But although Trump has provided more than enough fodder to add to the tension between black voters and the Republican Party, the spectacle of his campaign is a diversion, both obscuring and exacerbating a pre-existing crisis within the GOP. The vast majority of black voters—including a cross-section of black Republicans—believes the Republican Party doesn’t care about racial issues or the needs of black Americans, pointing to Republicans’ rhetoric and policies as damning evidence.

The moment the relationship between black voters and the GOP soured can be easily traced to 1964. That’s the year that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law (with bipartisan support), while the Republican Party, after a vicious and ugly internal struggle, nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, mere months after he had voted against the Civil Rights Act. For African Americans, the Goldwater nomination was a declaration of war. Only 6 percent of the black electorate voted for the Republican nominee that year, highlighting a critical point in the realignment of African Americans away from the GOP. But that striking result merely capped a decline that began decades before Barry Goldwater became a household name.

“The Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea around us,” Frederick Douglass once famously declared. And even as cracks in the foundation appeared with a factional pursuit of a “lily-white” Republican movement, black voters remained largely loyal to the “Party of Lincoln” through 1936. In that year, the first major political realignment happened, as African Americans, disenchanted with the economic and racial waffling of their party, overwhelmingly supported the re-election efforts of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, effectively aligning with the New Deal coalition. “Political gratitude is paying the GOP steadily diminished returns,” wrote the editors of Time. Lincoln’s name “no longer works its oldtime magic.”

The crux of the issue was the Republican Party’s dogged interest in wooing white southern voters, a point clearly outlined by Ralph Bunche in a 1940 report on the GOP’s race issue, commissioned by the Republican Party. The party could not run with both hare and hound. In other words, so long as the GOP pursued white southerners at the expense of African Americans’ needs and civil rights, it would continue to witness an exodus of black voters.

Subsequent presidential elections proved Bunche’s point. In 1948, not only did 75 percent of the black electorate vote for Democratic President Harry S. Truman, nearly 60 percent of African Americans registered as Democrats. This was a major shift given that African Americans had consistently split evenly between the two parties, even as they increasingly voted for the Democratic Party. This significant move came about for several reasons, including Truman’s civil-rights activism, the Democratic Party’s southern-segregationist wing launching an independent bid for the White House, and, as the historian Timothy Thurber suggests, Republicans downplaying civil rights with the hopes of winning over southern voters.