With Trump, the question is: What do black voters have to win?

One with my regional antecedents here and in Georgia – white male of ancient ancestry, with Confederate officers in the family tree – is well advised to speak quietly on the complex matter of race.

But Donald Trump’s abrupt emergence as a tribune of black voter interests – “what have you got to lose?” he asks – is too bizarre to pass unremarked. He even appeared the other day at a black church for the Sunday morning service. No doubt it was a learning experience. And novel, too.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s reverse Trump’s question to black voters: “What have you got to win?” Well, they could enlist, with Trump, a bit after the fact, in the “birther” cause – those who believe that Barack Obama was ineligible, as of foreign birth, to be president. They could also join Mitch McConnell, the leader of the U.S. Senate Republicans, in obstructing Obama’s agenda. McConnell, please recall, announced when the ink was still wet on the 2008 election news that his priority would be to deny Obama a second term. Not his only failure in a dismal record.

But lest Democrats enjoy chortling at Trump’s sudden conversion, the truth is that for many decades the shabby banner now flown by Trump and McConnell was their very own. From Reconstruction forward, the Democratic Party made itself the guardian of the Jim Crow system. Black voters then were usually Republicans. The segregationist logjam maintained by the Democrats was anchored in the U.S. Senate, where white Southerners, occupying safe seats in one-party states, resisted any tampering with segregation. And when the courts began to question the “separate but equal” doctrine, Democrats had the brass to accuse judges of usurping the legislative function. The more enlightened Southern senators – a Fulbright, a Sparkman, a Kefauver, an Ervin – might embrace other, more moderate causes, but none defied the unwritten rules.

And after all, hadn’t the Supreme Court, initiating the Jim Crow system in 1896, pronounced that it was a delusion in the minds of black people that segregation was “a badge of inferiority”? Harry Truman had advanced the first civil rights bill after desegregating the armed forces by executive order in 1947. But no such legislation had a chance until Lyndon Johnson rose to the Senate majority leadership in the 1950s.

A decade later, governors like George Wallace and Ross Barnett rode to the rescue of the civil rights cause by an obstruction of court orders and human decency so violent and contemptuous that LBJ succeeded in passing civil and voting rights bills in 1964 and 1965. He had substantial help from Republicans, it is only fair to note, but the Republican Party of that day was a very different body and still owed obeisance to Lincoln. Johnson, who knew his politics, predicted to his speechwriter Harry MacPherson that one result of the “civil rights revolution” would be a massive defection from the Democratic Party, making the Deep South a GOP citadel. And he was right.

By then, however, the defense of Jim Crow in the blatant style had become unfashionable, and smooth neo-Republicans like McConnell adopted more subtle and muted tactics, as have been evident in North Carolina since their seizure of the legislative redistricting power in 2010. By way of winning a majority of GOP congressional seats with a minority of the popular vote, they herded (an unpleasant but accurate term) black voters into “majority-minority” districts in a grotesque parody of voting boundaries – so grotesque that the courts have finally been forced to notice. Some black leaders collaborated in their effective disfranchisement by endorsing these mostly black districts, and implicitly the dilution of the Democratic vote in others, thus swapping influence for visibility.

So, what have black voters to win? They could lend a helping hand to the Republican legislators who flatter them with “majority minority” handouts. And by voting for a candidate who so begrudged the country its first president of color as to question his constitutional eligibility.

But if the polls are to be believed, the Trump what-have-you-got-to-lose agenda will be an uphill struggle for the 10 percent of black voters who are thinking of voting for this apprentice messiah. The skepticism of the other 90 percent is no great mystery.

This story was originally published September 13, 2016 at 5:04 PM with the headline "With Trump, the question is: What do black voters have to win?."