It hasn’t been a great week for Republican rhetoric about the Jim Crow era. Rep. Dan Bishop, for example, who’s running for state attorney general in North Carolina, thought it’d be a good idea to equate Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution in New York with Alabama prosecuting African Americans in 1950.
Historian Kevin Kruse explained soon after, “[N]o, I don’t think Donald Trump has it as bad as African Americans had it in Alabama in the 1950s, because (a) he wasn’t gunned down in the street, (b) he was in fact tried by a jury of his peers, and (c) he’s not going to be sent to the goddamn electric chair.”
A day later, one of Bishop’s GOP colleagues, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, shared some related thoughts of his own, suggesting that Black families were better off during the Jim Crow era. NBC News reported:
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds said in remarks first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“And then H.E.W., Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are,” he said, referring to the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a precursor to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Donalds appeared on CNN last night and was asked if he regretted expressing apparent nostalgia for the Jim Crow era. He denied having said that, though there’s video footage of the far-right congressman’s comments.
It wasn’t long before Democrats pushed back against the Florida Republican’s rhetoric.
“It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that Black folks were better off during Jim Crow,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on the House floor. “That’s an outlandish, outrageous, and out-of-pocket observation.
“We were not better off when a young boy named Emmett Till could be brutally murdered without consequence because of Jim Crow. We were not better off when Black women could be sexually assaulted without consequence because of Jim Crow. We were not better off when people could be systematically lynched without consequence because of Jim Crow. We were not better off when children could be denied a high-quality education without consequence because of Jim Crow. We were not better off when people could be denied the right to vote without consequence because of Jim Crow.
“How dare you make such an ignorant observation?” the New York Democrat, the highest ranking African American in Congress, concluded. “You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.”
The Congressional Black Caucus responded with a condemnation of its own, as did President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
It’s worth emphasizing for context that Donalds is not just some low-profile House GOP backbencher: He’s also a Trump campaign surrogate and contender for his party’s vice presidential nomination. Indeed, the Associated Press reported yesterday that Donald Trump’s political operation has sent vetting paperwork to a handful Republicans — and Donalds was among them.
The controversy also comes against a backdrop of Democratic outreach efforts to Black voters, with the party making the case that Republicans are, among other things, extremists on matters of race.
With this in mind, I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this story.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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