WASHINGTON – Rep. Byron Donaldsspeaking Tuesday at a black voters event for former President Donald Trump, suggested black families were more united and better off during the Jim Crow era, prompting immediate backlash from top black Democratic officials.
At the campaign event in Philadelphia, Donalds, a Florida Republican like Trump, suggested that things had gotten worse for black people after they embraced Democrats following President Lyndon Johnson’s introduction of Great Society programs in the 1960s, including an expansion of federal food stamps, housing, welfare and Medicaid for low-income Americans.
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more black people were not only conservative — black people always tend to be conservative — but more black people voted conservative,” Donalds, one of Trump’s key allies in Congress and a campaign surrogate, said in remarks first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson – you go down that road, and now we are where we are,” he said, a reference to the then-Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
In the lead-up to these comments, Donalds said he had recently seen “the reinvigoration of black families” – which he described as younger people forming nuclear family units – which is “helping to spark the resurgence of a black middle class in America,” the said researcher.
Minority Leader of the House of Representatives Hakeem JeffriesDN.Y., the highest-ranking African American in Congress, came to the House of Representatives on Wednesday and delivered a blistering speech in which he gave numerous examples of how black people had suffered from racial segregation.
“It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually incorrect statement that black people were better off during Jim Crow. That is a bizarre, scandalous and idiosyncratic observation,” said Jeffries.
“We were no better off when a young boy named Emmett Till could be brutally murdered without consequence because of Jim Crow,” he continued. “We were no better off when black women could be sexually assaulted without consequence because of Jim Crow. …How dare you make such an ignorant observation? You better check yourself before you destroy yourself.
Biden-Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika also denounced Donalds’ comments and the event in Philadelphia in a statement: “Donald Trump spent his adult life, and then his presidency, undermining the progress that Black communities fought so hard for — so it basically follows that his campaign’s ‘Black outreach goes to a white neighborhood and promises to return America to Jim Crow.’
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus issued a statement Wednesday night calling Donalds a “mouthpiece who will say out loud the silent parts that many won’t say themselves” and demanding that he apologize to Black Americans “for misrepresenting a of the darkest chapters in our history for his own political gain.”
Donalds, who has sometimes been mentioned as a possible Trump vice presidential running mate, later posted a video of the full remarks in response to Democratic criticism. In a separate video, he said President Joe Biden’s campaign was “lying” and “gaslighting” because “they’re trying to say I said black people did better under Jim Crow.”
‘I never said that. They lie. … What I said was that under Jim Crow you had more black families and that Democratic policies under HEW, under the welfare state, contributed to the destruction of the black family,” he said in a video posted to X on Wednesday.
Representative Wesley Hunt, a black Republican from Texas who also spoke at the Tuesday event, came to Donald’s defense on X.
“Democrats have replaced the father in the black house with Uncle Sam and when strong black leaders emphasize this, the Democrats come unstuck,” Hunt wrote. “We’re trying to have a national conversation about empowering Black families, about empowering American families, and that makes the left VERY uncomfortable.”
The Black Conservative Federation, of which Donalds is chairman, also condemned the criticism of Donalds’ statement.
“The Black Conservative Federation (BCF) condemns the attacks on our Chairman, Congressman Byron Donalds, by House Minority Leader Jeffries,” the group said in a statement. “Calling Congressman Donalds a ‘so-called leader’ because of his statement about the conservative black family is tasteless, insulting, and frankly inappropriate for a minority leader in the House of Representatives.”
Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes posted on his social account that Donalds was a “respected black leader” and referenced comments Biden made in 2020 that African Americans “aren’t black” if they vote for Trump.
The Trump campaign event was billed as “Congress, Cognac and Cigars” and is part of a broader effort by the Trump campaign to make inroads among black voters in swing states like Pennsylvania.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
