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OP-ED
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Black Republicans Coming Home?
by Ron Walters
Among the big meetings that are being held in Washington to signal the opening of the new Congress is one planned for mid-January by Black conservatives. The meeting will be led by Conservative Washington, D.C., media personality Armstrong Williams, who was at the dinner for retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond, where Trent Lott made his comments in apparent support of Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign.
Black Republicans, to their credit, voiced strong opposition to the remarks and to Lott’s continued role as party leader in the U.S. Senate. This included Black Conservatives such as Williams, among the first to express his upset with the statements made by Lott. Black moderate Republicans such as Ken Blackwell, Ohio secretary of the state, also expressed the sentiment that Lott should be removed as the leader of the Senate. But does this mean that the Conservative agenda will prevail at this meeting or that one posed by the Black moderates will?
The irony in this is that Williams has been a protégé of Strom Thurmond since his days as a college student, and has sought to participate in his public rehabilitation. Williams accompanied Thurmond to a mentor/protégé event sponsored by the Washington, D.C., Urban League several years ago and generally apologized for Thurmond’s conservative position on issues. How does one square the role of an apologist for a racist with being sensitive to comments uttered by racists? After all, when it was discovered several years ago that Trent Lott had ties to the racist organization, the Conservative Citizens Council, we watched to see if this would so embarrass Black Republicans that they would repudiate Lott. Narry a word was uttered in opposition. In fact, I could find no critical statements that Black Republicans had made at all.
I suspect that this new meeting comes because they are embarrassed. Ken Blackwell has suggested that the Republican “outreach” strategy to Blacks had been going well, and that the Lott affair has put a damper on it. So, the meeting is an attempt to recover progress on what some Black Republicans consider their initiative to recruit Blacks into the Republican Party, progress that has at least eluded me thus far. This meeting then, amounts to more strategic positioning by Black Conservatives, since Black moderates, like other moderates, seem to have little difference in their agenda from the powerful Conservatives inside the Republican Party.
Black Republicans cannot be meeting to put forth an agenda any different from that which party leader Tom DeLay has authored, because they have functioned as front men for the Conservative revolution since the emergence of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Where is the difference between Black Republicans and White Republican Party leaders on anything? Blacks had a number of disagreements with the Clinton administration. The only crack in the Republican dike was momentary, when Colin Powell voiced caution on an invasion of Iraq in the early 1990s and when he voiced support for affirmative action. Otherwise, Black Republicans have been in lock-step with their handlers on issues such as vouchers, faith-based initiatives, reduction in taxes, belittling civil rights, the war against Iraq and whatever else DeLay serves up.
Just as this moment, created by the racial thuggery of Trent Lott, is an opportunity to fashion a more progressive governing agenda on civil rights issues for the majority of Blacks and even Black Republicans who are not Conservative, it is also an opportunity for Black Republican spokespersons to move beyond the stock-and-trade vilification of mainstream Black leaders and to accept some real responsibility of their own, given the strategic power position they now occupy. The acquisition of the control of the entire governmental apparatus by the Republican Party also places Black Republicans in an historic position of accountability to the Black community. How will they exercise this accountability?
This should be a moment for the Ken Blackwells, Colin Powells and other moderates to ascend to the leadership of Black Republicans, but they have been sandwiched between the power of White Conservatives and their Black representatives whose voice was the voice of Blacks in the party. Moderate Black Republicans are in a position to exercise leadership on issues such as health insurance coverage; Title I funding; support for Black colleges, affirmative action and economic development of depressed Black communities; and on moderate approaches to foreign policy.
The public actions of these Black Republicans in the policy arena will provide the opportunity for history to judge not only the outcome of this meeting they are planning, but their actions on subsequent issues vital to the well being of the Black community with the proximity to power they now possess.
Ron Walters is Distinguished Leadership Scholar, director of the African American Leadership Institute and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. His latest book, with Robert Smith, is Africa American Leadership.
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