Politics
Numbers of African Americans in the GOP continue to fall
Prominent African-American Republicans. PHOTO/NewsOne.com
It’s a question that comes up every time you hit the home page of the Republican National Committee’s website: Where are all the black Republicans?
Only a year after celebrating the last days of its first African-American chair, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is fairly light on black faces these days. What was once, especially during the 1990s, a fairly aggressive photo-op promotional strategy strung together by a small network of die-hard black political consultants, former elected officials and partisans, is all but dead. While it did little in the way of yielding any results comparable to Democratic counterparts, there was a sense, leading up to the election of Michael Steele as party chair, that some progress had been made in mending the often bitter relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party.
“You have no blacks on staff at the RNC, or any of its other committees, and there are no blacks on staff of any of the presidential campaigns,” snorts longtime black Republican strategist and marketing expert Raynard Jackson. “But maybe after a few more electoral loses you will awaken to the most loyal customer you have ever had.”
