Politics & Power Quote by Michael Steele

Steele is doing two things at once: diagnosing a political abandonment and auditioning for the kind of Republican who could reverse it. The opening move - Black voters were once "ninety per cent Republican" - isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. It’s a rebuke aimed inward, at a party that often treats its current margin with Black voters as natural law rather than the product of choices, coalitions, and neglect. By locating the break "until... Roosevelt", he nods to the New Deal realignment without naming the more combustible chapters that followed: Southern Strategy incentives, civil rights backlash, and the long, slow sorting that turned cultural grievance into electoral math.

The most telling phrase is "walked away". It implies agency and cowardice, not just drift. Steele concedes Republicans "embraced civil rights legislation" while accusing them of being "afraid" to embrace civil rights as a lived commitment. That’s the subtextual jab at performative policy: votes in Congress without presence in neighborhoods; rhetoric about opportunity without the unglamorous work of trust. "Put it on paper" versus "show up" is an organizer’s contrast, not a strategist’s - a demand for relational politics over press-release politics.

Context matters here: Steele, as a prominent Black Republican, is simultaneously translator and critic, trying to make intraparty accountability sound like electoral pragmatism. The line "understand what that struggle was really about" is a warning against the party’s habit of flattening civil rights into abstract individualism. He’s arguing that credibility can’t be outsourced to ideology; it has to be earned, in person, over time.