Rep. Byron Donalds pushes back on Democratic criticism after saying ‘the Black family was together’ during Jim Crow
CNN
Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican who is seen as a potential running mate for Donald Trump, is defending himself amid Democratic criticism of comments he’d made Tuesday suggesting that Black families were “together” during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation.
Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican who is seen as a potential running mate for Donald Trump, is defending himself amid Democratic criticism of comments he’d made Tuesday suggesting that Black families were “together” during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. Donalds’ comments, which come as Trump’s campaign seeks to make inroads with non-White voters, were made at an event in Philadelphia with Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt, another Black Republican supporter of the former president. “You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said at the Tuesday event, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” he said. That ended, he suggested, due to a culture of dependence promoted by the federal government’s welfare system in the 1950s, including the establishment of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare — the federal agency now known as the Department of Health and Human Services — and civil rights efforts that followed under President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s. “And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are,” Donalds said.
Texas executed Ramiro Gonzales by lethal injection on Wednesday for a 2001 murder, the state Department of Criminal Justice said, following unsuccessful appeals to the US Supreme Court that argued, in part, he should have been ineligible for the death penalty under state law because he is no longer dangerous.
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