In the Balance of Power. Omar H. Ali
Moreover, as Steven Rosenstone, Roy Behr, and Edward Lazarus note in Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure, the obstacles faced by independents are not only legal but sociocultural. They write: “It is an extraordinary act for Americans to vote for a third party candidate. . . . To vote for a third party, citizens must repudiate much of what they have learned and grown to accept as appropriate political behavior, they must often endure ridicule and harassment . . . , and they must accept that their candidate has no hope of winning.”37
Since the mid-1980s, and in the face of legal and socio-cultural obstacles faced by independents, the percentage of voters—black and white, liberal and conservative—who either describe themselves as independent or register to vote as unaffiliated or with a non–major party has steadily grown.38 The percentage of voters who registered as neither Democrat nor Republican between 1984 and 2004, for example, more than doubled, from 10.2 percent to 21.9 percent.39 It is a pattern that continues locally and across the nation, with some states registering faster growth than others; North Carolina’s independents have been among the fastest-growing group of registered voters.40 Meanwhile, Gallup polls indicate that 42 percent of Americans self-identify as independent, up from approximately 29 percent 40 years ago. So, while the percentage of Americans participating in elections is largely holding at slightly over half of the electorate, even as the total number of voters increases—138 million people voted in the 2016 presidential election, compared to 122 million in the 2004 presidential election, and 111 million in 2000—an ever-larger percentage are positively identifying themselves as independents or registering as such.41
Regarding African Americans—who, as a whole, have proven to be the most loyal constituency to the Democratic Party, with the majority identifying themselves as Democrats since the mid-1960s—there appears to have been a political transformation. David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies notes, “The votes cast by African Americans in 2004 showed them to be less Democratic in their partisanship than they had been in 2000.”42 While 14.8 percent of African Americans identified themselves as politically independent in 1997, by 2005 that number had increased to at least 25.9 percent. If we add the 5 percent of those who responded either “other” or “no preference” to the 25.9 percent of those who said that they were “independent,” the percentage of African Americans who did not identify with either major party was 30.9 percent.43
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Perceptible signs of dealignment among African Americans relative to the Democratic Party have prompted the examination in this book of the history of independent black politics and third-party movements. Not since Hanes Walton Jr.’s Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis, published in 1972, has a book-length work been devoted to the subject of African Americans and third parties.44 While a number of key studies on black politics in U.S. history have appeared since that time, including award-winning books by Michael Dawson and Steven Hahn, none focus on third parties and independent politics per se.45 The present study therefore details how African Americans have used independent political tactics to advance their black political and economic interests.46 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, third parties have provided a way for African Americans (among other disaffected and marginalized groups) to apply pressure on the ruling parties. Under ongoing, although not necessarily consistent, outside pressure, the major parties have, in turn, adopted policies initially raised and fought for by independents into their own party planks, and have sponsored legislation accordingly. In the nineteenth century, members of the Liberty Party sought the immediate abolition of slavery; radical Republicans pushed for the extension of black voting rights; and Black Populists—through the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and then the People’s Party—demanded that the government provide economic relief and political reform. In the twentieth century, Socialists, Progressives, and Communists, each in their own way, helped (albeit under the authority of the Democratic Party) to usher in the modern welfare state with measures such as social security and a minimum wage enacted into law. Meanwhile the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, among other black-led organizations and parties, demanded that the government protect African Americans’ civil and political rights. Black independents, such as the Harlem physician Dr. Jessie Fields, like many of their counterparts from the past, continue to call for a level electoral playing field, with the appropriate recognition and respect that any other group of citizens should enjoy.
The pioneering work of black independents is the focus and thread in this historical study. This is in contrast to the way American political history is usually detailed and analyzed, which is by focusing on the major parties and their political leaders. Building third parties and independent political movements has been a potent yet underappreciated way that African Americans have effected changes, ultimately including extending citizenship, gaining the vote, desegregating public facilities, providing economic relief, and protecting black civil and political rights. African Americans have also chosen to work solely within the major parties—and indeed, those parties have always had dissenting voices within their ranks—but it remains the case that without ongoing independent political pressure, progressive legislative changes would likely not have been made. In other words, and more accurately, it has been a combination of outside-inside (inside-outside) movement-building, political action, and legislative negotiating that has produced change in the nation. The work of black independents, among other independents, in the electoral arena has therefore been an essential part of the development of American democracy.
A final note. After we, as a society, emerge from the mass protests and pandemic underway, we will have been changed in fundamentally unforeseeable ways. The conditions in which we find ourselves are transforming as this second edition goes to press. What we do and how we are able to reconstruct, remake, and reimagine our nation’s political institutions, our economy, and our culture are up to the American people—as it has been the case in other times of crises and catastrophes.47 Are new, nonpartisan forms of political empowerment and coalitions possible to move the country forward in more democratic and developmental ways? Perhaps. If history is any indicator, the voices of African Americans, and independent black leadership in particular, will be key to our recovery and renewal.
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Declarations of Independence
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties.1
Thomas Jefferson, 1784
It is an image that goes to the heart of why African Americans have had to declare their own independence: Philadelphia, June 12, 1776. A rebellion has erupted in the British Empire’s Atlantic Seaboard colonies of North America. Thomas Jefferson, a representative in Virginia’s House of Burgesses (founded in the same year that the first group of Africans was brought to the colony of Jamestown), is now a delegate to the Second Continental Congress—a rogue assembly. Talk of liberty has been simmering in Philadelphia since May of the previous year. The thirty-three-year-old planter is charged by a committee of the assembly with the task of writing what will become the Declaration of Independence. Yet one out of every five people living in the colonies are enslaved black men, women, and children.
Jefferson was among the largest and wealthiest slave owners in the colonies. His life, like that of his fellow slave owners who supported American independence, rested on a basic contradiction: endorsing slavery while demanding liberty. The Virginian would include a line in his draft of the Declaration, later removed, denouncing the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people.” But he does not denounce slavery itself.2 As he proclaims the “unalienable rights” of all “men” in his document, Jefferson will also see to it that among his hundreds of slaves, only three—one being his own child, through his slave Sally Hemings—are freed during his lifetime. The men and women in his tobacco fields, like Jefferson, are fully aware