When did Black voters shift to Democrats? Earlier than you might think.

In what’s shaping up to be a close presidential election, analysts are keeping an eye on the “Black vote,” which some polls suggest could be starting to slip away from Democrats after decades of dominance. But when exactly did African American voters first shift their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party?

Some historians focus on the 1960s and the civil rights movement. Others trace the change back to the 1930s, with the New Deal policies that addressed the widespread poverty of the Great Depression. But the roots of Black Americans’ move toward the Democratic Party go back further - to the first three decades of the 20th century.

The turn of the century initiated an era of great change. Booker T. Washington published his famous autobiography “Up From Slavery” in 1901, the same year Rep. George H. White (R-N.C.) departed office, leaving the House of Representatives without a Black member for nearly three decades - and ending a post-Civil War era that always had a Black Republican presence in Congress.

In his survey of African American lawmakers in that era, Eric Foner notes that of the roughly 2,000 Black officeholders, from U.S. senator to county sheriff, “only fifteen were elected as Democrats or supported the Democratic Party once in office.” One of those officials was a former Republican Midwesterner named George E. Taylor. Taylor is best remembered for his historic 1904 run for president representing the all-Black National Liberty Party. After the party dissolved, Taylor realigned himself not with the Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt but with a Democratic Party in flux.

The year 1906 fundamentally reshaped the country. Upton Sinclair published his fictionalized exposé of the meatpacking industry, “The Jungle.” Gary, Ind., was established as a company town for the burgeoning steel industry. San Francisco was rocked by a catastrophic earthquake. The Antiquities Act enshrined Roosevelt as a conservationist president. And at Ellis Island, European immigration was headed toward its 1907 peak of 1.25 million people.

That year also represented a turning point for African Americans and the party of Lincoln. In Brownsville, Tex., on Aug. 13, a White bartender was shot and killed, with blame quickly placed on Black soldiers from nearby Fort Brown. Although White army officers maintained that the soldiers were in their barracks, Roosevelt dismissed the entire regiment.

At the end of the year, Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end the Russo-Japanese War. That same December, he would also give an address to Congress addressing the racial terror directed at African Americans. In a year that would end with more than 60 African Americans dead by lynching, Roosevelt stated, “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by Black men, of the hideous crime of rape - the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder.”

It was in this context that a group of prominent Black men formed the Niagara Movement in 1905. Meeting at Storer College in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., the group offered a forceful assessment of the condition of African Americans, written by founding member W.E.B. Du Bois.

The “Address to the Country” argued that the Republican Party was “guilty of obtaining votes under false pretenses.” Du Bois noted the erosion of voting rights under a Republican administration. Black criticism of Republicans had been leveled at different times from across the political spectrum since Reconstruction, but Du Bois was different: a Northerner born after the Civil War, a new voice for a new century.

While the Niagara Movement would soon dissolve and Roosevelt would have his own separation from the Republican Party, the chasm between African Americans and the GOP would continue to widen. As groups such as the re-created Ku Klux Klan further blocked Black political participation and gains made during Reconstruction faded, the migration of large numbers of Black people out of the South and rural areas would remake the country and the political landscape.

Following the East St. Louis, Ill., massacre of 1917 and the Red Summer of 1919, which saw dozens of racist attacks across the country, disparate groups of Black people again voiced displeasure with the status quo, and Du Bois continued to question the viability of African Americans within the Republican Party. After he became a founding member of the NAACP, Du Bois moved to New York and established the Crisis, a monthly magazine he edited that quickly became a staple in African American communities.

Du Bois turned to a more established publication, the Nation, to write an op-ed ahead of the 1920 presidential election. Titled “The Republicans and the Black Voter,” the piece anticipated a future in which African Americans abandoned the party.

In the midst of the Great Migration, Du Bois wrote, “the Negroes as a mass have done more thinking in the last four years than ever before. Second, they have long-standing grievances against the Republican Party, and it cannot therefore count on the absolute necessity of a black man voting Republican.”

In her 2020 book “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party,” Howard University political scientist Keneshia N. Grant argues that politically excluded African Americans from the South arrived in the North without attachments to the Republican Party. “Therefore,” she writes, “what looks like a wholesale defection from the Republican Party by the Black electorate can also be understood as the Democratic Party’s mobilization of newly arrived Black migrants.”

The stark realities of industrial centers primed new arrivals for new politics. While Du Bois sought to shock Republicans to act, a competing faction in Harlem preached more radical politics.

In August 1920, the Socialist magazine the Messenger declared that the emergent “New Negro” would “repudiate and discard both of the old parties - Republican and Democratic.” The editors’ vision for the New Negro was fearless yet progressive - one that endorsed the recently ratified 19th Amendment and “stands for universal suffrage.” With Black women gaining the right to vote, the political parties would be appealing to a completely different Black vote in the 1920s.

In November 1924, the month Republican Calvin Coolidge won the presidential election in a landslide, African American leaders offered a rebuke of the GOP in the magazine Opportunity. William Henry Lewis, a Harvard Law School graduate and former assistant attorney general under Republican President William Howard Taft, referred to the Republican Party as the “Ku Klux Klan party.” The journalist, poet and educator Alice Dunbar Nelson railed against the GOP in her home state of Delaware, highlighting the absence of African American jurors and the inability of Black people to practice law in a state where the majority of African Americans had supported a party that “has been in power for twenty-five years.”

Four years later, Grace Campbell - who in 1919 became the first woman to run for statewide office in New York when she mounted a losing campaign for a state assembly seat on the Socialist ticket - wrote a column under a pseudonym in the Chicago-based Daily Worker in which she linked both Democrats and Republicans to “Jim Crowism, mobbing, segregation, lynching, southern disfranchisement” and other ills. In that same election cycle of 1928, the Democrats tapped a Black former Republican, Julian Rainey, to lead African American outreach nationwide.

A month after Campbell’s article appeared, Oscar Stanton De Priest became the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century, representing Chicago’s South Side - but also, effectively, Black people across the country. He was a Republican, but six years later, he would be out of office - losing reelection to another African American migrant from the South, a former Republican named Arthur W. Mitchell, who became the first Black Democrat elected to Congress.

It would take more than another decade for a clear majority of Black voters to identify as Democrats. But the seeds were sown nearly half a century earlier, when Du Bois and others laid out a different future from the one that had been imagined for them.