In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States

In the Balance of Power

IN THE BALANCE OF POWER

Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States

Revised and Updated Edition

OMAR H. ALI

Foreword by Eric Foner

Afterword by Jacqueline Salit

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

© 2008, 2020 by Ohio University Press

Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com

All rights reserved

To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).

Printed in the United States of America

Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ali, Omar H. (Omar Hamid) author.

Title: In the balance of power : independent black politics and third-party movements in the United States / By Omar H. Ali ; Foreword by Eric Foner ; Afterword by Jacqueline Sallit.

Description: Revised and updated edition. | Athens : Ohio University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Reveals the multiple independent political tactics and strategies that African Americans have used to expand democracy and uphold civil and political rights since the founding of the nation. This new edition of Ali’s groundbreaking narrative includes an epilogue by independent political analyst and leader Jacqueline Salit. New material addresses the historic presidencies of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, as well as the rising tide of independent and anti-party sentiments-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020241 | ISBN 9780821424346 (paperback) | ISBN 9780821447260 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans--Politics and government. | Third parties (United States politics)--History. | United States--Race relations--Political aspects--History.

Classification: LCC E185.18 .A45 2020 | DDC 323.1196/073--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020241

Para Diana, Pablo, y Samina & Hanes Walton, Jr.

Contents

Foreword by Eric Foner

Introduction

one: Declarations of Independence

two: Abolitionism, the Liberty Party, and Free Soil

three: Republicans, Reconstruction, and Fusion

four: Black Populism and the Negro Party

five: Black Communists, Socialists, and Nationalists

six: Civil Rights, Black Power, and Independent Politics

seven: The Black and Independent Alliance in 2008

Afterword by Jacqueline Salit

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Recent Articles

Timeline

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

Although Americans habitually refer to our political structure as a two-party system, third parties and other independent political movements have been a persistent feature of our history. From the Workingmen’s parties of the late 1820s to the recent presidential candidacies of John Anderson (1980), Ross Perot (1992), and Ralph Nader (2000 and 2004), some Americans have always felt that the two major parties fail to reflect their interests and concerns. Third parties have forced into the public sphere issues that their larger counterparts sought to avoid, such as slavery before the Civil War and the plight of farmers in the era of Populism. Although only one third party, the Republican Party, in the 1850s, has actually risen to national power, many have influenced the course of American history by giving voice to otherwise silenced discontents.

Indeed, many ideas widely taken for granted and assumed to be timeless features of American culture originated with independent political movements, whether organized as political parties or taking other forms. The idea of freedom as a universal entitlement, for example, was developed by the abolitionists, who developed the idea of equal citizenship irrespective of race. The modern idea of privacy—the extension of individual rights into the most intimate areas of personal life—arose from the efforts of generations of feminists to secure for women control over their own persons. Without political mobilizations outside the two-party system, it is difficult to imagine the progress that has been made in the last half-century toward the goal of equal rights and opportunities for all Americans, regardless of race. Independent political movements have made this a better society.

For black Americans, the traditional two-party system has posed a particular set of challenges. Before the Civil War, the vast majority of African Americans, of course, were slaves, stripped of all legal and political rights. Even those who were free generally lacked the right to vote, so political action, almost by definition, had to take place outside the confines of the major parties. After the nation’s brief experiment with interracial democracy during the era of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, the Democratic and Republican parties ignored the plight of black Americans. Nonetheless, where they were able to vote, blacks generally supported the Republican party, which had freed the slaves. During the 1930s, black voting allegiance began to shift to the Democrats, a trend that culminated in recent elections, when under 10 percent of the black electorate supported the Republican candidate for president. But many black political leaders today feel that their votes are taken for granted by a party that lacks a substantive program for addressing the continuing incidence of racial inequality in American life.

It is not surprising, given this history, that some black leaders have seen political independence as offering the most viable strategy for their community. In the pages that follow, Omar Ali traces the history of black participation in third parties and in other forms of political activism. His narrative touches on subjects that have inspired an extensive historical literature, such as abolitionism and the Black Panther party, and on lesser-known parts of this history, including black participation in the Socialist, Progressive, and Communist parties. He reveals the complex dynamics that have shaped the sometimes problematic relationships between African Americans and third-party movements.

As perhaps the most systematically oppressed group in the United States, blacks might be thought to welcome movements for far-reaching social change, and, indeed, they have often responded with enthusiasm to such movements. But at the same time, very few white-dominated independent political organizations have ever achieved a real harmony between blacks and whites. To some extent, of course, radicals and reformers cannot escape the societies they hope to transform, and the problem may be seen as simply one more example of the tensions inherent in American race relations, or of the pervasiveness of racism, even within third-party movements themselves.

Politically, African American leaders have found it difficult to decide where to look for allies in the larger society, or whether to eschew white allies altogether in favor of separatism. Conceptually, they have never reached a consensus on how to define the status of black Americans, a question with profound implications for finding the right strategy for political change. Are blacks members of an ethnic group, analogous to Polish Americans, Italian Americans, and other immigrant minorities, in which case they should operate as a political pressure group that seeks to elect more of their members to office and obtain a larger slice of the political pie? Are they members of an internal colony, whose situation is similar to colonized peoples in the Third World, in which case self-determination or even racial separation suggests itself, rather than seeking greater power within the existing system? Or are they basically downtrodden members of the working class, who ought to form alliances with other workers based on common class interests?

If these questions have proven intractable, it is also true that many white-dominated independent political movements have not effectively addressed the unique plight of African Americans as slaves, descendants of slaves, and victims of forms of oppression not experienced by other Americans. What kind of relationship could blacks forge with political movements such as the Populists, for example, who exalted the idea of the autonomous property-owning citizen? Or with movements based on the ideal of the free individual standing against state and society? Or with unionism, socialism, and communism, which saw social class as the fundamental dividing line in American society? None of these ideologies seemed entirely relevant to the black experience. Blacks were not propertied individuals—most of them were property before the Civil War. The idea of the free individual did help to inspire the crusade against slavery, in which many blacks took part, but it proved unable to solve the social and economic plight of the freed people after emancipation. Movements based on social class, finally, have faced a dual problem in attracting black support. On the one hand, there was the simple fact of racism in many unions. Perhaps more importantly, even those class movements that made genuine efforts to enlist black support generally subordinated racial issues to ones of class exploitation, defining the status of blacks as part of the larger plight of the proletariat or small farmer. The specific historical experience of blacks as a portion of the working class operating in a severely segmented labor market, subject to lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement, was rarely addressed systematically by such movements. Moreover, their rallying cry, solidarity of all workers, black and white, flew in the face of the everyday experience of black Americans.

As Ali demonstrates, the main current of black political thought dates back to the abolitionist movement. What the historian Vincent Harding has called the Great Tradition of black politics aimed at blacks’ full incorporation into American life. The country could never be true to its professed creed of equality, black leaders like Frederick Douglass insisted, until slavery was abolished and African Americans enjoyed the same rights and opportunities as whites. Others, however, such as Douglass’s contemporary Martin Delany, argued that slavery and racism were intrinsic to American society and that blacks could achieve genuine freedom only by creating their own national existence, preferably, for Delany, in Africa or the Caribbean. Self-determination, not integration, offered the proper political course. This analysis suggested the necessity of separate black political organizations, rather than alliances with reform-minded whites. As Ali shows, this tension, in one form or another, has existed in every era of American history down to the present day.

Whether independent political action or operating within one of the two major parties offers the best hope for improving the condition of black Americans remains, of course, a point of debate today. One of the many virtues of Omar Ali’s account lies in highlighting the variety of political structures and strategies blacks have chosen over the course of American history in pursuing the goal of racial justice. Independent politics is not the only approach, but it has a long history, which, as Ali shows, has at many points energized the black community and helped to make America a better place for all its people.

Eric Foner

Introduction

Blacks have tended to be loyal to the two major parties. However, specific circumstances have led to active African-American support of third parties. When the two major parties reject African Americans’ political goal of inclusion, African Americans seek other political allies.

Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics¹

Throughout the history of the United States, African Americans have catalyzed movements for the expansion of democracy, social justice, and economic and political reform. Since the mid-nineteenth century, African Americans have done so through a range of independent political tactics, including creating or joining existing third parties, supporting insurgent or independent candidates, running fusion campaigns, and lobbying elected officials with the backing of various alliances and organizations. That is, there has been an undercurrent of political independence among African Americans since the nineteenth century, even as most black voters have aligned themselves with one of the two major parties: the Republican Party from the time of the Civil War to the New Deal; and the Democratic Party since the New Deal, and especially since the height of the modern civil rights movement.² In our post–civil rights era of pandemics and political uncertainties, there are also new possibilities. Younger voters, less connected to the old-guard leadership of the civil rights movement, are increasingly self-identifying as independent—that is, neither as Democrats nor as Republicans—and they are doing so at record levels. A recent poll conducted by Tufts University notes that upwards of 44 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds identify as independent; meanwhile, Pew Research Center surveys show that over one in four African Americans across all age groups are consistently declaring their independence.³

To be sure, life in the United States will never be the same in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged so many lives, devastated so many communities, and upended the nation’s economy. A disproportionate number of black people have died in the pandemic—a function of widespread poverty among African Americans resulting from slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing forms of institutional racism towards black and poor people.⁴ Tragically, partisanship contributed to the government’s failure to act quickly and decisively in the face of COVID-19. But the arc of history also provides some clues of what may come with regards to African American politics even as the pandemic continues in full force at the time of this writing. As the University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson notes, African Americans have worked to advance their political and economic interests by supporting third parties and creating new alliances. In doing so they have brought about some of the most basic and farthest-reaching changes in the republic: the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the right to vote, and the enactment and enforcement of civil rights. What happens going forward is not known. What we do know is that independent black leaders and their allies, joined by masses of ordinary African Americans, have not only served as a moral compass for the nation, but an organizing political force for progressive change.⁵

Today, increasing numbers of black voters are among the tens of millions of people, from a range of backgrounds and from across the ideological spectrum, who view themselves as politically independent. Gallup Polls indicate a steady rise of non–major party political identification among all voters since the late 1980s: from 32 percent in 1988 to 42 percent in 2019.⁶ National opinion polls since the 1990s indicate that up to 30 percent of all African Americans identify themselves as politically independent.⁷ Notably, the category of pure independents created by pollsters and political scientists (that is, those who do not lean toward one or the other major-party when asked how they would vote after having first identified themselves as independent) reveals a profound bias against who independents are, now a plurality of voters in the United States. In this view, independents are effectively a myth, that is, closet-partisans, confused, or politically immature.⁸ However, when asked, independents say they want to be respected and recognized as independents (they do not fit into the partisan boxes which demand party loyalty).⁹ Justifying the approximate ten percent who are supposedly the pure independents (bolstering the notion that the vast majority of eligible voters are in support of the current bipartisan system) misses an obvious point: that if given only two (if that) actual choices on the ballot, then voters might choose one, or not vote at all—which is in fact what voter behavior consistently shows. Perhaps we should look to younger voters for what might lie on the horizon. Indeed, young black voters, like Millennials in general, identify at even higher levels as independent than do older cohorts. A 2019 University of Chicago–affiliated survey noted that upwards of 38 percent of African Americans eighteen to thirty-six years of age did not identify with the two major parties.¹⁰ These Americans are part of an emerging movement of African Americans and white independents comprising black and independent alliances. Most notably, in 2008, a black and independent alliance rallied around the insurgent candidacy of Senator Barack Obama in his bid to become president of the United States.¹¹

Increasingly less tied to the Democratic Party, black voters have been looking for new electoral options and allies in the face of bipartisan hegemony, ongoing poverty, and racism. The Black Lives Matter uprisings, potent political and cultural expressions, are manifestations of the search and demand for social justice in the United States among African Americans, especially younger African Americans. When this book first came out twelve years ago, 66 percent of all Americans believed that the nation was on the wrong track.¹² The latest Pew Research Center poll shows a historic low in terms of public trust in government: fully 83 percent of Americans lack confidence in government doing what is right.¹³ Among African Americans, the feeling and experiences of having been failed or betrayed are especially poignant and painful. Whether it is the failure of the health care system, the public schools, or the economy—despite the heroic efforts of rank-and-file nurses, doctors, teachers, and other workers—there is widespread recognition that the two-party establishment has not been willing or is unable to effectively serve the best interests of ordinary people.¹⁴ Partisanship, institutionalized in the bipartisan arrangement of the Democratic and Republican parties that rule the nation (despite these organizations being private, not public entities, although they create rules and regulations to benefit themselves using taxpayer dollars), either prevents or deters innovation in policies or practices that might otherwise effectively address the myriad challenges facing the nation as a whole and black communities in particular. Panning out, American history reveals that progressive change—social, political, and economic justice and reform—has always come through the interplay of outsider forces and insider forces, which is why independent political action remains critical to the development of the nation as a whole.

✓ ✓ ✓

African Americans have expressed their political independence in a number of ways since the late 1980s. In 1988, when Rev. Jesse Jackson ran as an insurgent presidential candidate for the nomination of the Democratic Party, two out of three African Americans who voted for him in the primaries reported that they would have voted for him as an independent had he decided to run as one.¹⁵ He did not, but that year another African American did: Dr. Lenora Fulani, a developmental psychologist and educator, became not only the first African American but also the first woman to get on the ballot in all fifty states as a candidate for president. She ran as an independent.¹⁶ Four years later, in 1992, the New York Times reported that 7 percent of black voters had cast their ballots for H. Ross Perot, a white Texas billionaire who, like Fulani in 1988, defied the two major parties but, unlike the black independent, had a $73 million war chest with which to advance his campaign.¹⁷ Nearly twenty million voters, or approximately 19 percent of the electorate, would cast their votes for Perot—the largest number of votes cast for an independent in U.S. history—of which over half a million votes came from African Americans.¹⁸ A CBS News poll conducted in May 1992, during the primaries, found that upwards of 12 percent of African Americans said they would vote for Perot over the Democratic and Republican candidates, reflecting surprising support for an independent presidential candidate among black voters at that point in the presidential race; the Los Angeles Times reported Perot drawing up to 18 percent support among African Americans in California.¹⁹ In New York, Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem (a position previously held by the late Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who had been elected with the support of the American Labor Party), gave an early endorsement to Perot, commenting that the independent represented a viable alternative for black voters.²⁰

Within days of Butts’s endorsement, the pastor came under heavy criticism from New York’s black Democratic leadership, headed by Congressman Charles Rangel. Indeed, the attacks on Perot came from across the bipartisan establishment, black and white. From the beginning of his campaign, the Texan was ridiculed by virtually every major liberal and conservative analyst, who fixated on his personal attributes—his diminutive stature, folksy style of speaking, and ubiquitous graphs and charts—instead of seriously engaging the question of why millions of people were interested in voting for him.²¹ Whether sick of the Democrats and Republicans, stating that the politicians are corrupt, or offering more nuanced reasons for why they were voting for Perot, Americans were exercising their independence. In the months and years after the election, the two major parties would attempt to contain and dismiss the voter rebellion: the federal budget was quickly balanced through bipartisan agreement (one of Perot’s concerns was the federal deficit), and the Republicans issued a Contract with America, containing sweeping promises of political reforms (the overriding message of his campaign). During the next election, Perot, the symbol of the 1992 voter revolt, was excluded from the national presidential debates.²²

Throughout the 1990s, black and white voters continued to assert their independence—passing term limits wherever initiatives and referendums were possible, recalling elected officials, voting for local independents and third-party candidates, and withholding votes for major-party candidates.²³ Beginning in Colorado, a largely unreported voter initiative was put on the state ballot to limit congressional terms (four terms in the House and two terms in the Senate). The measure passed with 71 percent of the vote in 1992. Subsequently, a movement under the direction of the organization U.S. Term Limits led to the adoption in fourteen states of term limits on congressional representatives, approved with an average of 67 percent support. According to exit polls in New York, A clear majority of black voters want term limits.²⁴ At a black political convention held in Manhattan on April 8, 1995, three hundred African Americans, from a range of backgrounds and political perspectives, met and endorsed term limits for all elected officials and judges.²⁵ There were other signs of discontent and expressions of political independence among African Americans. In the 1997 gubernatorial race in Virginia, the Democrat, Donald Beyer, received 80 percent of the black vote, rather than the usual 95 percent, and, as a result, lost to the Republican candidate.²⁶ Former Democratic governor Doug Wilder, the state’s first African American governor, had refused to endorse Beyer, remaining neutral instead.

One of the clearest expressions of black voters’ independence came in the form of disaffection from the Democratic Party during the 2005 mayoral election in New York City. In the fall of that year, media businessman and billionaire Michael Bloomberg—running a fusion campaign on the Republican and Independence Party lines—was reelected mayor of the city with 47 percent of New York’s African American vote.²⁷ Like Perot, he spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to run (as he would in his failed bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020). His most outspoken black supporter for his mayoral run, Fulani, had helped establish the Independence Party in the wake of the 1992 election. With almost no direct backing from Bloomberg himself, she led volunteers across New York City to rally support for his candidacy. Concentrating in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn and Queens, the Independence Party called on African Americans to vote for Bloomberg on column C (the column on the ballot where New Yorkers could vote for Bloomberg as an independent—column A being Democrat and B being Republican). In 2001, during his previous bid for mayor, Bloomberg had promised the Independence Party, whose ballot line he sought, to push for an enactment of nonpartisan municipal elections using the city’s initiative and referendum if elected. That year the Independence Party, with over 59,000 votes, gave Bloomberg his margin of victory. Keeping his promise, Bloomberg set up a series of Charter Revision commissions in which hundreds of New Yorkers had a chance to testify both for and against placing nonpartisan municipal elections on the ballot; the measure was ultimately defeated at the polls, largely at the hands of the Democratic Party, which strongly opposed it. But in 2005 the outpouring of support among African Americans would not only prove a serious indictment of the Democratic Party but point to the changing ways in which black New Yorkers were beginning to view themselves relative to both major parties.²⁸ As John P. Avalon wrote in the New York Sun, something is happening in the African-American community. . . . The diversification of the black community economically and politically is changing the landscape. One recent sign of this is the surprising amount of support for Mayor Bloomberg among African American voters. . . . A recent WNBC/Marist poll showed the mayor receiving 50% support from black voters. Avalon further noted, The growing [independent black] trend is broad as well as deep—in 1998 only 5% of African American voters between the age of 51 and 64 identified as independents, but by 2002 that number increased fourfold to 21%.²⁹

It has taken the financial resources of white billionaire businessmen in conjunction with the grassroots organization of insurgent and independent black leaders for African Americans to help challenge the bipartisan establishment.³⁰ Millions of dollars are needed to run television and radio advertisements, conduct telephone banking, retain legal expertise, and petition drives, all of which are necessary to begin to compete effectively in the electoral arena. The laws and related rules governing the electoral process (written and passed by the two major parties’ elected representatives) are specifically designed to keep the Democratic and Republican parties in power: restrictive ballot access, single-member districting, gerrymandering, inequitable campaign finance laws, and discrimination against non–major party candidates in televised debates combine to marginalize even the wealthiest citizens. Underscoring the state of American democracy, when Fulani was asked by a reporter to reflect on what was more difficult in her run for president, being black or being a woman, she poignantly noted that it was being an independent.

The election of President Obama to the highest office in the land as a Democrat was surely a milestone in the history of the United States; it was also the culmination of decades of on-the-ground organizing by ordinary people, many of them black independents, such as Fulani and her associates, in face of Democratic Party opposition. The tension remains (as Jacqueline Salit describes in the new Afterword to this book). One of the ways it took shape was in the 2016 presidential cycle. Black voters displayed diminishing support for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton. Early voting in battleground states, including North Carolina and Florida, revealed a 14 percent decrease in turnout in early voting among black voters, as upwards of two million voters, including many black voters, chose not to vote for the Democratic Party nominee in the general election despite strong appeals by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on behalf of Clinton. Overall black voter turnout for the Democratic Party in 2016 dropped five percentage points from 2012 (with insurgent Democratic candidate Senator Bernie Sanders being bullied out of the nomination by what, by any measure, are strikingly undemocratic nominating procedures that give superdelegates extraordinary power to override the will of rank-and-file delegates within the party). Donald Trump was elected president to the stunned surprise of the nation—the same nation that had reelected Obama four years earlier. Many Democrats began to call for impeachment, which eventually came to pass. By 2018, however, African Americans were once again joined by white independents to back Democratic congressional candidates—this time by a margin of twelve points, revealing the critical role of African Americans when mobilized. In these ways, and other ways, African Americans have been a factor in the balance of power.

✓ ✓ ✓

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 initiated enforcement mechanisms (albeit, at times, unevenly applied) to protect African Americans’ right to vote, but the question for many voters and would-be-voters remains: What meaningful choices are there in a largely bipartisan electoral system? That is, what political options are there if one is not in favor of the dominant policies or practices of the Democratic or Republican parties?

In 2004, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, the only antiwar candidate with national stature (Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had voted for congressional war appropriations for the war in Iraq), was, at the instigation of the Democratic National Committee, removed from the ballot in more than a dozen states.³¹ The Democrats and their Republican counterparts who shared control of the Commission on Presidential Debates would also exclude Nader from the presidential debates. In an environment of such heavy-handed bipartisan rule, when independent and third-party candidates holding dissenting views are blocked from either appearing on the ballot or participating in televised candidate debates, political opposition to the major parties is marginalized to the point of virtual nonexistence.³² Bipartisan constraints have consistently stymied the growth of third-party and individual independent campaigns since the early part of the nineteenth century, ultimately providing few options for voters. African Americans in the antebellum North who were somehow able to meet the property and residency eligibility requirements to vote (as in New York, starting in 1821), or had not been excluded from the vote by statute (as in Michigan, starting in 1837, or Pennsylvania, starting in 1838), often had no choices in the electoral arena.³³ From the 1830s to the 1850s, the vast majority of candidates from the two major parties—at that time, the Democratic and Whig parties—were proslavery, or silent on the issue.³⁴ If one was against slavery, the electoral arena was a limited venue for expressing one’s views—that is, until black and white abolitionists forced the issue of slavery and its abolition onto public stages through mass campaigns by calling on candidates and elected officials to take a position. These abolitionists formed the antislavery Liberty Party, running candidates of their own. In the century thereafter, African Americans confronted a new bipartisan establishment, when the Democratic- and Republican-controlled government was largely unwilling to enforce the constitutional rights of black men and women in the Jim Crow South.

In the current era, despite the legal gains of the modern civil rights movement, which successfully pressed elected representatives to pass federal legislation reaffirming the civil and political rights of African Americans (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965), elements of a new Jim Crow have become embedded in the political process (that is, legalized forms of marginalization and disfranchisement not based on race but on non–major-party registration).³⁵ Independents in the twenty-first century, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or political ideology, face a kind of second-class citizenship in the electoral arena. They are legally and institutionally marginalized, not only in terms of ballot access but by their exclusion from televised debates through gerrymandering and the actions of bipartisan (as opposed to nonpartisan) election regulatory bodies—from the Federal Election Commission to the Commission on Presidential Debates—favoring the two major parties and their candidates.³⁶ Bipartisan restrictions to the ballot not only limit the choices available to voters but, as a consequence, determine the policies and practices that flow from having candidates elected from such a limited set of options. Such restrictions also discourage voter participation. 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

✓ ✓ ✓

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