CINCINNATI — After Mitt Romney received just 6 percent of the black vote in 2012, the Republican Party said that it could no longer afford to ignore African-Americans. “We are never going to win over voters who are not asked for their support,” its leaders wrote in a candid election post-mortem.

Nearly two years later, the party is still struggling to connect. There is one black Republican in Congress, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. Republicans in state legislatures nationwide continue to back bills to require people to have identification to cast a ballot, which black leaders have said amounts to legalized voter suppression.

So when Republicans ask blacks to give their party a second look, they have a hard time finding an audience. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky confronted this on Friday when he appeared at a highly publicized speech to the National Urban League Conference to see row after row of empty chairs. The space did not look much fuller after one of the organizers urged people seated near the back to fill in the front rows.

He pushed forward, quoting Malcolm X: “Nobody can give you equality or justice. If you’re a man, you take it.” And he sounded empathetic as he described the arrests of three young black men as they waited for a bus. Their apparent crime, he said, was “waiting while black.” And he delicately acknowledged what was perhaps the biggest cloud hanging over his visit: his comments in 2010 in which he suggested that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 encroached on individual liberties. He told the crowd he supported the law unequivocally.