Politicians abandon their Black base when courting white voters pays off

Evidence

Du Bois’s intellectual high, that May, came crashing down with Black America by the end of the year. The day after Republicans used Black votes to regain the House in the 1906 midterm elections, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge (and loss of pensions) of 167 Black soldiers in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride. A dozen or so members of the regiment had been falsely accused of murdering a bartender and wounding a police officer in the horrifically racist town of Brownsville, Texas, on August 13, 1906. Overnight, the most popular US president in Black communities since Abraham Lincoln became the most unpopular. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 779

Categorization

• XREF: Directly illustrates Kendi’s core thesis that policy serves self-interest (Southern white votes) and then justificatory ideas (warning Black people about criminals, blaming rape for lynching) follow. — connects to: The Columbians recruited poor white workers abandoned by elite segregationist politicians — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 111; Red-baiting black candidates backfired when Atlanta’s white elite closed ranks — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 98