What would you like to know exactly? Here is a very basic overview.
Black politics has travelled along very different paths compared with other groups politics. Note that when I say "Black politics," what I mean is political action related to the ability to exercise self determination and enjoy participation in society as a fully protected member despite being Black. In that sense, it's a forced politics you're born into rather than opting into because of the historical conditions that defined and marginalized having darker skin and/or African ancestry in the West and has to varying degrees spread around the world. Bear in mind that for the first 200 years after the European colonization project in North America, there was no representative democracy. When it finally arrived, some African descended people had limited voting rights, but they were often arbitrarily revoked, as were the voting rights of many unpropertied Whites and indigenous people. White migrants fared little better upon arrival and women regardless of race were lacked any ability to express a political voice. That's roughly half the population effectively silenced. In the decades after the American Revolution, there were a number of initiatives that sprung up to stake claims to self-determination. There were nationalist programs to resettle African descended peoples in British Columbia or the frontier regions or Africa even as the slave trade continued between the Western coast of Africa and the Americas. There were simultaneously attempts to start women's suffrage movements that were occasionally successful at the local level, but not in national politics.
The project of Whiteness, which was to say the idea that white skin and European descent conferred at least an ability to own property, be seen and heard in the eyes of the law, and vote began to expand to many poorer American Whites and incoming European migrants during the 1830s-40s. Industrialization in the north helped, as labor relations changed significantly. In the south, a sort of semi-feudal system endured, but free Black people were systematically stripped of whatever remaining political power they might have gathered, especially after 1831. David Walker had written his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World around this time, agitating for full recognition of Black people as citizens, decrying those who would try to emigrate back to Africa and denouncing founding fathers such as Jefferson who disparaged Black people even as he championed supposedly universal rights of man. There had by this point also been a rash of uprisings between the late 1700s and the 1840s all around the Americas (especially in the Caribbean) where African descended people sought an end to the slave trade and abolition. Nat Turner's in 1831 is perhaps the most well known, particularly since it codified a number of restrictive laws prohibiting what could be seen as political activity among the enslaved, such as free assembly or free exercise of religion (Turner was a minister who recruited people to his rebellion in his travels). While the US had banned the slave trade in the early 1800s, it continued well into the period right up to the Civil War at varying levels, meaning organizing could be difficult as most slave ships were like the Tower of Babel in terms of linguistic and cultural differences.
By this point there already existed various factions in Black politics, with some such as Frederick Douglass being a staunch advocate (mostly) of total acceptance of Black people into the liberal American project. This was a project that aligned well with what is commonly called the first wave of the feminist movement and there were allegiances between Douglass and women's rights activists like Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton, which sadly came at least partially undone in the post-Civil War era as feminists felt Black men had betrayed them by accepting their own suffrage instead of continuing the fight for universal suffrage. Besides Douglass there were others like Alexander Crummell more in the nationalist tradition who bought into European colonial logics and shipped out to Liberia to supposedly "civilize" the natives. These are just two examples of the many points of view of the free Black people in America. Among the enslaved, there was also great political variability based on what we know mostly after the fact, but it's harder to gauge other than to say there were fugitives absconding North to freedom and small enclaves of free people of color in places like the Carolinas and Virginia. At the same time there were enslaved people who accepted the slave system and felt no racial solidarity as they were more concerned with mere survival and eking out whatever small comforts were possible within that system.
When the war came, Black politics became suddenly and irrefutably visible. It was political pressure from emancipated and free born African descended people that really kick-started the abolitionist movement, even in its nascent form in the late 1700s. The Whig party, which had most of its power base in the Northern US, was generally more open to abolitionist sentiment but the generally more agrarian dominated Democrat-Republicans had little reason to abolish the system from which it derived a considerable portion of its wealth. By the 1850s the Whigs were basically divided into pro and anti slavery wings and there were some Northern Democrats (the new name of the party) who had little interest in slavery. In local municipal elections in places like New York, for example, Black and indigenous voters, granted limited suffrage, had helped deliver some significant Whig victories even as the party splintered. Ultimately the Republican party was formed with the abolitionists being one of its signature constituencies. Southern Democrats retrenched into their system, unable or unwilling to give it up.
The Civil War happened after southern aristocrats decided having a political party wasn't enough and instead they wanted their own nation. It should be noted that this was largely one class of wealthy planters who used their wealth and influence to force the issue and not necessarily a broadly popular cause among the majority even of Whites in the South. After they opted to leave, abolitionists Black and White were vindicated from their years of calling the south belligerent and crazy. The new Republican party adopted a more forcefully abolitionist stance. Meanwhile thousands of enslaved people departed the farms and plantations on which they were bonded after news of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation spread and retreated behind union lines where they were summarily put in "contraband camps" and trapped there awaiting a decision from the federal government on whether they could be free or at least fight for the union cause. Several were returned to their slaveholders in the early years of the war.
As we well know, the North won the war and war service became one way some formerly enslaved men were able to find a pathway into a livelihood, but it was mostly previously free Black men from north and south who would be slotted onto New Republican ballots to gain real political and judicial power. This was the story of Reconstruction, which was by and large Black led through the instrument of the Republican party. Out of it came the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution which formally ended slavery, established a new definition of citizenship and granted the right to vote to men regardless of race. We can say these 3 amendments completely remade America and every struggle thereafter still even to this day. It's worth noting women didn't get the vote for another almost 60 years.
Sadly it ended in tragedy. Reconstruction was violently crushed, mostly by rioting Whites in the south and a series of compromises surrounding the heavily contested election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democrat Samuel Tilden. The compromise was the removal of occupying soldiers from the South leaving Black communities and their leaders vulnerable to mob violence and inaugurating the period we today call Jim Crow. Segregation was formally enshrined in law following the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in the Supreme Court in 1898 where the court ruled in favor of the idea of separate but equal actually being possible.
Into this landscape people like Booker T. Washington emerged pushing a less radical more palatable program for Black liberation whereby everyone learned a trade and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. This new theory of "uplift" basically posited that the main problem with the so called negro was a set of inner pathologies. This was in line with much of the race science of the day that considered Black people as a subspecies at the least (though the same was believed of the Irish, Chinese, and others).
In the early 1900s a new generation of activists came up like WEB DuBois, Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey and A. Phillip Randolph. Each had very different political projects and tended toward whatever party pole was most appealing to their platform. DuBois followed in Douglass' path. Garvey in Crummell's. Randolph hewed more to labor organizing traditions. Locke opened a cultural front pushing the idea of a Renaissance centered in Black enclaves like Harlem. The Republican party underwent a drastic overhaul in the WW 1 era, settling into a more corporate friendly anti-(Teddy) Roosevelt repudiation of the Progressive era. The Democrats picked up some cast-offs, especially from the burgeoning labor movement, but also had a strong post-Reconstruction Jim Crow power in the party to contend with preventing many Black people from finding much of a home in either party. Woodrow Wilson was certainly no real friend to Black people. The Depression of course saw further immiseration of Black people as southern democrats in Congress actually blocked New Deal legislation from being rolled out in the segregated communities Black people had been consigned to throughout the South.
A series of labor actions in the 1940s, and boycotts and demonstrations in the 1950s came to redefine Black politics in the today familiar refrain of equal protection under the law. Activist groups began forming multiracial coaltions and a new generation emerged with overlap with people in the labor movement, the communist party, international groups, etc. By the 1960s these coalitions were organizing on a variety of fronts to maybe more fundamentally alter society. And what happened? In 1960, many White Democrats, disgusted by the prospect that already presumably dangerous Catholic John F. Kennedy would be president, and incensed by his sympathy toward Civil Rights, began leaving the party. Then candidate Nixon began to court this new base. By 1964, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, whose ethics would go on to inspire generations of conservatives, was regularly denouncing civil rights and desegregation as government overreach. This didn't endear many to the new right. But after King was killed in 1968 and the most pro-Civil Rights president of the modern era in Johnson left office in disgrace due to warmongering, a period of political demobilization followed. Nixon won and presided over a fairly robust economy for a time, leaving the Democratic party mostly looking like losers, particularly following McGovern's crushing electoral defeat. Still they pressed for racial justice due to growing influence of Black communities in electoral politics following the normalization of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act which outlawed many disenfranchising practices like poll taxes and nonsensical "literacy tests" to vote.
So what happened? Some Black people turned first to liberal logics like Black Power which promulgated the idea that a kind of race first narrative rather than broader egalitarian politics was the way forward. Others decided to embrace an updated version of Booker T. Washington's thesis, pushing for a kind of Black Capitalism wherein engagement with market logics was seen as liberatory. Still others focused on assimilation, culturally and professionally, into the pursuit of the American middle class. Each of these belief systems found their way into the new institutionalism of the dawning neoliberal era wherein you could ride a diversity train to high ranking positions in either the democratic or republican party so long as you agreed to Blacksplain to Whites whenever the occasion called for it. State work also traditionally offered fewer barriers to entry and better stable benefits than the typically more ruthless and nakedly discriminatory private sector. In some ways Obama was the climax of this type of politics embodied in his 2008 campaign especially. Colin Powell arguably occupied a similar position.
Much is made of Black affinity for Democratic politics over Republicans because of things like entitlement programs, which couldn't be more inaccurate. Communities with high share of public benefits recipients tend to have lower voter participation anyway. Middle class Black voters, buoyed on the promises of institutional security are more likely to comprise the so-called "Black vote." There is a cross section of ideologies within what often comes across as Black Bloc voting, but there are historical and material circumstances that have conditioned one party being generally favored. Though there is a failure to reckon seriously with the fact that non-participation in voting is its own form of politics.
Digital media may be changing some of this or at least having an impact on how participation and nonparticipation in politics can be best understood. It's why things get more complicated after 2008 and why we see a variety of splinter groups gaining influence or at least becoming more visible today.
Hope all of this helps.
*edited for typos and clarity
