Rep. Byron Donalds at the Philadelphia “Congress, Cognac, & Cigars” event, stating that black families were stronger during the Jim Crow era. (Image: Office of Rep. Byron Donalds)
June 7, 2024 by David Silverberg
Not all gaffes are equal—some are major, huge, and potentially career-ending.
Perhaps when Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) said on Tuesday, June 4 that Jim Crow practices in the South kept black families together, it shouldn’t be counted as a gaffe, which is generally considered a mistake or a misstatement, usually of an impromptu nature. After all, it was clearly something he had considered and he expressed a genuinely held thought.
However, politically, it was much worse than a gaffe—it was a blunder.
The setting
Donalds was in Philadelphia, Pa., for a Donald Trump-related outreach event to black conservatives. Dubbed “Congress, Cognac, & Cigars” it was held at a club called The Cigar Code, which seeks to provide “a relaxing atmosphere where you can kick back and enjoy our high-quality cigars” along with drinks and food.
Organizers invited attendees to “Immerse yourself in the world of politics, premium cognac, and fine cigars. Enjoy a conversation about the Black Male vote, Leadership, and how Black Men will impact the 2024 vote.”
Donalds (who has sponsored legislation exempting premium cigars from tobacco regulations) was on stage with Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-38-Texas), a fellow black conservative Republican.
In keeping with the tenor of the evening, Donalds, cognac and premium cigar in hand, was clearly relaxed—and it’s at such times that he often provides his most truthful—and damaging—revelations. Like the time in 2021 when he admitted he had been drinking prior to addressing a press conference in the Capitol denouncing masking and President Joe Biden’s stimulus and pandemic relief bill.
This time his statement causing the uproar was this: “You see, during Jim Crow, during Jim Crow the black family was together. During Jim Crow more black people were not just conservative—black people were always conservative minded—more black people voted conservatively. And then, HEW, Lyndon Johnson, and then you go down that road and we are where we are.”
(HEW is the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which was changed in 1979 to the Department of Health and Human Services after creation of a separate Department of Education. Jim Crow refers to a character in 19th century minstrel shows that came to stereotype black people and then stand for the entire culture of racial segregation, discrimination and intimidation in the southern United States.)
When Donalds’ statement was reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer, it created an uproar. The Biden-Harris campaign posted a 28-second clip on X with the offending statement and the notation, “Trump VP contender Byron Donalds claims life was better for Black Americans ‘during Jim Crow.’”
Donalds hit back, claiming in his own post that “1. You lied. I never said better. 2. Don’t clip my words. Play the whole thing. Let me help you.”
Accordingly, below is a full text transcribed from the 1-minute, 45-second video posted by Donalds:
“I grew up with my Mom. My Dad and my Mom, things didn’t work out. As an adult, I look at my father and say ‘Bro, I don’t know what happened, but you’re my father and I love you. I don’t know what happened!’ I wasn’t there. But I’m going to tell you this: Growing up, one thing I wanted to do—and this is not about my father, this is about what I wanted to do—is I wanted to be a father to my sons.
“And so one of the things that’s actually happening in our culture, which you’re now starting to see in our politics, is the reinvigoration of black males with younger black men and black women and that is also helping to breed the revival of a black middle class in America.
“You see, during Jim Crow, during Jim Crow the black family was together. During Jim Crow more black people were not just conservative—black people were always conservative minded—more black people voted conservatively. And then, HEW, Lyndon Johnson, and then you go down that road and we are where we are.
“What’s happened in America the last ten years, and I say this because it’s my contemporaries, your contemporaries, you’re starting to see more black people be married, in homes, raising kids, because when you’re home with your wife raising your kids, and then you’re looking at the world, you’re saying: ‘Now wait a minute, time out. This does not look right. How can I get something to my kids?’ It goes back to the conversation about generational wealth. Not just a job, generational wealth. I’m looking at my kids be on my shoulders when they take off in life. That’s what’s happening.”
The reaction
House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries denounces Rep. Byron Donalds on the House floor. (Image: US House)
Whatever Donalds intended, the reaction was swift and severe.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-8-NY), the House minority leader, took to the floor of the House of Representatives to angrily denounce Donalds’ statement in a 1-minute, 4-second speech.
“Mr. Speaker, it has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that black folks were better off during Jim Crow. That’s an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation. We were not better off when a young boy named Emmett Till could be brutally murdered without consequence because of Jim Crow, we were not better off. When black women could be sexually assaulted without consequence because of Jim Crow, we were not better off. When people could be systematically lynched without consequence because of Jim Crow, we were not better off. When children could be denied a high quality education without consequence because of Jim Crow we were not better off. When people could be denied the right to vote without consequence because of Jim Crow.
“How dare you make such an ignorant observation. You’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself.”
The Biden-Harris campaign didn’t just slam Donalds on X.
“Donald Trump spent his adult life, and then his presidency undermining the progress Black communities fought so hard for — so it actually tracks that his campaign’s ‘Black outreach’ is going to a white neighborhood and promising to take America back to Jim Crow,“ Biden-Harris spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement.
The Donalds statement blazed across the media landscape like an uncontrolled wildfire, with almost all headlines negative and emphasizing Donalds’ support for Jim Crow: The New York Times, “Byron Donalds, Trump V.P. Contender, Suggests Jim Crow Era Had an Upside;” The Washington Post, “Rep. Byron Donalds says Black families were stronger during Jim Crow era;” Politico: “Byron Donalds expresses nostalgia for the Jim Crow era, when ‘the Black family was together;” NBC News: “Trump surrogate Byron Donalds hearkens back to Jim Crow era when ‘the Black family was together;’ The Hill: “Donalds suggests Black families were stronger during Jim Crow era.”
Innumerable anonymous responses on X were far more extreme, pointing out, among other things, that Donalds would have been lynched for marrying—much less courting—a white woman during Jim Crow.
Donalds has tried to respond and clarify his remarks but his efforts have been comparable to trying to fight a firehose with a squirt gun.
Analysis: Twisted history
Byron Donalds and history don’t mix.
Whether it was the moment in 2021 when he said that Potemkin villages were invented by the East Germans to hide their side of Berlin from the West, to his rage about being sent a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to this latest misstatement, it is clear that history is not his strongest subject.
Perhaps he’s right that there’s a discussion to be had about the strength of black families down through the ages.
But as Jeffries pointed out, during the Jim Crow era, the point of segregationist and discriminatory law was not to strengthen the black family. The negative impact of southern oppression on black families is more than amply chronicled in both fact and fiction.
But going beyond the argument over the impact of Jim Crow on families there’s Donalds’ assertion that black voters “were not just conservative—black people were always conservative minded—more black people voted conservatively.”
That’s just factually wrong.
Ending slavery was a radical cause in the United States before the Civil War and ending discrimination after it was part of the liberal agenda. After they gained the right to vote through the 15th Amendment black voters responded and were overwhelmingly not conservative, but Republican. “Conservatism” at the time meant returning to the situation during enslavement or something like it.
Although President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, after emancipation white southerners tried to segregate the races, i.e., establish a Jim Crow society in the South. The Republican Party opposed and worked against Jim Crow laws and southern racial discrimination, winning black voters’ loyalty.
In contrast, the post-Reconstruction South was solidly segregationist Democratic and white politicians and racists did everything they could to suppress and deny black voting rights. Restoring and protecting those rights was a liberal cause, not a conservative one and politically active blacks responded accordingly.
Where blacks could not express their discontent in political activity or at the ballot box in the South they voted with their feet, resulting in a vast migration northward where there were jobs and far less overt discrimination. They were hardly “conservatively minded.”
After World War II and the victorious fight against Fascism, the wall of racial segregation began to crumble but not before southern politicians did absolutely everything they possibly could to stop civil rights for black citizens. In 1948 then-Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina led a walkout of southerners from the Democratic Party to form his own, segregationist Dixiecrat Party and run for president. In 1964 he switched allegiance to the Republican Party—after President Lyndon Johnson, the president whom Donalds denigrated, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination. In 1968 President Richard Nixon launched his “southern strategy” to position the Party to pick up the allegiance of segregationist voters previously loyal to Gov. George Wallace of Alabama and position the Republicans as the party of disaffected white southerners.
The overwhelming majority of black voters were never “conservative minded” when conservatism meant maintaining Jim Crow, nor did they vote conservatively. Their clear and obvious interest was in moving society forward toward integration and non-discrimination. Indeed, Rev. Martin Luther King excoriated those moderate liberals who did not do enough toward this end in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”
So Donalds has virtually all of his history wrong. But that’s hardly anything new.
Analysis: The political fallout
As though to provide icing on a very sour cake, Donalds’ latest statement comes two weeks after the century anniversary of the 1924 Fort Myers lynchings, another feature of the Jim Crow South and something that occurred in his own district, no less.
But it also comes at an extremely sensitive time politically.
It comes when history in Florida is being officially re-written to teach school children that before emancipation, “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” thereby justifying bondage as beneficial to those enslaved. When Donalds argues that Jim Crow strengthened black families, he appears to be seeing advantage in a time when official discrimination and prejudice were the norm.
Step by step, school by school, library by library, especially in Florida, Donalds, his Trumpist allies and cultural crusaders are normalizing social situations that existed back when America was supposedly “great.” One has to wonder where this leads. Was America great when women didn’t vote? When alcohol was banned? When lynchings were common? When race riots went unpunished?
“The Apprentice” redux
On another front, there is Trump’s reprise of his “The Apprentice” reality show in picking his vice presidential running mate and the role of Donalds’ remarks in his bid for the job.
The remarks come when Trump, who has made no secret of his racial prejudices, is threatening to make them the law of the land if he is elected president again. Is Donalds attempting to curry favor with a man who says that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America and all Mexicans are “criminals” and “rapists?” Are these the kind of policies Donalds will pursue in the White House if he attains it? Does he believe that if he is elected Trump’s vice president he will promote Jim Crow policies to “strengthen” the black family?
All the candidates, no matter how remote their chances, are under greater scrutiny than usual (although nothing compared to what the winner will receive). Every gaffe, stumble and indiscretion is magnified and blasted across the media landscape.
They are also competing for the favor of a mercurial, unpredictable felon facing jail time.
Donalds is making his bid by showing his loyalty and spewing out a torrent of pro-Trump statements and postings. He traveled to New York to stand by Trump at the trial, he spoke as a passionate Trumper in the Bronx and he’s served as a surrogate for Trump elsewhere, which is why he was in Philadelphia.
But as the Trump vice presidential candidates are learning, unthinking and unblinking loyalty is not enough. The reality show is now in a phase where the wrong statement, the wrong move, an irritable moment or a passing gaffe is enough to disqualify a contestant. For example, when South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) revealed to the world that she shot an innocent puppy, she probably disqualified herself no matter how much Trump might approve.
Will Donalds’ seeming longing for what he regards as the family-friendly days of Jim Crow disqualify him from the Trumpstakes? Only Trump can know for sure. But even Trump, who no doubt himself longs himself for the days of Jim Crow, may experience a moment of hesitation given the strength of the reaction to Donalds’ statements.
However this plays out, it is another expression of Donalds’ sometimes incredible ineptitude as a politician. He may be able to fool some of the people in Florida’s 19th Congressional District all of the time, and he may be able to fool all Americans some of the time, but increasingly he is proving that, as Lincoln noted, he cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
Rep. Byron Donalds and Rep. Wesley Hunt enjoy cognac and cigars at the Philadelphia event where Donalds discussed Jim Crow. (Photo: Brakkton Booker /Politico)
Liberty lives in light
© 2024 by David Silverberg