Williams said though many see the GOP as the party for business and the Democratic Party as the champion of social needs, there’s really no difference in the responsibilities of leaders from either party.
“If you look at civil rights organizations, when you look at what they say they want, there’s a disconnect in how you get there,” she said. “Black voters have looked to the Democratic Party and its way of combating social ills for decades without appreciable results.”
“We need to shift the balance of what’s sustainable,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to try something different. Maybe doing the same thing and having the same result is not the answer.
“But you have to accept that someone is thinking and trying to solve a problem in a different way doesn’t mean they don’t have a different goal than you.”
Sticks and stones
Still, Black Republicans are received less than enthusiastically by African-American voters, said Williams, who often is on the receiving end of unflattering names when people discover she’s a Republican.
In some ways, she said, it would be easier to stay behind the polling curtain as a Black Republican and keeping one’s political affiliation to oneself than to be called a “race traitor.”
“You can take the easy route out and just say you’re a Democrat,” she said. “It’s not an easy path. The people who choose it choose it because they believe it.”
Culturally, it’s acceptable for non-Republicans to put down Black Republicans, Williams said. It’s a form of Black-on-Black discrimination, she added.
“If the same comment was made from a white person to a Black person or from a straight person to a gay person, that would not be acceptable,” she said.
The costs are real for some who break away from the Democratic Party to join the Republicans, Williams said.
“You do have instances where people can’t get work any more as a result of trying to participate in the political process,” she said. “I even know a man who had to file bankruptcy just because he said he was a Republican.”
Williams said one of the deepest cuts came from the dean of Black community journalism, Amos Brown, who to her recollection, said Black Republicans “are colored but not our kind.”
“The people who say those things care more about their party than they do about their community,” she said. “Talk about voter intimidation; that’s voter intimidation.”
But Brown said the only criticism of Republicans he recalls was specific to an African-American senator from South Carolina.
“She does not know whether I scratched or not in a general election,” he said. “There have been general elections where I’ve split my tickets.”
Brown also has endorsed Republicans like Jackie Cissell.
Though he admits many other Black Hoosiers may have problems with Black members of the Republican Party, Brown said he believes Williams may be too new to the Central Indiana political landscape to understand the historical arena in which he has worked.
Black Republican values
When Brown arrived in Indianapolis in 1975, the Republican Party was very strong, with leaders like Joseph Slash and the late Rev. Charles Williams going to work in Mayor William H. Hudnut III’s administration a few years later.
“Yes, they were Republican, but they stood up for what was in the best interests of African-Americans as a whole,” he said. Those Black Republicans, he said, believed in affirmative action, business and community development, and improved education.
“Those were values of Black Republicans here in the city. They were visible. They were out in the community. And people perceived those Black Republicans were on the side of the community.”
That doesn’t appear to be true today, Brown said.
“What’s different today is the environment is more polarized,” he said.
In particular, there appears to be the impression among younger Black Republicans that the administration of Mayor Greg Ballard is better to African-Americans than that of former Mayors Hudnut and Richard Lugar, Brown said.
“In my view,” he said, “they can’t back that up.”
For instance, Brown said he’s repeatedly asked for statistics that track dollars spent by the city with African-American-owned businesses. But city officials say they don’t track that.
Brown said they should and that it shouldn’t be difficult since they keep track of minority-owned and women-owned companies that provide products and services to the city.
Even in a traditionally red state, it’s taken nearly two centuries for a Black Republican to hold statewide office. If they can convince the largely Democratic Black community to cross the aisle and pull their lever, it may not take as long to perform this feat again.
Not your great-grandfather's party
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was one. So were civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and author Zora Neale Hurston.
Each was a Republican.
But the Republican Party of the Reconstruction era and early 20th century was not the party it is now. Many would say the more accurate understanding of the parties is whether they are federalist or anti-federalist.
Abraham Lincoln, clearly was a federalist, exerting the power of the U.S. government to bring the rebel states of the South into line.
But today’s Republican Party, with its message of smaller government, clearly is an opponent of Lincoln-style federalism.
Until the 1920s, African-Americans in Indianapolis more often than not were members of the Republican Party. In fact, the original Ku Klux Klan members were Democrats of the South, making it unlikely African-Americans would join that party.
But according to the late historian Emma Lou Thornbrough, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan within Indiana’s Republican Party in 1924 drove voters toward the Democratic Party.
Evansville, where lawyer Ernest Tidrington was named chairman for the Colored People of Vanderburgh County and appointed head of the Colored Bureau of the Indiana Republican Party, also was solidly Republican.
Even in Gary, three Black Republicans were elected to the City Council in the 1920s.
