In Search of the “First” Black President

In this paper, I will focus on the uneasy political relationship forged between African Americans and President William J. Clinton from 1992-2000. My goal is to move beyond overt explanations based on partisanship and to discuss the nuance of black attitudes toward Bill Clinton, and how those attitudes changed and influenced black attitudes toward the Republican Party during this period. I argue that African Americans relationship with Clinton evolved over time, a story that is obscured by the historical field’s focus on black voters’ partisan support for Clinton in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. Indeed, despite this black Democratic partisanship, my research indicates that African American’s relationship to Clinton was an uneasy one, particularly given Clinton’s overt racialized dog-whistles on a number of significant cultural and policy issues (mass incarceration, welfare reform, and Affirmative Action, for example). However, my research also demonstrates that this relationship evolved over the course of Clinton’s tenure in office, in part due to African Americans’ reaction to Republican attacks on Clinton’s agenda and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In other words, black communities’ opinions of Clinton shifts dramatically once they witness “unwarranted” attacks on Clinton. In fact, many African Americans viewed the “partisan assault on Clinton” in racialized terms, seeing the attacks as proxy for “an assault on African American interests and civil rights.” Thus, this paper will track the evolution of this relationship whereby Bill Clinton went from being a questionable white southern Democrat to the “first black president” in the eyes of African American constituents.