Jay Bryant explains The significance of Carol Moseley Braun:
Carol Moseley Braun, who ended her presidential campaign this week, is frequently and accurately described as the only African-American woman ever to serve in the United States Senate.Ruh oh!
But, assiduous newsreader though I am, I have never seen her identified by the following descriptor, which in addition to being equally accurate is vastly more remarkable:
Carol Moseley Braun is the only African-American Democrat ever to serve in the United States Senate.
Isn't that really astonishing? A political party that for the past seventy years has claimed the allegiance of as many as ninety per cent of the black voters of this country has elected precisely one of them to the Senate. And the only way Moseley Braun won was by challenging and defeating the Illinois Democratic Party's anointed and endorsed candidate – incumbent Senator Alan J. Dixon in 1992.Much more by following the link. When are Jesse and Al holding the press conference?
I paused in mid column just now and did some rough math, which suggests that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all Democrats are African-Americans. So if we applied the concept of affirmative action quotas to the Democratic Senate membership, there should be approximately twelve black Democratic Senators in the current Congress. But in fact, there are none. There weren't any in the last Congress either, or the one before that. Except for Moseley Braun's single six-year term, there have never been any black Democratic Senators.
There have been three black Republican Senators: Hiram Revels, Blanche Kelso Bruce and Edward Brooke.
Oh, Democrats will let African-Americans serve in the House of Representatives, but only after carefully carving out black-majority, which is to say segregated, districts for them. Well, you can't expect white Democrats to vote for one of them, can you?
So the Democratic Party's policy, throughout the modern, post-World War II era has been to create separate-but-equal congressional districts. Keep blacks in the ghetto – the urban plantation. The handful of African-American Republican members of Congress, by contrast, have come from suburban and rural areas, where they have been, often enthusiastically, supported by Republican voters. Moreover, whenever the Republican Party has attempted to run black candidates in black areas, they lose overwhelmingly, and this pattern holds for other offices, too.
White Republicans have no problem whatsoever voting for black Republicans, when they can find one to vote for. Black Democrats won't vote for a black Republican. White Democrats won't vote for a black Democrat. Which is the racist party?
