Ask any black person which political party has been the ally to the black community. With near unanimity, blacks would answer the Democratic Party. Ask any black person which political party has been hostile to black community, they’d say the Republican Party with similar unanimity.
Yet, from its founding in the late 1800s, the Democratic Party protected slavery, launched the Civil War, and opposed reconstruction and urban modernization. The Democratic Party enforced segregation, engaged in the lynching of blacks, and fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and ’60s. The Democratic Party did not elect a black man to U.S. Congress until 1935, while the Republicans had elected Senator Hirman Revels from Mississippi in 1870. President Woodrow Wilson, who labeled himself a “progressive Democrat,” was an avowed racist who shared many views with white supremacists. He re-segregated the federal civil service. The first film ever shown at the White House was “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and was shown by him during his tenure.
Ask a black person: What was the political party of Governor George Wallace from Alabama who, during the heights of the Civil Rights Movement, openly declared that he stood for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” and blocked black students from entering the University of Alabama?
When the persistence of racial gaps in employment, incarnation, education and wealth remain unaffected or unmoved by the Democrats, at the local, state and federal levels, it’s not hard to see why fewer voters are turning up. Evidently there are ways that the Republicans are more candidly racist and xenophobic. However, grappling with how being loyal to either party often produces the same results for black people or Latino people or even just for poor people is not a matter of creating fabricated equivalency.
I continue to vote, usually for Democrats and never for Republicans, largely out of a sense of longing or nostalgia. America and its party establishments are like a drug to which black people are addicted, and continues to chase after its high even though we know it’s not healthy for us. We know it’s not healthy for us; thus, we have come to think of voting for either party, specifically Democrats, as a form of lessening harm. Voting Democrat is the equivalent of using a clean needle to shoot up, so that trying to get that American high is less likely to screw us up as badly as it could.
Political power can be used to gain leverage, but the black community and black politicians continue to fall for empty promises and deceitful assurances given by the political party establishment. The questions can be asked: Have we really made any real progress under Democrats? What have they given us with what we have given to them?
None of what I’ve said should be taken as an argument that blacks should leave the Democratic Party and join the Republican Party. I’m just asking the question: Why is the American Negro so attracted to the Democratic Party?
The Democratic Party – from the Democratic National Committee to the Missouri Democratic Party to St. Louis’ Central Democratic Committee – can choose to propose a comprehensive agenda that appeals to black people – or the time will come for black people to establish a party of their own.
John Collins-Muhammad is alderman of St. Louis’ 21st Ward in North St. Louis.
