Black People Are The Only True Third Party There Has Ever Been In The US Of A

We've appealed to "you" (you = white people) for centuries but you've never voted for us.

One iteration of The Black Political Party if you will: Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Ralph Bunche, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, among those marching from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in 1965. (Bruce Davidson/Magnum)

Forget the Whigs. Or The Green Party. Or the Working Families Party, as good as they may be. The only true authentic, persistent (and unnamed?) third party there has ever been in the United States of America is Black People. We, as Black people, are a party of pragmatists. We vote for what makes sense. We don’t throw away our vote and certainly not in any privileged or juvenile sense to “stick it to the establishment”. A swath of white people often do. We as Black people vote for the greater good. We vote for Black interests — that is in our best interest. And what is in our best interest is also what is best for everyone else. Black people in the United States don’t cheerlead for a particular political party. By contrast, in the main, white people do, and are often boisterously tethered to a political party (though among younger white people that is changing more and more.)

We as Black people are a political party. By default. But we don’t run candidates. We are the candidates. Every one of us. Daily. Whether in an election year or not. We are the perennial outsiders. We built these very foundations of a long-running cauldron of a country called the United States of America. We are long-term, not long-shots. We are never long-shots. Our story and history shows that. “Always bet on Black,” Wesley Snipes’s character says in the 1992 film “Passenger 57”. (He wasn’t talking about roulette.)

Black people voted Republican in the United States from 1870 through the late 1950s. We didn’t do so because we loved Republicans. We did so because the Republicans tended to support and espouse the values and policies that aligned with Black interests. It was the Radical Republicans who supported

In his 1964 “Ballot Or The Bullet” speech Malcolm X said of political elections in the US that “the whites are so evenly divided that every time they vote, the race is so close they have to go back and count the votes all over again. Which means that any bloc, any minority that has a bloc of votes that stick together is in a strategic position. Either way you go, that’s who gets it. You’re in a position to determine who go to the White House and who stay in the doghouse.”

We as Black people must vote. We must show up and show out. This Saturday in Louisiana it is CRUCIAL for Black people to vote like they never have before. And Black people in Louisiana must vote NO on all five of the propositions before them on the ballot this Saturday (May 16). (If you know any one in Louisiana please pass this on to them.) The more robustly we turn out, the more likely we will satisfy a positive outcome in the vein that Malcolm X described more than sixty years ago.

Malcolm’s declaration of yesteryear is applicable to this very day.

We as Black people are the nation’s continuous conscience. And one of the original sins of the USA was visited upon us. We are not the Democrats. We are not the Republicans. As a group we are eternal campaigners. Consciousness raisers. We are forever leaders, strugglers, freedom fighters, righteous upholders, champions of humanity and human rights for all. Our campaign slogan is the same as it ever has been — freedom, justice, equality of access and opportunity.

But you never vote for us.

The “you” here is white Americans at large, in their majority, as a group.

Maybe the closest persons to a president that the (figurative or literal) aforenamed (and invented) Black People Political Party ever had was Harriet Tubman. Frederick Douglass. Marcus Garvey. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture). Fannie Lou Hamer. Ella Baker. Angela Davis. Fred Hampton. And so many numerous people in between. We may not have cast a ballot for these leaders, but they sure loved us. Their very actions were a vote for us. They bet on us. At times many of us let them down. Or we didn’t appreciate them. Or didn’t believe in them.

Politicians don’t vote for their constituents (unless it is 2026 and the politicians belong to the Republican Party or on the Supreme Court.) And none of the people mentioned in the prior paragraph were ever politicians. The Black People Political Party has never held an election. We had meetings. Summits. Initiatives. Movements. We shaped them. Made them. Forged a path. Made huge gains backed in blood, sweat and tears. Especially and mostly blood.

All Roads Lead To The South, 2026


Barack Obama came along many decades later but he wasn’t a president nominated by the Black people political party per se. He was nominated by the Democrats. Most Black people embraced him. Some did not.

Most white people who voted did not vote for Barack Obama in either the 2008 or 2012 presidential election. That is a fact. Even when you hear the oft-repeated line from the 2017 film “Get Out” in which the white actor Bradley Whitford’s character says, “I would have voted for Obama for a third term”, it is a line anathema to the realities of the actual data.

If there was a white person’s political party independent of the Democrats and the Republicans - it would be the Whiteness Party. No matter if the Republicans and Democrats may be white nationalists and soft white nationalists respectively, the variable and intangible that does not change is the Whiteness Party. White people tend to vote only for what they perceive benefits them. The so-called “voting against one’s own interest”, which the Thomas Frank book “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” explores, isn’t a vote against a white person’s interests at all, especially if a white person is voting in the interests of whiteness. Which is what white farmers, who continued to be trampled by Trump in both terms in the White House, voted for. Now some of those farmers are dead, self-inflicted. This is an illustration of how voting for whiteness can literally kill you.

Sure, there has been other kinds of actual Black political parties. The Black Panther Party, initially founded in 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama, then on the west coast in California the following year. But Black people are the largest political party informal or otherwise, that there is in the United States. We don’t need to put a (B) at the end of our last name because who we look like, or are, is almost always self-evident. We, however, are most certainly not a monolith. And we don’t all look alike. Everyone who is our color, as the saying goes, ain’t our kind. (The bumper sticker version is, “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk”.)

With the latest anti-Black racist assault on our ability to vote, the most important thing that we, The Black Political Party of the United States can do is vote tomorrow (Saturday May 16) in Lousiana in unprecedented and undeniable numbers (at least 80 percent turnout) and vote forever more in elections in our jurisdiction. As Black people whose ancestors built the United States of America in 245 years of enslavement labor we owe it to ourselves, to our ancestors, to our children and to the future. History is waiting for us. Time to deliver.


TO ALL BLACK PEOPLE WHO READ THIS:

VOTING MATTERS
IF IT DIDN’T, REPUBLICANS WOULDN’T RACIST GERRYMANDER SEATS
IF IT DIDN’T THEY WOULDN’T SUPPRESS YOUR VOTE

VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT — BECAUSE IT DOES