have expressed their political independence in a number of ways. In 1988, when Rev. Jesse Jackson ran as an insurgent presidential candidate for the nomination of the Democratic Party, two out of three African Americans who voted for him in the primaries reported that they would have voted for him as an independent had he decided to run as one.8 He did not, but that year another African American did: Dr. Lenora Fulani, a developmental psychologist and educator, became not only the first African American, but the first woman, to get on the ballot in all fifty states as a candidate for president. She ran as an independent.9 Four years later, in 1992, the New York Times reported that 7 percent of black voters had cast their ballots for H. Ross Perot, a white Texas billionaire who, like Fulani in 1988, defied the two major parties, but, unlike the black independent, had a $73 million war chest with which to advance his campaign.10 Nearly twenty million voters, or approximately 19 percent of the electorate, would cast their votes for Perot—the largest number of votes cast for an independent in U.S. history—of which over half a million votes came from African Americans.11 A CBS News poll conducted in May of 1992, during the primaries, found that upwards of 12 percent of African Americans said they would vote for Perot over the Democratic and Republican candidates, reflecting surprising support for an independent presidential candidate among black voters at that point in the presidential race; the Los Angeles Times reported Perot drawing up to 18 percent support among African Americans in California.12 In New York, Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem (a position previously held by the late Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who had been elected with the support of the American Labor Party), gave an early endorsement to Perot, commenting that the independent represented “a viable alternative for black voters.”13
Within days of Butts’s endorsement, the pastor came under heavy criticism from New York’s black Democratic leadership, headed by Congressman Charles Rangel. Indeed, the attacks on Perot came from across the bipartisan establishment, black and white. From the beginning of his campaign, the Texan was ridiculed by virtually every major liberal and conservative analyst, who fixated on his personal attributes—his diminutive stature, “folksy” style of speaking, and ubiquitous graphs and charts—instead of seriously engaging the question of why millions of people were interested in voting for him.14 Whether “sick of the Democrats and Republicans,” stating that “the politicians are corrupt,” or offering more nuanced reasons for why they were voting for Perot, Americans, by casting their votes for him, were exercising their independence. In the months and years after the election, the two major parties would attempt to contain and dismiss the voter rebellion: the federal budget was quickly balanced through bipartisan agreement (one of Perot’s concerns was the federal deficit), and a “Contract with America,” containing sweeping promises of political reforms (the overriding message of his campaign), was issued by the Republicans. During the next election, Perot, the symbol of the 1992 voter revolt, was excluded from the national presidential debates.15
Throughout the 1990s, black and white voters continued to assert their independence—passing term limits wherever initiatives and referendums were possible, recalling elected officials, voting for local independents and third-party candidates, and withholding votes for major-party candidates.16 Beginning in Colorado, a largely unreported voter initiative was put on the state ballot to limit congressional terms (four terms in the House and two terms in the Senate). The measure passed with 71 percent of the vote in 1992. Subsequently, a movement under the direction of the organization U.S. Term Limits led to the adoption in fourteen states of term limits on congressional representatives, approved with an average of 67 percent support. According to exit polls in New York, “A clear majority of black voters want term limits.”17 At a black political convention held in Manhattan on April 8, 1995, three hundred African Americans, from a range of backgrounds and political perspectives, met and endorsed term limits for all elected officials and judges.18 There were other signs of discontent and expressions of political independence among African Americans. In the 1997 gubernatorial race in Virginia, the Democrat, Donald Beyer, received 80 percent of the black vote, rather than the usual 95 percent, and, as a result, lost to the Republican candidate.19 Former Democratic governor Doug Wilder, the state’s first African American governor, had refused to endorse Beyer, remaining neutral instead.
One of the clearest expressions of black voters’ independence came in the form of disaffection from the Democratic Party during the 2005 mayoral election in New York City. In the fall of that year, media businessman and billionaire Michael Bloomberg—running a fusion campaign on the Republican and Independence Party lines—was re-elected mayor of the city with 47 percent of New York’s African American vote.20 Like Perot, he spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to run. His most outspoken black supporter, Fulani, had helped establish the Independence Party in the wake of the 1992 election. With almost no direct backing from Bloomberg himself, she led volunteers across New York City to rally support for his candidacy. Concentrating in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn and Queens, the Independence Party called on African Americans to vote for Bloomberg on column “C” (the column on the ballot where New Yorkers could vote for Bloomberg as an independent—column “A” being Democrat and “B” being Republican). In 2001, during his previous bid for mayor, Bloomberg had promised the Independence Party, whose ballot line he sought, to push for an enactment of nonpartisan municipal elections using the city’s initiative and referendum if elected. That year the Independence Party, with over 59,000 votes, provided Bloomberg his margin of victory. Keeping his promise, Bloomberg set up a series of Charter Revision commissions in which hundreds of New Yorkers had a chance to testify both for and against placing nonpartisan municipal elections on the ballot; the measure was ultimately defeated at the polls, largely at the hands of the Democratic Party, which strongly opposed it. But in 2005 the outpouring of support among African Americans would not only prove a serious indictment of the Democratic Party but point to the changing ways in which black New Yorkers were beginning to view themselves relative to both major parties.21 As John P. Avalon wrote in the New York Sun, “something is happening in the African-American community … the diversification of the black community economically and politically is changing the landscape. One recent sign of this is the surprising amount of support for Mayor Bloomberg among African-American voters. … A recent WNBC/Marist poll showed the mayor receiving 50% support from black voters.” Avalon further noted, “The growing [independent black] trend is broad as well as deep—in 1998 only 5% of African-American voters between the age of 51 and 64 identified as independents, but by 2002 that number increased fourfold to 21%.”22
It has taken the financial resources of white billionaire businessmen in conjunction with the grassroots organization of insurgent and independent black leaders for African Americans to help challenge the bipartisan establishment.23 Millions of dollars are needed to run television and radio advertisements, conduct telephone banking, retain legal expertise, and carry out petitioning drives, all of which are necessary to begin to compete effectively in the electoral arena. The laws and related rules governing the electoral process (written and passed by the two major parties’ elected representatives) are specifically designed to keep the Democratic and Republican parties in power: restrictive ballot access, single-member districting, gerrymandering, in-equitable campaign finance laws, and discrimination against non–major party candidates in televised debates combine to marginalize even the wealthiest citizens. Underscoring the state of American democracy, when Fulani was asked by a reporter to reflect on what was more difficult in her run for president—being black or being a woman—she poignantly noted “it was being an independent.”
Since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been an undercurrent of political independence among African Americans, even as most eligible black voters have aligned themselves with one of two major parties: the Republican Party from the time of the Civil War to the New Deal; and the Democratic Party since the New Deal, and especially since the height of the modern civil rights movement.24 With enforcement mechanisms in place (albeit, at times, unevenly applied) to protect African Americans’ right to vote, what
