be sure, life in the United States will never be the same in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged so many lives, devastated so many communities, and upended the nation’s economy. A disproportionate number of black people have died in the pandemic—a function of widespread poverty among African Americans resulting from slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing forms of institutional racism towards black and poor people.4 Tragically, partisanship contributed to the government’s failure to act quickly and decisively in the face of COVID-19. But the arc of history also provides some clues of what may come with regards to African American politics even as the pandemic continues in full force at the time of this writing. As the University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson notes, African Americans have worked to advance their political and economic interests by supporting third parties and creating new alliances. In doing so they have brought about some of the most basic and farthest-reaching changes in the republic: the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the right to vote, and the enactment and enforcement of civil rights. What happens going forward is not known. What we do know is that independent black leaders and their allies, joined by masses of ordinary African Americans, have not only served as a moral compass for the nation, but an organizing political force for progressive change.5
Today, increasing numbers of black voters are among the tens of millions of people, from a range of backgrounds and from across the ideological spectrum, who view themselves as politically independent. Gallup Polls indicate a steady rise of non–major party political identification among all voters since the late 1980s: from 32 percent in 1988 to 42 percent in 2019.6 National opinion polls since the 1990s indicate that up to 30 percent of all African Americans identify themselves as politically independent.7 Notably, the category of “pure independents” created by pollsters and political scientists (that is, those who do not “lean” toward one or the other major-party when asked how they would vote after having first identified themselves as independent) reveals a profound bias against who independents are, now a plurality of voters in the United States. In this view, independents are effectively a “myth,” that is, closet-partisans, confused, or politically immature.8 However, when asked, independents say they want to be respected and recognized as independents (they do not fit into the partisan boxes which demand party loyalty).9 Justifying the approximate ten percent who are supposedly the “pure independents” (bolstering the notion that the vast majority of eligible voters are in support of the current bipartisan system) misses an obvious point: that if given only two (if that) actual choices on the ballot, then voters might choose one, or not vote at all—which is in fact what voter behavior consistently shows. Perhaps we should look to younger voters for what might lie on the horizon. Indeed, young black voters, like Millennials in general, identify at even higher levels as independent than do older cohorts. A 2019 University of Chicago–affiliated survey noted that upwards of 38 percent of African Americans eighteen to thirty-six years of age did not identify with the two major parties.10 These Americans are part of an emerging movement of African Americans and white independents comprising black and independent alliances. Most notably, in 2008, a black and independent alliance rallied around the insurgent candidacy of Senator Barack Obama in his bid to become president of the United States.11
Increasingly less tied to the Democratic Party, black voters have been looking for new electoral options and allies in the face of bipartisan hegemony, ongoing poverty, and racism. The Black Lives Matter uprisings, potent political and cultural expressions, are manifestations of the search and demand for social justice in the United States among African Americans, especially younger African Americans. When this book first came out twelve years ago, 66 percent of all Americans believed that the nation was on “the wrong track.”12 The latest Pew Research Center poll shows a historic low in terms of public trust in government: fully 83 percent of Americans lack confidence in government doing “what is right.”13 Among African Americans, the feeling and experiences of having been failed or betrayed are especially poignant and painful. Whether it is the failure of the health care system, the public schools, or the economy—despite the heroic efforts of rank-and-file nurses, doctors, teachers, and other workers—there is widespread recognition that the two-party establishment has not been willing or is unable to effectively serve the best interests of ordinary people.14 Partisanship, institutionalized in the bipartisan arrangement of the Democratic and Republican parties that rule the nation (despite these organizations being private, not public entities, although they create rules and regulations to benefit themselves using taxpayer dollars), either prevents or deters innovation in policies or practices that might otherwise effectively address the myriad challenges facing the nation as a whole and black communities in particular. Panning out, American history reveals that progressive change—social, political, and economic justice and reform—has always come through the interplay of outsider forces and insider forces, which is why independent political action remains critical to the development of the nation as a whole.
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African Americans have expressed their political independence in a number of ways since the late 1980s. 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.15 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 also the first woman to get on the ballot in all fifty states as a candidate for president. She ran as an independent.16 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.17 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.18 A CBS News poll conducted in May 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.19 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.”20
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.21 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 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 the Republicans issued a “Contract with America,” containing sweeping promises of political reforms (the overriding message of his campaign). During the next election, Perot, the symbol of the 1992 voter revolt, was excluded from the national presidential debates.22
Throughout the 1990s, black and white voters continued to assert their independence—passing term limits wherever initiatives and referendums were possible, recalling elected
