By Raynard
Jackson
Columnist
Over the weekend a reporter from a major media outlet
called. He has been wanting to do an
extended profile on me for well over a year, but I have continued to delay the
reporter. What I finally decided to do
was to speak to him off the record in great detail with the understanding that I
would let him know when I was ready to go on the record so he could run his
story on me.
This reporter had, to my amazement, already begun to talk
with many elected congressional Democrats that I am friends with and several
people I know who work for President Obama.
These people all read my columns and told the reporter that “they wished
more Black Republicans would speak out on issues like Raynard.”
Some Republicans think I am too blunt and too critical of my
party. So I have decided to use this
column to give my readers some insight into how I have evolved into the type of
Republican I have become.
I was born and raised in St. Louis, MO. If you are Black in St. Louis, you are
automatically a Democrat. There is no
discussion, no vote, no choice. I
attended Soldan High School and was president of my
senior class; thus I knew many of our elected officials—all of whom were
Democrats.
So off to Oral Roberts University (ORU) I go to attend
college. ORU was and still is one of the
best religious schools in the U.S. Every
semester we had to sign an honor code.
Basically the code said they we would live a values based life on and off
campus and if we violated the code we could and would be expelled from
school.
We also had to attend mandatory chapel services on Wednesday
and Fridays from 11:00 am to noon. They
took attendance and if you had three unexcused absences, you were automatically
suspended from school.
Upon my graduation with my degree in accounting, I returned
to St. Louis.
It was upon my return home that I first realized that the
Republican Party was more compatible with my beliefs than the Democratic
Party. So my pastor, Sammie Jones of Mt.
Zion Missionary Baptist Church, told me he wanted to introduce me to some Black
Republicans. You need to know that Jones
was and still is a big Democrat back home.
The first person he introduced me to was Bill White, one of
the most influential Republicans in the state.
He also owned and operated several Black radio stations across the
country. White also played professional
baseball for the Kansas City Monarch of the Negro League.
As fate would have it, White said he had a project he wanted
me to get involved in. He had a friend
who was about to file to run for mayor of St. Louis on the Republican
ticket. His name was Curtis C. Crawford,
another Black Republican.
White arranged for me to go by and meet with Crawford and he
said that he would open doors for me all across the country within the party and
he did. When he found out I had a degree
in accounting, he asked me to be treasurer for his campaign, making me the
youngest person in the city’s history to this day to hold such a
position.
Crawford was an attorney by training who had received several
appointments by President Nixon. He
served as regional director for the Small Business Administration (SBA) before
Nixon appointed him to be a commissioner on the U.S. Parole Board, the first
Black on the board since its creation some forty years earlier.
Though we lost the election, my visibility within the party
skyrocketed as a result. This led to me
meeting and establishing relationships with the likes of John Ashcroft, Roy
Blunt, Wendell Bailey, etc. I had known
our then senator, Jack Danforth since high school.
Out of nowhere I get a call from the Bush family asking me if
I would consider chairing then vice president George H.W. Bush’s campaign in St.
Louis for president. Of course I said
yes and the rest is history.
Over the years, I spent many thousands of hours at the feet
of people like Bill White, Curtis Crawford, Art Fletcher, Sam Cornelius, Jim
House, LeGree Daniels, Jewel Lafontant, Bill Coleman, etc. They were Black Republicans but were Civil
Rights icons simultaneously.
Unfortunately, most Black Republicans of today have no
institutional memory of who these people were and have no curiosity to find
out. Their stories are well chronicled
in the nation’s two hundred Black newspapers; but far too many Black Republicans
see little or no value in Black newspapers.
Black newspapers are the history books of Black Republicans, if these
Black Republicans would simply take advantage of what’s right before their
eyes.
So, I criticize my party because this is what these legends
taught me to do. I chastise today’s
Black Republicans because I “willingly” carry the burden of years of
conversations at the feet of Black icons who didn’t have to make a choice
between their Blackness and being a Republican.
They said yes to both and made America and the Republican Party better
for it.
Raynard
Jackson & Associates, LLC is an internationally recognized political
consulting, government affairs, and PR firm based in Washington, DC. Jackson is an internationally recognized
radio talk show host and TV commentator.
He has coined the phrase “straticist.”
As a straticist, he has merged strategic planning with public
relations. Visit his website at: www.raynardjackson.com
