“The African-Americans love me,” Donald Trump said back in January. Nine months later, evidence of that love is exceedingly rare. Polls put Trump’s black support in the low single digits, smaller in several samples than the margin of error. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act in the summer and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the Klan in the fall, received 6 percent. Ronald Reagan received 12 and then 9 percent. Even John McCain, running against Barack Obama, received 4.
Whether because of those numbers or despite them, the academic study of black Republicans is booming. Last year, Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Harvard, published “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” a spirited study of conservatism, politics and race. Now we have Joshua D. Farrington’s “Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP” and Corey D. Fields’s “Black Elephants in the Room.” Other books have been published, and more are on the way. We may soon have more books on black Republicans than actual black Republican voters.
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