Charlotta Bass for Vice-President: America’s Two-Parties and the Black Vote

Social media has brought the culture wars to a larger audience and demonstrates how conservatives have constructed historical narratives to confirm their worldview. But historians are fighting back, demonstrated by the hashtag #Twitterstorians and the professionals who use social media to deploy their scholarship in the public arena. One particular topic that regularly comes up is the racist history of the Democratic Party. Several conservative commentators point to the Party as the stronghold of the slave south and Jim Crow — something historians readily acknowledge and agree to. But this narrative emerges as an attempt to absolve the current Republican Party of its support for racist policies and pin American racism solely on the Democratic Party. Many of those pushing this agenda, including Trump mouthpiece and self-proclaimed amateur historian Dinesh D’Souza, remain unburdened by the standards of evidence and the critical analysis needed to understand the complicated history of the two political parties and their appeal to Black voters.

The assumption that the political parties have not evolved with every political iteration is reductive at best, and political zealotry at worst. One of the stereotypes at the heart of this debate is the assumption that Black voters are merely political pawns for both parties, ignoring the reality that Black voters remain an influential voting bloc that can and have influenced state and national elections. The Republican Party carried the Black vote for a time, but policy and not loyalty has driven the Black vote. California editor and activist Charlotta Bass’s political evolution highlights the transition of the Black vote away from the GOP. Bass, an influential political activist, ran for Vice-President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Her campaign demonstrated some of the shifting loyalties of Black voters and the failure of both political parties to address the needs of the Black community.