Stephen A. Smith Thinks Voting Republican Will Make Parties 'Compete' for Black Votes. He’s Wrong
Blind loyalty to a party has never been a defining feature of Black political activism, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Michael Harriot writes.
In 1940, Black people saved the world.
During the first eight years of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt’s policy was to treat Black people like America had always treated Black people. He defended Jim Crow segregation and ignored pleas for an anti-lynching law. He put a Klansman on the Supreme Court. His redlining federal policy is still considered the gold standard of systemic racism. The New Deal didn’t just reserve its most impactful aid programs for white America; it excluded Black Americans from the most expensive, most progressive economic reform package in the history of the planet. And, while historians still rank Roosevelt as the most powerful president in American history, to win a third term, he had to confront an economic, political, and social crisis that had loomed over his entire presidency.
White supremacy.
In Roosevelt’s defense, he was a Democrat. In 1940, about 44% of Black registered voters identified as Democrats. That number didn’t include the Jim Crow South, where registering to vote was as dangerous for Black men as smiling at a white woman. In the former Confederate states, the Democratic Party was synonymous with white supremacy. And in a country where three out of four Black people lived in former Confederate states governed by fascist disenfranchisement laws, Roosevelt had never needed Black voters. He won his first two presidential campaigns in landslides. But when he heard that Black labor organizer A. Philip Randolph was planning a huge demonstration, Roosevelt understood what a “Negro March on Washington” meant for his reelection prospects.
The man most historians consider the most powerful president in U.S. history acquiesced. Summoning the members of his secret “Black Cabinet,” FDR tasked Howard University history professor Rayford Logan with writing Executive Order 8802. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black newspaper, launched the Double V campaign, urging the president to fight fascism at home and abroad. Soon, Black men flocked to the military.
Buoyed by their success, FDR’s Black Cabinet convinced the president to appoint another Howard University professor, Dr. Charles Drew, to build something called a “blood bank.” At their behest, he also included funds in the upcoming budget for a program called the Civilian Pilots Training Program (CPTP). Congress knew the country was preparing for war, so neither party opposed the unexplained line item in the military budget until the CPTP produced its first cohort of Tuskegee Airmen.
Before Executive Order 8802, America didn’t have the bombs, the tanks, planes, pilots, or the will necessary to face Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan’s plan for world domination. FDR knew it. While Black Americans played a large role in helping to extinguish this global threat to Democracy, they didn’t give their votes to FDR or the Democratic Party. They demanded something in return.
That’s only one reason Stephen A. Smith is wrong.
“I wish for one election that every Black person would vote Republican,” yelled world-renowned word-hollerer Stephen A. Smith on a recent episode of Cam Newton’s podcast. Smith acknowledged that he was quoting a speech he gave at Vanderbilt University when he said, “Black folks in America are telling one party: ‘We don’t give a damn about you.’ They’re telling the other party: 'You’ve got our vote.' Therefore, you have labeled yourself disenfranchised because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you, and nobody comes to address your interest.”
On Newton’s podcast, Smith added: “What I want is to put ourselves as a community in a position where both parties have to work to get our vote.”
I personally heard him deliver a version of his “I Have a Black Republican Dream” speech during a 2014 Black History Program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Even the local newspaper noted how Smith “chided black people for what he views as a blind allegiance to the Democratic party since the mid-1960s without engaging in even dialogue with leaders in both of the major parties.” He was wrong then; he is wrong now.
Aside from inspiring sports fans to turn down the volume when he is talking, the ESPN host is most known for being loud and wrong.
He was wrong when he blamed Trayvon Martin for making white people leery of Black men in hoodies, and not four centuries of racial propaganda. When he assumed his ESPN fame gave him enough clout to convince Black people to respect Donald Trump, he was wrong. He was wrong to suggest that some women deserved to be punched in the face. He was on the wrong side of “All Lives Matter” and Colin Kaepernick’s protest. When he called Rep. Jasmine Crockett “ghetto,” he was as wrong as the white people who used the same slur.
But when it comes to this political issue, Smith’s take isn’t just loud, wrong, historically inaccurate, and devoid of logic; his narcissistic contrarianism perpetuates an anti-Black narrative that launders racism as intellectual thought.
It’s white nonsense.
Parties Have Always Had to Earn Our Votes
Political parties exist for a reason. In the duopoly that defines mainstream American politics, the two parties represent two opposing methods of governing: one progressive, the other conservative. And while the Republican Party stands for very little, it represents a constituency dedicated to one proposition: All men are not created equal.
To be fair, when Stephen A. Smith and people who get their history from sixth-grade social studies textbooks regurgitate the ahistorical narrative that “the Democratic Party was the original racists,” they are partially correct. But here’s what Stephen A. Smith gets wrong:
Black people have never “given” their vote to a political party.
The Democratic Party was created by white slaveowners to protect slavery. That’s it. When historians wax poetic about how Jeffersonian Democracy evolved into Jacksonian Democracy, they are euphemizing the political philosophies of two human trafficking rapists who wanted to protect their slaveholding empires. They championed whites-only suffrage, so they were not “populists.” They believed the federal government should protect their human property, so they were not “states’ rights” conservatives. People who are willing to rip their country apart to keep their slaves are not “patriots.”
The very first Democratic platform stated that “all efforts of the abolitionists or others, made to induce congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto… have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people, and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union.” After the un-American Confederates got beaten like a civil rights activist at a MAGA rally, the newly pardoned insurrectionists renewed their dedication and lynched freedmen by the thousands. They weaponized their political power to disenfranchise democracy-seekers by the millions.
And because of what they did, Black people didn’t give them votes.
Conversely, the Republican Party was originally a single-issue party built for one purpose: to oppose the expansion of slavery. The GOP initially appealed to newly emancipated Black Americans because of its policies. But the new Black coalition didn’t just blindly accept the goals and strategies of the party’s white founders. As Black elected officials gained power, they took control of the infrastructure and remade the GOP in their own political image.
By the 1870s, the reverse gentrification of the GOP was so complete that disgruntled white liberals fled the “Nigger Party and formed an anti-Black faction called “Lily White Republicans.” And when the civil rights movement pushed the country closer to true Democracy, Southerners took their Confederate flags to the States’ Rights Democratic Party, or the Dixiecrats. By the 1970s, the most prominent pro-segregationists, such as Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Ronald Reagan, had become Republicans.
So Black people stopped giving Republicans their votes.
As you can see, blind loyalty to a party has never been a defining feature of Black political activism. In the Black political universe, the name of the party has always been inconsequential. And because our political participation is defined by our collective interests, when a party platform doesn’t reflect our political goals, we stop supporting it. We never gave our vote to a party, anyway; we made the parties earn it.
So, while the man who fantasizes about becoming the Black Joe Rogan would have you believe that he and all the white people who ever whited have figured out how to conquer American politics, history tells us what would happen if Smith realized his dream “that every Black person would vote Republican.”
White people will stop voting Republican.
When Black Republican voters contributed to what still ranks as the highest turnout in American history in 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal with white Democrats that ushered in a century of Jim Crow. He did it because the GOP never wanted Black people to have political power; it wanted Black voters. And when Black voters used the Republican Party to give ourselves power, white people left.
America was forced to confront the issue of civil rights because of Black people. When the Democratic Party accepted the inevitable end of Jim Crow, white people left the party. The Lily White movement formed because the GOP was too Black. The Dixiecrats fled the Democratic Party for the same reason. The Democratic Party created the party primary system specifically to exclude Black voters. The Southern Strategy, the Tea Party, MAGA Republicanism, and every conservative intraparty movement in the history of American politics are all products of this mission.
This lesson doesn’t even require a trip back to the 1800s. According to Pew Research, in 2016, Donald Trump received 6% of the Black vote. Over the last 100 years, no major party candidate who won the presidency has received a lower percentage of the Black vote. In the 2024 election, Trump won around 15% of the Black vote. According to Stephen A. Smith’s Grand Theory of Negro Politics, this miraculous increase in Black votes should have made the GOP more inclusive.
Instead, the party leaders created a right-wing blueprint for the executive branch that sought to roll back gains from the Civil Rights movement. Trump’s 2026 and 2027 congressional budget proposals defunded the Minority Business Development Agency and clawed back money that Congress set aside for Black farmers. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth purged the armed forces of Black leaders and reinstated the names of white supremacists to military bases. They whitewashed the country’s past and made their government websites white again. It’s almost like their goal is to become the most racist administration ever. Or, as Smith calls it:
‘Competing.’
How Black America Reshaped U.S. Politics
Executive Order 8802 didn’t just desegregate the defense industry; the exodus of Black workers from the Jim Crow South during the Second Great Migration shifted the nation’s demographics. Partly because of the Double V campaign, 75 historically Black colleges participated in the National Defense Program, while millions of Black men and women joined the war effort.
After Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Democrats sought to capitalize on the party’s support among Black voters. In December 1946, FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. The commission’s report proposed a national anti-lynching law, eliminating poll tax laws and strengthening the DOJ’s civil rights division. Shortly before the 1948 election, Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which banned segregation in the armed forces.
While most people believe that the parties “switched sides” during the civil rights movement, this is actually when Black voters became Democrats. In 1948, for the first time since emancipation, a majority of Black voters identified as Democrats, while 77% of Black voters cast a ballot for Harry S. Truman – not because of what the Democratic Party had done for Black people – but because of what Black people had done for Democrats.
Still, Black voters were not above party politics.
In 1959, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy attended the annual gala of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to beg the supporters of historically Black colleges to back him in the Democratic primaries.
They said no.
Kennedy’s primary opponent, fellow Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, had already secured the support of UNCF director Hobart Taylor Sr. A fellow Texan and one of the few Black multimillionaires in America, Taylor and Johnson had been quietly working together for years. Together, they helped topple Texas’s all-white primary system and, at the 1944 Democratic Convention, Johnson appointed Taylor as the first Black Democratic delegate from the South.
Kennedy ultimately won the Democratic nomination and selected LBJ as his running mate. When they won, LBJ sent inauguration party tickets to Taylor’s brilliant son, attorney Hobart Taylor Jr. As the younger Taylor passed through the line to shake the VP’s hand, Johnson told his old friend’s son to come by the office. Of course, Taylor Jr. dismissed the invitation, figuring his daddy’s friend was just making small talk at the party …
Until he got a call a few days later.
What happened next comes directly from an interview with Hobart Taylor Jr:
“[Johnson] said, ‘I thought I said ‘come to see me.’ And so I said, ‘Well, all right, I’ll come tomorrow then.’
I came down, and then that’s when he handed me a draft of the order establishing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, of which I knew nothing, and he asked me to look it over and see what I thought about it. He gave me about an hour, and he put me in the ceremonial office over there next to him.
I looked it over, and I said, ‘Gosh, I’d do a lot of things differently if I were doing it … And he said, ‘Would you write it the way you want it?’
…He got me a room down at the Willard Hotel, and I worked on it all that night. …I was searching for something that would give a sense of positiveness to performance under that Executive Order ... And that is in the phrase:
‘The contractor shall take affirmative action to carry out his obligations of equal employment.’ And I took ‘affirmative’ because it was alliterative.”
And that’s how “affirmative action” was invented.
Within five years of creating Executive Order 10925, President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Higher Education Act, which created the federal government’s category for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Democrats didn’t do that; Black people did.
A Black man wrote Executive Order 8802; FDR signed it because he had no other choice. Roosevelt’s New Deal created a middle class for whites. The Black middle class was the result of Black organizing and collective political activity.
On his first day in office, Trump rescinded the federal directives that evolved from Executive Order 10925 and Executive Order 8802.
Stephen A. Smith wants Black people to vote for that party. He thinks he is smarter than you, me, and all the Black scholars, politicians, and freedom fighters who helped save the world from fascism and made this country a more perfect union.
But as we know…
Stephen A. Smith is always wrong.
Michael Harriot is the author of the New York Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America and founder of ContrabandCamp.com, a Substack covering the intersection of race, politics and culture.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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