While campaigning for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, in Philadelphia, U.S. Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL) spoke at an event about “the reinvigoration of Black families with younger Black men and Black women,” which Donalds said “is helping to breed the revival of a Black middle class in America.”
Donalds said: “You see, during Jim Crow, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservatives, Black people have always been conservatively minded, but more Black people voted conservatively.”
.@JoeBiden @RepJeffries @harrisonjaime & @DerrickNAACP are gaslighting Black America.
I was talking about Black families, conservative mindsets, and conservative voting.
Receipts are a beautiful thing! And don’t clip my words to keep lying. I’m watching pic.twitter.com/W2Fr5uAHE8
— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) June 5, 2024
House minority leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), condemned Donalds’s remarks and said: “That’s an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation.” Jeffries pointed out, to the contrary, lynchings and Jim Crow-era policies including mandated segregation that killed and oppressed Black citiizens. “How dare you make such an ignorant observation? You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.”
Rep. Byron Donalds made the ignorant observation that Black people were better off under Jim Crow.
Fact check. pic.twitter.com/YAiOeaVzPD
— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) June 5, 2024
Democratic National Committee leader Jaime Harrison, who is Black, also criticized Donalds’s comments about Jim Crow and Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harrison wrote: “Johnson’s Great Society saw some of the largest advancements in civil rights for African Americans” and cited the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and ’68 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Harrison wrote to Donalds: “I know history is iffy for you and DeSantis down there in FL… but it is time to brush up. Y’all don’t do much in that GOP House anyway, so maybe walk over to the Library of Congress. They have a lot of comprehensive history books.”