My Mom The Black Republican Wouldn't Recognize Her Party Today
If my mother were alive, she would be disappointed at what her Republican Party has become. But not surprised. She had witnessed the GOP inching its way toward scapegoating some Americans to score political points with others in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and thought the tactic, while canny and often effective, betrayed longtime African-American Lincoln Republicans like herself.
During the holiday season, I think about my mom, who kept our sprawling, raucous clan together. No matter what was going on with all of our lives, we made our way to the old homestead — squeezing into the Baltimore row house as our families grew — and minded our manners at the dinner table.
After the meal and a few drinks, all bets were off. But looking back, it was usually unresolved personality frictions, not politics, that triggered the occasional tiff.
As a very young girl, because of my mother’s work supervising precincts on Election Day, I was pretty aware of how our democracy was supposed to work, so was as vocal about the news of the day as my elders at our gatherings. Our political differences were minor, especially when compared to reports of the testy exchanges of today, with families and the country at large contributing to Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year: “polarization.”
One reason, I believe, was the diversity of views within the Democratic and Republican parties.
The Democrats’ tent was large enough to cover Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, whose speech as a young Minneapolis mayor at the 1948 Democratic National Convention was pivotal in the party’s decision to add a civil rights plank to its platform; President Lyndon Johnson, who signed landmark rights laws in the 1960s; and the Southern senators who opposed and filibustered those bills.
The Republicans my mother admired were those who favored progress, such as Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, an African American senator who stood up to his party when he felt his duty demanded it, as when early on he called on President Richard Nixon to resign. In our state of Maryland, Republican Sen. Charles “Mac” Mathias carried on the tradition of moderate so-called Rockefeller Republicans, criticizing President Ronald Reagan’s rightward shifts.
My mother agreed. How could she go along, she told me, when during the 1980 campaign against President Jimmy Carter, Reagan laid bare the Southern Strategy employed by Nixon and others before him, invoking harmful racial stereotypes of “welfare queens” and a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. He opposed civil rights bills and a federal holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., before he signed it, with an insult.
It was ironic that as Reagan turned her off, he attracted so many of the Reagan Democrats who helped hand him victories. In Baltimore, we knew some of them well, the working-class white voters, some union members, who inhabited row houses similar to ours in neighborhoods we knew not to venture into.
Though many were Catholic just like us, when Lawrence Cardinal Shehan implored them and all citizens to support a proposed open-housing law that would forbid housing segregation in the city, he was booed and heckled, and received death threats.
My mother was practical enough to know that to a politician, a vote is a vote. But where did that leave her, she wondered, someone upstanding, who worked hard, including for her party, yet didn’t hear its candidates speaking to those like her, instead repeating hoary lies that made the lives of her loved ones more difficult?
This was a mother who packed her three oldest children off with love and anxiety when they marched for civil rights, who believed in their causes and took pride in the lessons she taught them about character and doing the right thing that inspired them.
She knew there were people like Donald Trump in the world and in her party. But I know she would have been appalled as his acolytes stomped through the U.S. Capitol with Confederate flags, breaking the law not in the name of justice but to thwart it, and received so little rebuke from Republicans driven by fear of one man.
As someone who would accept no excuses from any of her five children, she would just shake her head as Republican senators today fall in line, making excuses for the rogue’s gallery of Trump Cabinet hopefuls, making the rounds trailing pardons, sexual misconduct accusations and NDAs.
By 2024, dissenting voices in the party had disappeared, many choosing not to run for seats they could not possibly win. Trump demands loyalty, and party members comply, repeating the talking points he has dictated. They defend the unqualified crew the president-elect is foisting upon the American people, most of whom didn’t vote for him, after calling those with experience, education and a stacked resume DEI hires if they happen to be Black and a Democrat.
That’s what you get when the ever-present loudest voice in the room is a South African émigré who seems nostalgic for apartheid, and only too eager to replicate it in the U.S.
Mom was smart enough to have known what members of her own party would think of her, a Black election worker with integrity who chose truth over fealty every time.
I’ve written about the belief among many African Americans that the Democratic Party has taken its most loyal voting base for granted. It’s also true, and I’m sure mom would agree, that the GOP, counting on resentment and fear of the other, has run campaigns that view Republicans like my parents as collateral damage.
She wouldn’t be surprised, nor angry, since she was the sweetest person you’d ever want to know.
But saddened, for sure.
Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.
