Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida on Thursday defended comments he made this week that invoked Jim Crow — a period of racial violence and segregation — as an era when “the Black family was together.”
“I never said that it was better for Black people in Jim Crow,” Donalds, a Florida Republican, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid during an interview with “The ReidOut” on Thursday night.
The comments came after Donalds, who is sometimes mentioned as a potential running mate for Donald Trump, drew outrage after saying at a campaign event in Philadelphia for the former president on Tuesday that fewer Black families were fractured during Jim Crow.
“Don’t try to impose the fact that the marriage rates were better in the — higher, higher, I want to be clear — higher in the Jim Crow era to mean that I think Jim Crow is great,” Donalds said. “That is a lie. That is gaslighting. I would never say such a thing.”
At Tuesday’s event aimed at outreach to Black voters in battleground Pennsylvania, Donalds, a Trump campaign surrogate, suggested that by embracing Democrats, circumstances have worsened for Black people. He pointed to programs enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s that included expanding 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 just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds told the audience Tuesday.
When Reid pointed out that the Jim Crow South was marked by restricted rights for Black people, such as blocked access to voting, and said Donalds was “inaccurate,” the Florida Republican responded, “No, I’m not being inaccurate.”
“All I was talking about is about Black families,” Donalds said.
Donalds’ comments on Thursday echo his previous defenses amid criticism from Democrats, including from members of the Congressional Black Caucus and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who decried Donalds’ remarks as “an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation.”
The Biden-Harris campaign also said in response to the comments that Trump “spent his adult life, and then his presidency undermining the progress Black communities fought so hard for — so it actually tracks that his campaign’s ‘Black outreach’ is going to a white neighborhood and promising to take America back to Jim Crow.”
Donalds said Wednesday that the Biden campaign was “lying” and “gaslighting” because “they’re trying to say that I said that Black people were doing better under Jim Crow.”
