ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Carol Mosely-Braun, and Al Sharpton popularized the strategy of working within the Democratic Party (and Alan Keyes in the Republican Party) to seek self-consciously African American electoral success during the last third of the twentieth century, blacks of various backgrounds and goals continued to launch independent campaigns outside the confines of the two-party system. In fact, in terms of sheer numbers, third-party presidential candidacies remained by far the most popular expression of black presidential aspirations even as mainstream candidates began to assert their influence in the two major parties. But independent candidates, especially black ones, found it frustrating to launch bona fide campaigns in which they had to compete for financing, ballot space, and media coverage with both Republicans and Democrats, neither of which they totally trusted to represent the issues. African American independent candidate Larry Holmes echoed this distrust when, in 2000, he lashed out at the Democratic Party as the “box our movement is locked away in.” A final factor at work limiting the effectiveness of black campaigns was that their chosen parties were vulnerable to factious disputes which often limited their cohesion and their longevity. To be sure, few, if any, of these candidates held out any hope of actual election, but most of them had other, sometimes even bizarre, goals.
