WS Chronicle

It might be hard to believe, but African-Americans voted in large numbers for GOP candidates after they received the right to vote. Back then, the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan and others who had disdain for black people.

Even the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. – “Daddy King” – was a Republican back in the day. Richard Nixon, as vice president of the United States, had hoped to count on millions of black people to help elect him president in his race against John F. Kennedy, the Democrat.

But one fateful day changed that. Kennedy was able to show concern for a jailed Martin Luther King Jr. and helped get him out of jail weeks before the November 1960 presidential election. The tide turned. Millions of black people voted for Kennedy for president.

CNN’s series “The Race for the White House” looks at a few presidential races, including the 1960 race. The episode points to that gesture by Kennedy as one that changed the views of African-Americans toward the Democratic Party. It was said that Kennedy would not have won the election without the huge numbers of black people voting for him.

Too bad the Republican Party can’t figure out how to bring black Americans back into the fold. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2016 surely is not doing that.
According to The Washington Post, a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll shows that only 6 percent of black voters nationally plan to support Donald Trump. The Post says that the Quinnipiac poll released at the end of June showed Trump winning 1 percent of the vote from blacks.
But wait, there’s more.

The Wall Street Journal’s Neil King reports that in the Journal-NBC-Marist poll of Ohio, Donald Trump gets 0 percent of the vote from black Ohioans. Yes, that’s zero percent. Neil King reports that’s about what Trump is getting from black voters in the polls in Pennsylvania, too.

Previous Republican presidential candidates received more support than that in earlier years.

National GOP officials have said in the past that they want more African-Americans in their fold. They even had a black Republican National Committee chairman until they ran him away, just like the Republicans did in North Carolina recently to their black chairman.

So, where is the gesture from Trump that could turn African-Americans toward the Republican Party? Nowhere to be seen. It ain’t gonna happen.
Now, we can name the gestures that push African-Americans away from the GOP.

How about when Trump singled out a black man at one of his rallies by saying: “Look at my African-American over here.”

At least one of the black people on his “The Apprentice” show has called out his racist tendencies. African-American Kwame Jackson, the runner-up, was “fired” from the show in the first season. CNN Money reports that when he spoke about Trump in April, he accused Trump of appealing “to the lowest common denominator of fear, racism and divisiveness in our populace.”

The other GOP presidential candidates had their episodes, too. But they are not as close to the White House as Trump, so we can put them on the shelf for now.
No, there will be no gestures from the GOP strong enough to woo black people back, unless hell freezes over. Then, we might consider it.