Fred Logan: Black Politics in Allegheny County, Campaign 2024

by Fred Logan Over the past 59 years, since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, there have been 14 US presidential elections. Right this moment, the fifteenth campaign is raging like a hurricane between the National Democratic Party and the National Republican Party. White America—not Black America—is bitterly divided. Mainstream experts on White America repeat over and over that White America is more politically divided today than at any time since the US Civil War of the 1860’s. Democratic and Republican elected officials battle in federal, state, and local chambers like the North and the Confederate armies fought during the US Civil War. Recently, the whole country was warned by US President Joe Biden that if Donald Trump wins the White House, American democracy is threatened.& & & What is the role of Black politics at this grave moment? Is it to sit passively and hope for the best? Hell no! The Black community in the vanguard of US resistance to right-wing reaction, and a united front against it, must be in the forefront battling reaction in 2024.& But what does this mean in concrete political struggle? In US presidential campaigns since the VRA, Black Pittsburgh voters have voted for the...