Stephan: I think it is very important that my readers understand what powers and lies beneath the resurgence of White Supremacy because it has become the defining profile of one of our major parties -- the Republicans.
You rarely hear it mentioned, and when I ask people I have yet to find anyone who can tell me how many Blacks have served in the U.S. Senate. The answer is that over the last 150 years, since 1870, when Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black senator, there have only been nine more, for a total of 10. In contrast, there have been 1,964 White (and a few Hispanic) senators. Currently, there is only one Black Republican senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris of California are the two Black Democrats currently serving.
2013 marked the first time in American history that there was more than one Black senator. Hispanics fare only slightly better. They represent over 14% of the U.S. population, while the Senate is 3% Hispanic and the House is approximately 5% (25 members) Hispanic.
This essay addresses some of the reasons for this glaring disparity.
Illustration by Anthony Russo/The New Yorker
As the summer of 1958 was coming to an end, Martin Luther King, Jr., was newly famous and exhausted. All of twenty-nine years old, he had been travelling across the country for weeks promoting his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” a memoir of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott—a protest that, at three hundred and eighty-two days, was the most sustained mass action in American history. It had led both to a Supreme Court decision that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional and to retaliatory bombings of Black churches. The book tour was meant to mobilize support for the movement’s next phase, but days after his first event he’d been kicked, choked, and arrested by the Montgomery police. And now, in Harlem on September 20th, he was being denounced as an Uncle Tom for not appearing at a Black-owned bookstore whose politics conflicted with the mainstream image he was trying to project. So he sat at a table with a pile of books at the white-owned Blumstein’s department […]
