political spectrum. Dr. Jessie Fields, a black physician from Harlem who had been active in third-party politics since the late 1980s, was elected vice chair of the new party. The party effectively served as a transitional organization, acting as a bridge between the millions of Perot supporters and preexisting elements of the independent movement that became the Reform Party, a key element of which was the Fulani-organized Black Reformers Network.

On the heels of the Million Man March, organized by the Nation of Islam's minister Louis Farrakhan, the Democratic Party—whose leading lights by then included Congressmen Kweisi Mfume of Maryland and Charles B. Rangel of New York, and Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate—began to show itself susceptible. During the 1997 gubernatorial race in Virginia, for instance, black voter turnout was markedly down. The Democrat, Donald Beyer, polled 80 percent of the vote among African Americans and lost to Republican Jim Gilmore. This was a notable departure from the usual 95 percent black support that traditionally went to Democrats. Former Democratic governor Doug Wilder (the state's first and only black governor) refused to endorse Beyer, instead remaining neutral.

Perhaps the clearest expression of black voters' disaffection from the Democratic Party in recent years came during the mayoral cycle in New York City in 2005, when the white billionaire Michael Bloomberg—running on both the Republican and Independence Party lines in a fusion bid—received 47 percent of the African American vote (up from his 30 percent support among African Americans in his 2001 run for office). Bloomberg had initially received the Independence nomination after promising to create a charter revision commission to explore revising the city's election laws in favor of nonpartisan municipal elections.

Black Politics in the Twenty-first Century

By 2005 there were over four times as many African Americans in Congress than in 1965, three times as many in state offices, twice as many in local elected positions, and tens of thousands of black men and women in appointed offices. Virtually all were Democrats. Yet despite the substantial presence of black Democrats in local, state, and federal offices (and some black Republicans at the highest levels of office, notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell), most African Americans remained politically marginalized and poor—as the world witnessed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana in 2005. One-third of African Americans have had incomes below the poverty line. On the whole African Americans have also had a markedly higher infant mortality, disproportionately higher incarceration and unemployment, and lower life expectancy than the rest of the U.S. population.

Even though the black middle class may have more than tripled since the 1960s, the vast majority of African Americans simply did not reap all the benefits resulting from the modern civil rights movement, including better educational opportunities, jobs, and health care. The default strategy coming out of the Gary convention—increasing the number of black elected officials via the Democratic Party—fell short of the vision of creating a more empowered black electorate by getting more African Americans into office.

Partisanship largely prevailed over policies that could be of value to the black community. Consequently, as black elected officials (like most other elected officials) prioritized their partisan allegiances, a dealignment of African Americans from the Democratic Party has followed. Extreme partisan allegiances among black elected leaders for instance were made manifest in 2004 by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). That year, the CBC took exceptionally undemocratic measures against the possible defection of black voters in favor of independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader by attempting to pressure him to withdraw from the race. Meanwhile, at the instigation of the Democratic National Committee, Nader petitioners and petition-signers were subjected to various degrees of intimidation and harassment, accompanied by a coordinated effort to remove his name from state ballots in more than a dozen states.

While most African Americans continue to self-identify and to vote as Democrats, with a small percentage Republican, nearly 30 percent of African Americans identify themselves as politically independent—an identification that has steadily grown over the past fifteen years (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2005). According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the youngest generation of eligible black voters are least tied to the two major parties; black voters, like all other voters, increasingly rejected partisan identification altogether. The question is how such shifting patterns in both partisan and non-partisan identification will translate politically in years to come as African Americans continue to pursue their political interests.