Will Heartfelt Penitence Woo the Black Vote?

Insight on the News, vol. 12, no. 33, p. 15
September 2, 1996

by
David Wagner

The seventies saw African-American intellectuals question the power of the Democratic Party in their community. Many wonder if a segment of the black vote could be the GOP's for the asking.

When Bob Dole rejected a speaking invitation from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he indicated that black activists are part of the core constituency of the Democratic Party. Yet, 100 years ago, blacks were one constituency the GOP could take for granted in Kansas and wherever else they actually were allowed to vote.

For the half-century that followed the Civil War, the Democratic Party tended to stand for localism and the preservation of regional folkways, a bias that, according to Michael Barone's political history Our Country, allied them with saloon-keepers in the North and segregationists in the South.

Franklin D. Roosevelt achieved an amazing political feat, bringing Southern whites and Northern blacks (many of whom had moved north as a result of the Depression) into one coalition. Then Harry Truman integrated the armed forces and insisted his party adopt a civil-rights plank, even at the cost of a politically dangerous split with the party's Southern wing.

While it was a Republican ex-governor, appointed chief justice by a Republican president, who engineered the Supreme Court's school-integration opinion in Brown vs. Board of Education, the GOP nonetheless failed to capture the initiative with black voters. Democrats enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and their lock on the black vote has continued for another three decades.

Only in the late seventies did there begin to emerge a generation of African-American intellectuals who questioned whether liberalism and the Democratic Party had been as helpful to their community as generally was assumed. A partial list of these pioneers of the "Afro-con" movement would include the late Clarence Pendleton, chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; Clarence Thomas, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee and now a Supreme Court justice; economists Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, the late columnist Larry Wade; and former State Department official, philosopher and presidential candidate Alan Keyes.

Yet despite the awakening of black conservatism, many Republicans continue to assume they have no choice but to write off the black vote. The Dole campaign's black outreach gets failing marks from Gwenevere Daye Richardson, editor of Headway, formerly National Minority Politics, a black conservative magazine.

"Our magazine had a roundtable with [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich," Richardson tells Insight, "back when he was the hot ticket and everyone wanted to interview him. But we tried for six months to arrange one with Dole, with no success. And he knew we're conservative, so it couldn't have been that he was afraid of a hostile audience."

Yet, Richardson says she doesn't believe racism plays into the mix. "That would be inconsistent with Dole's record. I think it's those high-dollar Republican consultants: They don't want to risk anything involving race."

She points to what she terms a missed opportunity. "It's not so much a class thing, with blacks supposedly moving into the middle class and turning Republican. It's more a matter of philosophy: less government, more free enterprise. About a third of black people in this country believe in that, but they don't vote that way."

What should the Republicans do? "There will continue to be a large bloc of black voters that thinks right but votes left," says Richardson, "until the organized right develops nonpolarizing ways of addressing racial issues."

Should conservatives declare themselves penitent for not having supported the Civil Rights Act? To do so successfully would mend fences with many black voters but might strike some of the antistatist Afro-con intellectuals as patronizing and compromising. Should they emphasize social issues, on which blacks tend to be conservative? The problem there, observers tell Insight, is that to many black voters, the term "religious right" means redneck churches, leading them to avoid white social conservatives although actually agreeing with them on most issues.

In his book Masters of the Dream, candidate Keyes argues that African-Americans mastered the art of grounding their lives in spiritual realities during times when all of society's material realities were ranged against them. This spiritual grounding, says Keyes, broke down under the advance of the welfare state, which refocused black life around material values.

During his two unsuccessful Senate campaigns in Maryland, Keyes says he more than once was told by black voters: "I agree with you, but why do you have to be a Republican? I can't vote for a Republican!"

Yet, within living memory of older African-Americans, blacks believed they could not vote otherwise. To restore that situation -- or even to become competitive within the black electorate -- Republicans and conservatives have a lot of work to do.