Black Republicans have gained national attention in recent months, their visibility coming at a time when the party appears to be shifting more to the right.
Rodney Hall made history last month when he won the Republican primary for a Mississippi Capitol seat, setting him up to become the first Black Republican elected to the legislature since the Reconstruction era.But that wasn’t his goal when he decided to run for the open seat in District 20, which runs along Mississippi’s border with Tennessee border.
Black candidates are competing for the Republican presidential nomination, including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former Texas congressman Will Hurd. In Kentucky, Attorney General Daniel Cameron is the party’s nominee for governor. In last year’s midterm elections, two new Black Republicans won House seats, bringing their number in Congress to five, the highest since the Reconstruction era.
Leah Wright Rigueur is a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University, and author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” a historical look at Black conservatives in the party. She said that in recent years the Republican Party has “started investing in … Black candidates that they believe can either win elections, or can disrupt the kind of culture surrounding a political space or race.
Gines says the Republican Party’s image has become closely tied with former president Donald Trump and some contentious cultural issues. For instance, Gines says he does not agree with the Republican stances on critical race theory and monitoring what instructors are teaching their students.
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