• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Black Republicans are expected to provide window dressing and cover to prove that this is not a racist party, yet our own leadership continues to act otherwise,” Party Secretary Shannon Reeves wrote to his fellow party board members.

Reeves wrote his comments because state Republican Vice Chairman Bill Back had sent out an e-mail containing an article by someone else suggesting that the nation would have been better off if the South had won the Civil War.

Reeves went on to describe some of his experiences as a black Republican. “As a Bush delegate at the 2000 convention in Philadelphia, I proudly wore my delegate’s badge and [Republican National Committee] lapel pin as I worked the convention. Regardless of the fact that I was obviously a delegate prominently displaying my credentials, no less than six times did white delegates dismissively tell me [to] fetch them a taxi or carry their luggage.”

It’s no wonder that Republicans have a hard time attracting blacks to the party.

Being black and Republican can have its rewards, however. At the 2000 convention in Philadelphia, every Republican African-American elected official in the country got to speak from the podium. City councilmen, county executives, state legislators—they all got to speak. Except one guy. Morris Temple, the county coroner from London, Ohio. And he was pissed. I was covering the convention for ABC Radio and interviewed him.

TEMPLE: Yeah, I’m angry. I’m damn angry. Every other black elected official in the whole damn country got to speak from that podium except me. Oh, the Bush people told me there was another guy, some motor vehicle commissioner from Maryland. Turns out the guy was Filipino!1

In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush got 8 percent of the black vote. The African-American officeholders who were paraded on the podium in Philadelphia were not intended to attract black votes. They were presented for the consumption of suburban whites who don’t want to vote for an overtly racist party, the kind of party that would deliberately purge the voting rolls in Florida of tens of thousands of blacks who should never have been purged. White suburban voters don’t want to vote for a party that would try to suppress black turnout in 2002 by putting out flyers in black neighborhoods saying:

URGENT NOTICE. Come out to Vote November 6. Before you Come out to vote—Pay your parking tickets, motor vehicle tickets, your rent, and most important, ANY WARRANTS.

The election, of course, was November 5.

So it’s a balancing act. Pursue Nixon’s Southern strategy: flog the flag in Georgia and South Carolina, suppress votes in black neighborhoods, but feature the black Republican school board treasurer from Monroe, Louisiana, at your national convention.

And, by all means, anytime you can, flaunt Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

In January, President Bush announced that his administration would file a pair of legal briefs against the University of Michigan’s undergraduate and law school admissions programs. The White House told the Washington Post that Dr. Rice had been one of the “prime movers” behind the President’s decision and that after “a series of lengthy one-on-one meetings with Bush, she drew on her experience as provost at Stanford University to help convince him that favoring minorities was not an effective way of improving diversity on college campuses.”

The next day, The New York Times reported that a “dismayed” Rice was so “troubled by [the] article in the Washington Post that she announced that she believed universities should be able to use race as a factor in admissions policies, a view that may put her at odds with Mr. Bush.” In other words, the White House had been lying to the Post. And while Bill Bennett and Sean Hannity told the Fox audiences that any use of race as a factor in admissions was “abhorrent,” the only two blacks that Republicans ever point to, Rice and Powell, think it’s an appropriate tool.

Perhaps Rice and Powell knew something about