Black slaves were first kidnapped, tortured and transported to America in 1619. They were treated as chattels without voting rights. The U.S. Constitution left that oppression in contradiction to the Declaration of Independence undisturbed. The latter proclaimed that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution, however, counted slaves as non-human but worth three-fifths of a white person for purposes of allocating representatives among the states in Congress. In South Carolina, Black slaves outnumbered white people. Their enfranchisement would have been the death knell for white supremacy.

The prospect of Black voting precipitated the bloody Civil War and a staggering 600,000 deaths. In 1860, with the election of President Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina and its sister slave states feared the end of slavery, the enfranchisement of Black people and the end of the three-fifths clause via constitutional amendments. Slavery was not economically viable in the new states emerging as the United States raced to the Pacific Ocean. Slavocracy would lose its grip on power in the federal government. South Carolina’s attack on Fort Sumter was to preserve white supremacy in slave states. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, celebrated the same:

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, and the 15th Amendment in 1870 prohibited the federal government and states from denying the right to vote based on race. Black people generally flocked to the Republican Party, which had delivered them from slavery. Initial Black electoral successes terrified racists in the South. They saw their political power fading. They formed the Ku Klux Klan, lynched Black people for the audacity of voting and ushered in a century or more of Jim Crow — a return to slavery but with lipstick.

Black people first began to migrate to the Democratic Party during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt did not exclude Black people from the one-third of the nation then poorly housed, poorly clothed or poorly fed. But he opposed a federal anti-lynching law to protect Black people from the Klan’s murderous imperial wizards and kept Black Americans strictly segregated in the armed forces. Republicans and Democrats did not seriously compete for Black voters because Klan terror deterred them from voting at all.

That did not change until the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 which gave teeth to the 15th Amendment. Black voter registration and voting soared. Formerly ardent segregationists like South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and Alabama’s George Wallace began to court Black voters. The knowledge that a politician might lose an election concentrates his mind wonderfully. In 2012, the turnout of Black voters exceeded that of white voters for the first time in history, as 66.6% of eligible Black voters turned out to help reelect Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president.

The concepts of white or Black voting blocs are un-American. They postulate that all Black voters think alike, that all white voters think alike, and that the two races think differently. These racist postulates encourage tribalism and racial strife. Thus, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Anderson v. Martin (1964) that designating candidates by race on ballots was unconstitutional because it encouraged racial bloc voting. What’s wrong with the idea of “voters” without more?

But the political mind and voters remain wedded to racial bloc voting with its degrading or obnoxious subtext. Generally, Black Americans vote Democratic, a holdover from Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Black voter turnout may be the difference between Democrats winning or losing in battleground states and Democrats court them accordingly.

Republicans are generally viewed with suspicion by Black voters because of their racist connections over the past century. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 denounced the landmark Civil Rights Act as infringing on the alleged “sacred” right of racists to refuse business relations with Black people and to require them to stand in the back of the bus.

Republicans, however, care more about winning than about being racists. They are also courting Black voters by appealing to conservative social values, entrepreneurship, school choice initiatives and an embrace of traditional gender roles.

Political competition makes politics more honest and less venal. I say to Republicans and Democrats alike: Treat voters based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., It will be our deliverance from the strife and hatred of tribalism.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.