The Story of Black Wall Street #005: Super Tuesday in Tulsa
The 'black agendas' mattered less than past black experiences
Welcome to the fifth edition of Run It Back, my biweekly newsletter about neglected black history. For the foreseeable future the newsletter will be focused on Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, which I’m currently writing a book about for Random House.
Yesterday was a day of what I’d call obvious surprises. Weeks of speculative polls, social media chatter and endless television ads caused me and many others to stray from some very basic intuitions: Mike Bloomberg had no base of support on which to build a candidacy; Bernie Sanders’ ideas read as radical in the conservative south, even among Dems; Joe Biden is a trusted name in establishment politics, and a big name can carry you a very long way.
I’m not a political reporter and definitely not a political scientist, so I’m only going to write what I know. Over the last week I reported a story for The New Yorker about Mike Bloomberg’s black agenda, which he named the Greenwood Initiative and unveiled in January right here on Black Wall Street. My story probed whether black people in Tulsa thought the plan was shallow pandering or a sincere attempt to help the black community. The results Tuesday speak for themselves--in Tulsa County, Bloomberg pulled only 14% of the vote, far behind Bernie Sanders at 30% and Joe Biden at 37%. There was no exit poll data about black voters specifically, but CNN reports that 46% of non-white voters went for Biden, 25% for Sanders, and only 9% for Bloomberg. Exit polls also showed that 50% of Oklahoma voters made their decision in the last few days, and of that group, 41% broke for Biden, with Bloomberg and Sanders trailing far behind. On Wednesday morning, Bloomberg suspended his campaign, evaporating $500 million spent on a longshot bid for the White House.
Oklahoma is one of the reddest states in the nation--every single county went for Trump in 2016--but the political alchemy here still feels very different than in my home state of Alabama, where Biden won a whopping 63% of the overall vote, and 72% of the black vote. I interviewed about 15 people for the New Yorker story, and met quite a few folks that didn’t necessarily fit into the neatly defined narratives about black voting habits that the news cycles require. I talked to a 37-year-old activist preacher who is thrilled about Bloomberg’s plan, and an 84-year-old woman who voted for Bernie because of his youthful support. I met three Elizabeth Warren supporters, even though she’s struggled to secure a lot of black votes. I stumbled upon two black Republicans, one who was Team #NeverTrump and the other an ardent supporter of the president (Biden’s name rarely came up, but these interviews were mostly conducted with people in Greenwood leadership or activist circles and before Biden won in South Carolina on Saturday).
All of this made me think a lot about the political philosophy of A.J. Smitherman, the editor of Greenwood’s black newspaper, The Tulsa Star, in the 1910s. Smitherman was a staunch Democrat in an era when many black people still aligned with Republicans, the party of Lincoln. His motivation was less based on fervent ideology than a measured skepticism of both sides of a political system almost entirely controlled by whites. "The policy of voting for men simply because they are Republicans, Democrats or any other partisan is dangerous for any people, but especially so for the Colored people,” he wrote in a 1915 editorial.
Smitherman viewed splitting the black vote as an important tool in protecting black citizens from the vagaries of Jim Crow. As in the South, Oklahoma instituted a literacy test in 1910 that was meant to keep blacks out of the voting booth. When the law was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1915, Smitherman argued that a more diversified black electorate would discourage the passage of similar laws. "The Colored people of Oklahoma, fortunately, are more diversified in politics than in any other southern state and any disenfranchisement would be as harmful to Democrats as it would to Republicans,” he wrote. “We as a race need to use the ballot [box] for our best interest, which instead of being wrapped up in one party is found in all of them.”
The voting precinct just north of Greenwood, where a few people were still lined up to vote after polls closed at 7 p.m.
You could feel that spirit in the primary contest this year, with several candidates vying aggressively for black voters. Early contenders like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker made identity-based appeals, while candidates like Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg rolled out specific black agendas. Reparations were discussed at multiple Democratic debates. Ironically, the two leading candidates, Sanders and Biden, don’t have black agendas at all. Bernie is promising to lift all boats, while Biden is offering a return to the “normalcy” of the Obama era. With these two candidates at the helm, the discussion around black voters will now shift from a debate over varying policies to one over turnout. In the fall, Trump’s various racist statements and actions will be re-litigated and voting against him will be cast as a patriotic duty--and who better to fill the role of the humble but noble patriot than the black voter?
These have been the standard frames for viewing the black vote my entire adult life, since Barack Obama had to run as a unity candidate instead of daring to insinuate he would specifically help black people, and Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was framed around the villainy of Donald Trump. Again we’ll be expected show up the polls, and we probably will in significant numbers--black voters consistently turn out at higher rates than other minority groups and, in the Obama years, at higher rates than white people.
The black vote wasn’t always taken for granted by one side of America’s political machine. In 1912, just months before Smitherman moved to Tulsa, many black voters in the northern states broke for Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson after he pledged “to see justice done them in every matter.” But Wilson reneged on his promise, segregating several departments of the federal government and screening Birth of a Nation, the racist film about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House. African Americans abandoned Wilson for the Republican party in 1916. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the next president to court the black vote, but it wasn’t until his second election--after New Deal programs had started being implemented--that he gained a large share of African American voters. But even as late as 1960, only two-thirds of black voters identified as Democrats.
Today about 90% of black voters are Democrats, even though nearly 70% of black voters identify as moderate or conservative. This is partially the function of the Republican Party veering further right over the course of decades and under Trump into explicitly white supremacist territory. It has to do with black voters wanting to retain the gains of the Civil Rights Movement at all costs, even though they are constantly under threat by conservative judges and legislatures. But it’s also because of the pressures of social conformity black people face within their own peer group. A recent study found that black people are four times as likely as whites to face “sharp criticism” from family and friends for voting Republican.
What we’re left with are presidential nominees on one side that rarely seem up to the task of addressing the needs of black Americans directly, because black votes are a given, while the other side actively seeks to roll back civil and voting rights because black votes will never come their way—precisely the scenario that Smitherman foretold. A Biden vs. Trump showdown seems destined to solidify these tiring tropes.
The way forward with a progressive agenda may not be through national leaders promising revolution all at once, but through connections in local communities where politicians and activists can tangibly demonstrate how an anti-corporate agenda improves people’s daily lives. Here in Tulsa, black voters elected a city councilwoman who successfully implemented a restriction on dollar stores in their neighborhood, a policy that is now being imitated around the country. No doubt all of our communities would be better off if we spent as much time focused on what’s happening at our local city council and board meetings as the spectacle playing out 24/7 on our television and iPhone screens.
The 2020 primaries were a fascinating peek into a world where candidates felt they had to court the black vote instead of assuming it was guaranteed. Ultimately, though, the black agendas were rejected as political theater rather than expected policy. While it’s easy to find examples of black voters supporting progressive candidates on a local level, it was pragmatism--about what a divided Congress can accomplish, about how much a candidate really cares about their black-focused policies, about what amount of change white voters can stomach--that won the day. Of the many people I talked to, I think Jim Goodwin, the 80-year-old editor of the Oklahoma Eagle who has spent his whole life in Greenwood, had the most salient point on presidential politics: “They make these promises, they engage the citizenry, but we suffer from what I call institutional amnesia. From one Administration to the next, there seems to be no recollection of the promises made in the past.”
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Sources
Brophy, Alfred L. “Guinn v. United States (1915).” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.
Tulsa Star. Oct. 16 1915, pg. 4.
“U.S. Supreme Court Kills Grandfather Clause, Negroes Will Gain Vote in Oklahoma. Tulsa Star. June 26 1915.
Weiss, Nancy J. “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation.” Political Science Quarterly. Vol. 84, No. 1 (Mar., 1969), pp. 61-79
Weiss, Nancy J. Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR. 1983.