Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida on Thursday defended comments he made this week that invoked Jim Crow — a duration of racial violence and segregation — as an technology when “the Black family was together.”
“I never said that it was better for Black people in Jim Crow,” Donalds, a Florida Republican, informed MSNBC’s Joy Reid all through an interview with “The ReidOut” on Thursday evening.
The comments got here after Donalds, who’s occasionally discussed as a doable operating mate for Donald Trump, drew outrage after announcing at a marketing campaign match in Philadelphia for the previous president on Tuesday that fewer Black households have been fractured all through 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 informed the target 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 “misguided,” the Florida Republican responded, “No, I’m now not being misguided.”
“All I used to be speaking about is about Black households,” 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 statement.”
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 stated Wednesday that the Biden marketing campaign used to be “lying” and “gaslighting” as a result of “they’re trying to say that I said that Black people were doing better under Jim Crow.”