Over the past year-and-a-half, Sen. Rand Paul has spoken at historically black colleges, gathered with African American leaders in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown, and criticized a justice system he says unfairly targets minorities. His message is unmistakable: I’m a different kind of Republican who’s not afraid to engage with communities that typically vote for Democrats.

Yet in 2010, when he was a long-shot tea party candidate for Senate, and during his first two years in the job, Paul was rarely seen or heard from in Kentucky’s African American community, according to interviews with more than a dozen black leaders in the Bluegrass State, including seven of the eight African American state legislators. Indeed, his much-publicized courtship has occurred almost entirely as the Republican began plotting a potential run for president.


The officials, almost all Democrats, largely agreed that Paul deserves credit for spending time in minority communities and addressing issues that haven’t been high on the GOP’s priority list. But many were skeptical that Paul is acting out of long-held beliefs about racial injustice, given his earlier absence and his controversial 2010 remarks questioning whether the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses, which he’s sought to surmount ever since.

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“I see Sen. Paul as really being an opportunist here,” said Democratic state Sen. Reggie Thomas. “His actions over the last couple years, now that he wants to run for president, really belie his feelings he’s expressed.”

“For him or anyone else to think he can show up in our community, smile, shake a few hands, take a few pictures, and that represents something significant in terms of him conveying a message that answers the questions or addresses the issues we are concerned about,” added state Rep. Reginald Meeks of Louisville, “to me that’s being pretty callous and pretty shallow.”

Aside from attending Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrations, dispatching field representatives from time to time and working with a tea party-affiliated African American pastor, Paul barely registered in Kentucky’s black communities during his first few years in office, according to the interviews.

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But that started to change after Mitt Romney won only 6 percent of the African American vote and 27 percent of the Latino vote in the 2012 presidential election, numbers that triggered alarms among party leaders. By the spring of 2013, Paul had seized on a message of broadening the Republican base, making high-profile speeches at historically black colleges as well as increasing his outreach to black community leaders and activists in Kentucky.

Those efforts have intensified this year, most visibly outside the state: The senator impressed civil rights leaders by visiting Ferguson when other Republican leaders remained mum about the killing of Brown. Paul is working with African American Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on criminal justice reform legislation and has pressed to restore voting rights for non-violent felons.

“I don’t think there has been anybody who has been a bigger defender of minority rights in the Congress than myself, and that’s not saying others aren’t trying as well,” Paul told Salon last month.

Paul drew notice on Wednesday when he suggested that high cigarette taxes were a factor in the death of African American Eric Garner in New York. Police tried to arrest Garner on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, and a grand jury voted this week to not indict the police officer who put Garner in a chokehold that led to his death.

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Paul’s aides say the libertarian-leaning senator has always valued outreach and been drawn to issues like criminal justice reform, but the Senate has given him a broader platform to pursue those interests than he had as a first-time candidate. At the same time, Paul doesn’t dispute a political element to his overtures: He has explicitly said Republicans’ national prospects hinge on doing better with minority voters.

“When Rand was running the first time, he was a Bowling Green [Kentucky] doctor,” said Daniel Bayens, Paul’s Kentucky spokesman. “He hadn’t had the opportunity to hear from every corner of Kentucky or every corner of the country. Over the past four years, he’s had the opportunity to hear from a lot more people, a lot of diverse backgrounds.

”I don’t think his underlying principles have changed,” Bayens added, “but I think the ways in which he views some specific issues, and what he’s been able to do on specific issues, has changed. He’s found specific and broad areas of agreement with the African American community and other minorities through that process.”

In that same time frame, Paul has struggled to move past his 2010 remarks about the Civil Rights Act. Paul was running as a tea party candidate deeply skeptical of big government, and his comments to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow sparked a firestorm. He has repeatedly stressed since then that he would have voted for the measure, but back home, the memory remains fresh for some.

In 2010, “there were no [outreach] efforts that I’m aware of, because if you’ll recall, it was during that campaign that he talked about his [views] of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” said Raoul Cunningham, president of the Kentucky Conference of the NAACP.

At the time, the Rev. Milton Seymore accused Paul of wanting to take the country back to the Jim Crow era. But he has come to respect the senator after watching Paul reach out, stumble and come back anyway. For example, Paul’s April 2013 speech at Washington, D.C.’s historically black Howard University was panned by students as condescending and out-of-touch. But he took feedback constructively and kept at it, Seymore said.

“With the people he’s had an opportunity to talk to [in the Senate], I think he’s got a wider view, a different view,” said Seymore, who now works with one of Paul’s Kentucky field representatives at the pastor’s Justice Resource Center on issues including housing and removing felonies from some convicts’ records. The partnership began in 2013.

Seymore said Paul has “got a reputation to clean” after his 2010 campaign. “He’s got to go where [other politicians have] never been before.”

In Kentucky, black leaders are mixed on how successfully he’s done that. African American legislators mostly feel ignored, while some community activists and pastors in Louisville said they appreciate what Paul is doing and believe his overtures are genuine.

Six of Kentucky’s eight black legislators, all Democrats, said they had never heard from Paul — not now, and certainly not in 2010 — though many of them said they would be open to talking with him. (A seventh African American legislator said he hadn’t spoken with the senator in more than a year; the eighth was unreachable.)

Given Paul’s emphasis on competing for votes in places typically unfriendly to Republicans, some of the legislators wondered why he hasn’t consulted them.

“I haven’t seen or heard from this guy except in passing,” said state Sen. Gerald Neal, a vocal critic of Paul’s. “I respect his position, I follow him very carefully, but to come into the community and …disregard individuals who are elected by a significant portion of the population…[it’s] astounding, and it’s telling.”

Some Paul allies consider the lawmakers hostile or dismiss them as bearing political agendas of their own, and note that the lawmakers could reach out, too.

Asked why the senator hasn’t approached the legislators, Bayens responded that Paul is “at the beginning of the process of doing outreach” and suggested the senator would be open to working with the lawmakers “on areas of agreement.”

Leaders at the community level, too, say Paul’s outreach is relatively recent, but those who have dealt with him generally spoke positively. His local work has included several appearances at the historically black, Baptist Simmons College, whose president, Kevin Cosby, has developed a strong relationship with Paul; an April meeting with business owners in heavily black west Louisville to discuss economic development, and working with the Jefferson County Republican Party to open an office in west Louisville in June.

Since 2013, a Paul field representative has held office hours once a month in the Russell neighborhood of west Louisville, where the poverty rate is over 50 percent according to some estimates. Visitors initially ignored the representative, Whitney Meadows, but she has since gained acceptance, said Markham French, the executive director of Plymouth Community Renewal Center.

In 2010 “there was a lot of negative press about some things [Paul] had said, and I didn’t really pay much attention to his campaign,” French said. “But when his staff called us [in 2013] and said he wanted to come down here, then I started taking notice. One of the things he said, to paraphrase, is, ‘If there’s a thousand issues on the table and we agree on 200 or 300, let’s work on those.’ And that’s where I’m at.”

The Rev. Jerry Stephenson, whose church and community center are located in a predominantly African American neighborhood that is also one of the poorest and most crime-ridden areas in Louisville, has known Paul since before he was elected senator, he said. They met at a tea party meeting and said Paul has visited the center at least once a year, Stephenson said in an interview,.

“Him reaching out to the African American community is not something he just dreamed up,” Stephenson said. “It’s been a part of him.”

African American Democrats, in Kentucky and elsewhere, have applauded Paul’s efforts to make some non-violent ex-felons eligible to vote, amid the feeling that minorities are disproportionately sent to jail for minor offenses. And Paul has used that issue to talk more broadly about reforming the criminal justice system, most recently in the wake of the Ferguson shooting.

He testified in the Kentucky statehouse on behalf of a bill that would restore voting rights.

“It’s not a typical Republican issue,” said state Rep. Arnold Simpson. “I’m impressed by that.”

Rep. Derrick Graham, another African American Democrat, said he supports Paul’s work on that subject, but the two have never talked.

Graham is not upset about it, he said, noting that he and Paul are from different parties and different levels of government. But, he added, “I would think that, in terms of trying an outreach program, those of us in elected positions would be some of the people you’d probably try to work with.”