Can GOP be Lincoln’s party again?
[Comment]
I welcome reaction from people who believe I’m wrong and why they think so when I declare that Black people must go back to the Republican Party.
After all, as a Washington Post article reports: “In the decade before 1948, black Americans identified as Democrats about as often as they did Republicans.”
Even thereafter, in the 1956 election, for example, Republicans won 40% of the Black vote.
The number of Blacks that identified as Democrats increased when “Harry Truman made an explicit appeal for new civil rights measures from Congress, including voter protections, a federal ban on lynching and bolstering existing civil rights laws.”
The numbers of Blacks who identify as Democrats increased even more dramatically to over 90% after the Civil Rights Act of 1963, from about 70% in 1960.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/07/when-did-black-americans-start-voting-so-heavily-democratic/?client=ms-android-sprint-us
Today many so called Black leaders have Black believing they are “born” Democrats even though the party now take the Black vote for granted as critical data show.
Black unemployment has always been double or more of Whites.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1954 White unemployment was 5% while Black unemployment was 9.9%. In 2013 White unemployment was 6.6% while that of Blacks was 12.6%.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-black-unemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/
In January 2017 White unemployment is at 4.6% while for Blacks it’s still un acceptably high 8%.
These are official figures, the real numbers may be way higher especially for young people.
In Chicago, capital of Black youth gun violence the data are horrific. The Chicago Tribune report: “Forty-seven percent of 20- to 24-year-old black men in Chicago, and 44 percent in Illinois, were out of school and out of work in 2014, compared with 20 percent of Hispanic men and 10 percent of white men in the same age group, according to the report from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute.”
My main point is that Blacks are now captives of the Democratic party. Recall the Emancipation Declaration was under Republican Abraham Lincoln. Blacks voted heavily Republican until the 1930s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program that flipped Blacks to becoming Democrats.
The country was in dire strait and FDR flipped everyone with his charming ways and his programs that focused on relief, recovery, and reform. In fact, he drained the swamps and restored forests, providing work to many idle young Black men.
Life is about change. So it’s time for Blacks to flip to Republicans by making concrete demands that will improve their lives starting with jobs.
Today contemporary Blacks are encouraged to be on their knees with closed eyes, begging God to give them something.
In the past, enslaved Black people, with opened eyes, prayed for God to help them free themselves and overcome from their wretched conditions.
Blacks are not monolithic. They are different in their thinking as they are in their ethnic/racial origins. However, the general view is that Black people think and look the same. That is why a police officer would pull over a 16 year old Black female even when a suspect is described as a 40 year old Black man.
Church leaders and the establishment mislead many Black people into believing prayer alone can deliver them. So Blacks remain beholden to the Democratic party.
Black people prayed during their period of enslavement. But their eyes were open and they were strategic taking advantage and improving their conditions through: a Civil War; the Emancipation; Civil Rights; re-evaluating their relationship with Republican party and shifting back; and, the opening of this country for all other immigrants.
Now Donald Trump is in the White House. The argument is not whether you like him or not. My point is that it is time to re-evaluate relations with Democrats. If Black people come up with demands that will improve their lives with jobs and safety, and better schools for their children and these demands are met then why not go back Republican?
Dr. Rupert Green is an educator in New York.
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