Politics: Black men have played key role in lifting Democrats

Black men have played a key role in lifting the Democratic Party

In my narrative for Audible, “Malcolm and Me,” about my interviewing Malcolm X in 1962, and our subsequent meetings in New York, I tried to highlight the careers of heroes who didn’t have cameras following them around. One was A.J. Smitherman, publisher of the Tulsa Star, who was the target of the mob that murdered 300 black people in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921. They burned down his house and charged him with inciting a riot. He and his family fled to Boston.

His crime? Crusading against the lynching of Black Americans. He was accused of “riling up Negroes.” Predictably, his sacrifice wasn’t mentioned in the HBO series “Watchmen’s” account of the riot. It took until the 1990s, years after his death, for him to be vindicated.

Another hero was Walter Caldwell Robinson, a publisher of the Chattanooga Observer. As chairman of the Colored Voters League of Greater Chattanooga until he died in 1968, he was the most powerful Black man in Chattanooga, Tenn., where I was born. No one could become mayor of the city without Robinson’s support. He told his daughters, “Have sense in your head, God in your heart, money in your pocket, and a ballot in your hand.” When the Klan, which controlled Chattanooga’s City Hall at the time, placed a coffin on his front porch, he went to the Klan, unaccompanied, and told them to cut it out.

He was a Republican. So were most Blacks in the 1930s. For many progressives, President Franklin D. Roosevelt is a hero, yet, he made a compact with Dixiecrats that Blacks be denied the benefits of programs that brought white ethnics into the middle class. Into whiteness.

President Harry Truman advanced the cause of Blacks. Sixtyfive thousand Blacks heard Truman deliver a speech in Harlem in which he accused Dwight Eisenhower of implementing a Southern strategy. He told them that Eisenhower was visiting Southern governors. “What do you think that he’s telling them?” he asked. Eisenhower was opposed to school integration and the desegregation of the Army, which was accomplished under Truman. Blacks began receiving Social Security during his administration. Thousands of Blacks continued to support the Democrats when the Kennedys secured the release of a jailed Martin Luther King Jr.

Black men have played a key role in organizing Black support for the Democratic coalition. Black men and women, the leaders of freedom movements, have brought other groups forward, figuratively, on their coattails, only to have some turn on them.

Nikki Haley is an example. She hopes to achieve the Republican nomination for president in 2024 by denigrating Blacks, the cliche, slothful way to achieve power. And while Sen. Kamala Harris is a progressive, both women reflect a split in the Indian America community, thousands of whom cheered President Trump when he appeared with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indeed writer Arundhati Roy says that “Indian racism towards Black people is almost worse than white people’s racism.”

Nevertheless, Kamala Harris doesn’t need a guide to the Black experience. She’s paid her dues.

A child of the civil rights movement, Harris would agree with the late novelist Bharati Mukherjee, and novelist Elizabeth Nunez, both immigrants, that the civil rights movement brought all people of color forward. A Chinese American judge told me that the civil rights movement brought him out of the ghetto.

My only problem with the BidenHarris ticket is that Harris should be at the top. Because many lack financial literacy, including myself, before I was schooled by economist Cathy Jackson, Harris’ campaign against criminal banks goes unappreciated.

Blacks lost hundreds of millions because they were sold subprime loans when most were eligible for conventional loans. This banking scam emptied my neighborhood of Blacks. But I’m sure that both Biden and Harris would agree that if it were not for the endorsement by Rep. James Clyburn, DS.C., a Black man, there’d be no BidenHarris ticket. Clyburn had also criticized the 2008 attacks against thenpresidential candidate Barack Obama when the Clintons campaigned in South Carolina.

The Clintons’ campaign against President Obama carried racist overtones which I pointed out in a CounterPunch essay, January 14, 2008, titled “Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man.” Yet, I, like other Black men, voted for Clinton because she would have been better for Blacks than Trump.

Blacks don’t have the luxury of staying home or throwing their votes away and if young Blacks do so, it’s because there is little in the school curriculum about the massacres and lynchings that happened when their ancestors attempted to vote. They know about John Lewis’ encounter with state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but they’re ignorant of the massacre of Black men by a proConfederate city administration in New Orleans, in 1866. They’d met for a Constitutional Convention, convened to protest the Black Codes, instituted to deny Black men the vote. The exConfederates killed 50 Black men and wounded 150.

They know about the beatings of students at lunch counters in the 1960s, but they are ignorant of the removal and murder of Black elected officials in Wilmington, N.C, in 1898, said to be the country’s only coup d’etat. The mob of 2000 white men killed up to 300 people and Black businesses were destroyed.

It’s because of these sacrifices that we have Kamala Harris. She is good for Black men and women, white women, Jamaican and Indian Americans, yet a very vocal feminist group is preaching separatism. Speaking of the Harris veep selection, “She The People” wrote, triumphantly, “Black women, Latinas, Indigenous women, and Asian American women have fought and bled for generations to arrive at this moment. This is our time.” This is a divisive, narrow viewpoint that distorts history because it omits some vital components of the Democratic coalition including Black Men.

Weekly, on “AM Joy,” the contribution of Black male voters is diminished by a clique of Northeastern Black pundits and academics to whom Comcast has given a show. On Aug. 23, one of the regulars, Jonathan Capehart, described the support of Clinton from the LGBTQ community as “whopping.” Their votes were 78% for Clinton.

The Black male vote for Clinton was 80%. Why isn’t that considered “whopping”?

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