Byron Donalds, Trump V.P. Contender, Suggests Jim Crow Era Had an Upside

Representative Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican whom Donald J. Trump is said to be considering for his running mate, suggested on Tuesday that the Jim Crow era had some virtues for Black people while trying to persuade voters of color to back the former president.

Mr. Donalds, who has emerged as a key Black surrogate for Mr. Trump, made the comments on Tuesday evening at a “Congress, Cognac, & Cigars” event in Philadelphia. The gathering, hosted by Mr. Donalds and Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas, another Black Republican, was intended to promote Mr. Trump and the Republican brand.

At the event, Mr. Donalds said that the programs that followed the Jim Crow era of racial violence and segregation — the federal government’s welfare system during the 1950s and the civil rights agenda of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s — had a detrimental effect on Black families.

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Mr. Donalds said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”

Mr. Donalds’s comments drew criticism from members of President Biden’s campaign, which has been trying to shore up his diminished support from voters of color, particularly among Black men.

Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden’s campaign, assailed Mr. Donalds’s remarks.

“Donald Trump spent his adult life, and then his presidency, undermining the progress Black communities fought so hard for — so it actually tracks that his campaign’s ‘Black outreach’ is going to a white neighborhood and promising to take America back to Jim Crow,” Ms. Chitika said in a statement to The New York Times.