The NAACP says nothing about three of the most powerful black politicians in America.

Voters on Election Day chose Tim Scott as South Carolina’s U.S. senator. They also sent Utah’s Mia Love and Texas’s Will Hurd to the U.S. House of Representatives. Thus, the 114th Congress will include three black Republicans. This is a new high-water mark for black Americans.

Too bad the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People couldn’t care less. (America’s oldest civil-rights organization still plasters that retrograde expression all over its logo and website.)


NAACP has yet to congratulate, acknowledge, or even attack Scott, Love, and Hurd — now America’s three most powerful elected black Republicans. What you hear is the silence of the Colored People. Despite ten separate requests for comment on this “advancement of colored people,” I could not squeeze a consonant out of NAACP’s Baltimore headquarters, its Washington, D.C., office, or even its Hollywood bureau.

NAACP president Cornell William Brooks did say on November 5, “This election was not about who won but rather the citizens who lost the right to participate.” Despite complaints about malfunctioning polling machines and voters blocked for lack of photo ID, one wonders where NAACP is hiding these disenfranchised citizens. Why have we heard as much about them since November 5 as NAACP has said about Scott, Love, and Hurd?

NAACP did issue a November 14 press release expressing its “strong support of the new Qualified Residential Mortgage rule” under the behemoth Dodd-Frank financial-services law. The group praised the rejection of new down-payment rules for home loans. Who needs strong credit standards? What could go wrong?



NAACP has offered communiqués praising Obama’s new draconian carbon dioxide regulations and even applauding La June Montgomery Tabron for becoming president of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. As for three black Republicans getting elected to Congress? Crickets.

What a disgrace.

Agree or disagree with Scott, Love, and Hurd, their triumphs are significant.

Tim Scott is the first black senator to rise from the South since Reconstruction. Democrats could have elected, nominated, or at least appointed to a vacancy a black man or woman between 1865 and 2014. Some way or another, the “party of the black people” plumb forgot to make that happen. Instead, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, a Republican of east-Indian ancestry, appointed Scott to fill the seat of former GOP senator Jim DeMint when he resigned to run the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Scott won the seat outright on November 4. He steamrolled his Democratic opponent 61 percent to 37 percent. In fact, according to Politico.com, Scott scored 749,266 votes while Republican Lindsay Graham won with only 665,605. Evidently, Scott persuaded more racist, white Republicans to support him than did Graham.


Liberals will have real trouble dismissing Scott as some sort of country-club creation. This former “boy in the hood” was raised in poverty by a single mother. He overcame early troubles, got focused, and now is one of the most influential men in America.


Meanwhile, the new representative of Utah’s fourth congressional district is a diversity officer’s dream come true. Mia Love is a black, female Mormon of Haitian descent. As the former mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, she also brings executive experience to the House. Washington needs more people in charge who actually have run something, as Love has. Despite her inheriting a $3.5 million budget shortfall in January 2010, the Salt Lake Tribune reports , “Saratoga Springs now has an AA+ bond rating, the highest possible for a city of its size.”

Will Hurd goes to Washington from Texas’s 23rd district. He defeated incumbent Democrat Pete Gallego in a 70 percent Hispanic district. Republicans can win Hispanic votes, when they try. As Hurd becomes a leading voice on national security, Democrats will tie themselves in knots trying to trivialize this former CIA officer, who happens to be black.


Actually, liberals probably will follow the NAACP’s playbook and pretend that these successful black Republicans do not exist. Luckily, America hears the Left’s silence.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.