There is a fascinating Saturday Night Live sketch from 1980, a piece almost entirely forgotten by most viewers of the NBC comedy show. The sketch survives in the pop culture arena only because it features the SNL debut of comedian Eddie Murphy. Airing about a month after the country elected an ex-actor to the presidency
The GOP of today, bears little resemblance to the ‘Party of Lincoln’ to which black voters had been fiercely loyal since the era of Reconstruction. By Michael Taube Frederick Douglass, the great writer, orator and abolitionist leader, was a trusted adviser to President Abraham Lincoln — and a black Republican. In an Aug. 15,
Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Leah Wright Rigueur provides a thoughtful inquiry into the unraveling between Republicans and African-Americans in her authorial debut, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power. This erosion occurred over a period of decades, most problematically between 1936 and 1980, the focus of her
“African-Americans should not be Republicans, nor should they be conservatives” Rigueur opens her new book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican. And yet they are. Rigueur wanted to know why. Consequently, she gives us a 310-page history which introduces us to figures from the obscure (Arthur Fletcher) to the notorious (Barry Goldwater); and facts unknown
