Is Ye, Kanye West, the New Face of Black Conservatism? How About Herschel Walker?
True enough. I was reminded of how Booker T. Washington, the iconic Black conservative who founded the Tuskegee Institute, and Chicago’s Julius Rosenwald, philanthropist and president of Sears Roebuck, built thousands of state-of-the art schools for African American children — including some of my cousins — across the South during the Jim Crow era.
Washington was the epitome of a Black conservative movement that emphasized traditionalism, patriotism, self-sufficiency, and strong cultural and social conservatism within the context of the Black church. The movement helped bring near-solid Black support to the Republican Party that lasted until Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson in the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.
The “Party of Lincoln” lost most of its loyal Black following in the years that followed Southern backlash against the civil rights revolution, as well as numerous other people of color turned off by the rise of Trump’s presidency.
But this year, a new trend has appeared without a lot of fanfare as 22 Black candidates are running as Republicans for House seats in the midterms. Overall, a record number of 67 Black, Latino, Asian or Native American candidates are slated to appear on the November midterms ballot, by the Grand Old Party’s count — compared with only a dozen current House members of color.
Already some in the party are reviving dreams of Ronald Reagan’s vision of an inclusive “Big Tent” party rising up from the ashes of past racial polarization. But the cultural, historical and political divide that Trump and his loyal following have generated against the more urban and diverse Democrats will endure unless both sides make stronger efforts to bring them together.
Republicans this year, for example, have made crime and inflation their biggest issues. That’s OK on the face of it. But on tough issues like crime, the two parties remain far apart. The left tends to push bail reform and better police-community relations, while the right wants to throw more bodies in jail, even for nonviolent offenses.
That’s a tragedy for any real, durable progress. But election years, ironically enough, tend to be a terrible time to entertain serious ideas. We’re too busy, it seems, following the celebrities and the tweets.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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