Black Republicanism is a real aphorism, however, in some ways, it seems as logical as walking in an East-Westerly direction, such is the inherent contradiction of it.
The struggle to understand the idea of Blacks aligning themselves with the Republican party or supporting the party’s agenda is a real phenomenon. Nevertheless, it also begs the question why have some Blacks in other parts of the world still see the Republican party as an entity worthy of their support?
If someone was to ask me what is it that most black people who support the Republican party have missed?.….…. I would readily respond that they missed the fact that the two political parties switched roles in the early 1960’s.
Conversely, If I was asked what is it which causes any black person to still support the Republican Party, I would readily opine that the emancipation proclamation signed by the then Republican president Abraham Lincoln still have some starry-eyed about the party to this very day.
The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, may be looked at in its most simplistic form a‑la the undeniable fact that 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the designated areas of the South were moved from slave to a sense of pseudo-freedom.
Or we can scratch the surface and look at some hard facts as it relates to the mythology surrounding Lincoln’s valiancy in signing the Emancipation Proclamation. After three(3) years of a bloody civil war, Lincoln desperately needed bodies to fight his war.
The Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory. Source[archives.gov]
Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.
According to [ Dr. Terry L. Jones of thepineywoods.com] Lincoln became known as “The Great Emancipator,” but in reality, the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise of freedom intentionally excluded some 800,000 slaves-many of whom lived in Louisiana as well.
Some historians have argued that Lincoln hated Slavery, however, in a public letter to the New York Tribune published just a month before he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln declared “My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Yea, the Great Emancipator had no deep burning desire in his gut to eradicate the scourge of slavery, for him whatever he would do about it had to justify his own end.
Emancipation, however, was a complicated matter because most Northerners were fighting to restore the Union and had no interest in freeing the slaves. To win the war, it was absolutely vital that Lincoln keep the slave-holding Border States on his side, not to mention the thousands of slave-owning Southerners who had opposed secession and were providing important support to the Union.
Lincoln knew that if he attempted to free all of the slaves, loyal slave owners in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, and in the Union-controlled areas of the Confederacy, might well join the Rebels to protect their valuable slave property. To prevent that from happening, the Emancipation Proclamation carefully avoided freeing the slaves held by most Unionists.
Lincoln realized that slavery helped the Confederacy wage its war for independence. Slaves performed most of the labor in the South constructing Rebel military fortifications, working in munitions factories, and harvesting the food that fed the Confederate army. Every slave who worked in such a manner freed up a white man to serve in the army. Source [ Dr. Terry L. Jones]
Probably, the most important issue of the conundrum Lincoln faced was the need to adopting emancipation as an official war goal also would make it less likely that the anti-slavery Europeans would intervene on the side of the Confederacy.
Lincoln was singularly focused on maintaining the Union. If the French entered the war to protect their territory of Louisana America as we know it today may well have been only a dream.
The calculated nature of the proclamation was not lost on people at the time, according to Professor Jones, one British newspaper noted, “The principle asserted is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.“
Even so, the {emancipation proclamation} meant that the enslaved African-America population toiling endlessly in degrading servitude could have something to look forward to, a starting point on what would become a seemingly endless sojourn to self-autonomy and citizenship.
Little did they know that even though the emancipation proclamation would to some degree, remove the literal chains from their ankles, dark forces were already hard at work creating an equally brutish system known as [Jim Crow], which all but made the newly liberated blacks slaves again to the very masters from whom they were just freed.
Like two travelers crossing paths in the dark the Republican party which for what its worth, was the party of emancipation became the political party to which white men ran after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House.
The Democratic Party was now the party that looked out for the rights of blacks and whites were pissing mad.
For the average white man, the negro had no right they should respect.
President Lyndon Johnson has been rumored to have said “We have lost the South for a generation,” Johnson told an aide after he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Dr. Steven J. Allen of capitalresearch.org pushes back against the assertion that Johnson ever made those comments.
Allen’s arguments are rooted in the concept that if LBJ had made those comments, he would have been wrong. The Goldwater surge in the South„ he argues faded quickly. With a handful of exceptions, Republican gains in the region in 1964 vanished by 1966. Decades passed with Democrats still in firm control of the South.
In seeking to label those with whom he disagrees, like the Reverend Al Sharpton whom he tarnishes pejoratively a ‘racist preacher”, Allen forgot that President Johnson could have made the statement and be wrong, could have made the statement and be right eventually, and that there was no mutual exclusivity between competing events.
Dr. Steven J. Allen, in seeking to establish that the statement attributed to President Johnson was a myth, inherently failed to speak to the irrefutable fact that for decades after the signing of the civil rights act, to the present day, the entire south has been a bastion of Republicanism.
An almost impenetrable garrison which has hardly seen a Democrat carry a southern state, outside Florida except for Carter who won his home state of Georgia, Bill Clinton who carried Arkansas and Al Gore winning Tennessee.
The laughable truth being ignored by Allen is that, whether Johnson said “we lost the south for generations” or not is manifestly unimportant.
The Democratic party eventually lost the south and parts beyond eventually. As a consolidation of purpose developed to re-litigate, if not retool for a new war under the mantra the south will rise again.
It probably makes more sense to lay out the gross atrocities which the Republican Party has visited on people of color since the party took over the persecution of black people from the southern Democrats.
Voter suppression. Police brutality. Blatant Racism and the list goes on and on. However, no Republican initiative has been more detrimental to African-Americans than the Nixon so-called war on drugs, continued through Ford, Reagan and Bush.
In the period since the war on drugs was launched the American prison population has skyrocketed to over two million. Many of those caught in the dragnet have been low-level nonviolent drug offenders who just happen to be black.
Even as Republican policies have packed the prisons with nonviolent drug offenders, and resulted in the deportation of countless others, state legislatures controlled by Republicans have passed laws that make it impossible for offenders who have done time in prison to vote after they have paid their debt to society.
This has rendered a huge segment of the male black population not just felons but made them unemployable and without the ability to chose their leaders.
In many cases, they are denied basic benefits such as food stamps for the rest of their lives, that includes pregnant women, people in drug treatment or recovery, and people suffering from HIV/AIDS simply because they were once caught with drugs.
These racist draconian policies ensure the recidivism of blacks and ensure that prisons remain filled with black bodies.
Speaking to this in her best selling book [the new Jim Crow] Lawyer, Activist and Author Michelle Alexander said;” If shackling former prisoners with a lifetime of debt and authorizing discrimination against them in employment, housing, education, and public benefits is not enough to send the message that they are not wanted and not even considered full citizens, then stripping voting rights from those labeled criminals surely gets the point across.”
I will probably not change a single mind of the black people who vote Republican.
That was not my intention, what I set out to do in this piece was to establish a factual foundation that puts to rest the frivolous arguments around black people’s support for a political party which literally hates them and has systematically worked toward their destruction.
Black Republicanism is an oxymoron that only makes sense if you are traveling in an east-westerly direction.