Trump surrogate Byron Donalds harkens back to Jim Crow era when 'the Black family was together'

WASHINGTON — Rep. Byron Donalds, speaking Tuesday at a Black voter outreach event for former President Donald Trump, suggested that Black families were more unified and better off during the Jim Crow era, sparking immediate backlash from top Black Democratic officials.

At the Philadelphia campaign event, Donalds, a Florida Republican like Trump, suggested that things had gotten worse for Black people after they embraced Democrats following President Lyndon Johnson’s enactment of Great Society programs in the 1960s, including an expansion of federal food stamps, housing, welfare and Medicaid for low-income Americans.

“You see, during Jim Crow, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds, one of Trump’s top allies in Congress and a campaign surrogate, said in remarks first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“And then H.E.W., Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are,” he said, a reference to what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Leading up to those remarks, Donalds said he had more recently seen “the reinvigoration of Black families” — what he described as younger people forming nuclear family units — that is “helping to breathe the revival of a Black middle class in America,” the Inquirer said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the highest-ranking African American in Congress, took to the Housefloor Wednesday and delivered a blistering speech, giving numerous examples of how Black people had suffered under racial segregation.

“It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has