In April 2013, Senator Rand Paul spoke to students at Howard, asking, in a particularly awkward exchange, whether they knew that many of the early advocates of racial equality were Republicans. (They did, and didn’t care for the patronizing question.) That May, Mr. Priebus announced the formation of a College Republican chapter on the campus of Central State University in the critical swing state of Ohio. Late last year, Morehouse College in Atlanta rechartered its dormant Young Republican chapter. All three are historically black institutions.

It is a paradox of American history that a party formed in the 1850s by free-soil advocates devoted to stopping the spread of slavery should find itself pondering its lack of appeal to black voters. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation secured black allegiance to the G.O.P. well into the 20th century, but a realignment began during the Depression.

In his 1948 book, “Balance of Power,” Henry Lee Moon, the director of publicity for the N.A.A.C.P., argued that the emerging African-American vote would be most effective when strategically balanced between the two main parties. But instead of an open market for black support, the burgeoning civil rights movement created a near racial binary between the parties. The Democratic Party became increasingly identified with the cause, particularly during the Johnson administration, and the Nixon-era G.O.P. invested in the “Southern strategy” of racial backlash — Atwaterism before it could be called that.

By the late ’80s, when I enrolled at Howard, the term “black Republican” was nearly oxymoronic. The handful of students who identified as such were thought to be cynically gaming the system, pursuing the easiest route to public visibility and sacrificing collective advancement on the altar of individual gain.

But we students who protested were not driven by ideological uniformity or contempt for “diversity of thought among African-Americans” — the G.O.P.’s current catchphrase. To us, Mr. Atwater embodied the party’s cynical manipulation of white racial fears. Rand Paul’s audience at Howard knew that progressives on race issues were once aligned with the Republican Party — and also why they had abandoned it.