Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Herald-Tribune:

SARASOTA - At age 64, well into her retirement from the Army, Frances Rice is at the center of a contentious campaign on race and politics — and she has never been happier.

The leader of the National Black Republican Association is a minority within a minority. Not only is she black, she is also a Republican, a member of a party to which fewer than 10 percent of black voters in Sarasota, Florida, where she is based, belong. Her campaigns — including one meant to foil the nomination of the first black presidential candidate, Barack Obama — are best known for their shock value.

Karl Rove and Rice

Her messages have brought condemnation from Democrats. But they have also sparked a backlash among many Republicans.

When she was criticized for raising billboards in Southwest Florida saying “Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican,” she challenged anyone to sue her if they thought she was wrong. “Let them come into court with their evidence,” Rice said.

When hearing that the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, Jim Greer, had expressed disappointment in her magazine, The Black Republican, which Greer had secured party money to publish, Rice dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

The magazine featured a picture of Ku Klux Klan members burning a cross, with the caption “Every person in this photograph was a Democrat.”

Article titles included “Democrats embrace their child molesters,” and “Top 10 Democratic sex scandals in Congress,” and “Democrats wage war on God.”

Rice shows no intention of backing down. Her personal history of growing up in poverty under segregation is her fuel.

“This is the first time in my life that I have felt I am actually doing something about what the Democrats have done in the past and are doing now to black people,” Rice said. “If the Democrats had left us alone after the Republicans freed us from slavery we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. They are keeping blacks in virtual slavery.”

Republicans question tactics

(And Rice questions this article. Click here for her response.)

Supporters call Rice relentless, a black Republican willing to say things white Republicans cannot. Detractors say she is setting back the GOP’s black outreach effort with her inflammatory campaigns.

“Obviously we weren’t consulted before she decided to do any of this,” said Tony Cooper, president of the Tampa Black Republican Club. “It’s a fruitless debate and it may conjure up more ill will toward the party. We should be spending money on debating the Democrats on the issues.”

Said Deon Long, president of Florida’s Federation of Black Republican Clubs: “We thought those billboards were asinine.”

Rice thinks of herself as an “iron butterfly” positioned to expose the “Democratic Party’s racist past” in time to convince blacks to vote for John McCain.

Mitt Romney and Rice

Since the launch of billboard and radio campaigns this summer she says membership to her association has doubled to 2,000. Last week she hosted a booth at the Urban League meeting in Orlando, where McCain and Obama gave speeches. Next month she plans to host the inaugural meeting of the Black Republican Forum in New York, an event she organized, where discussions include race and presidential politics.

She is so politically active that tax lawyers question why the NBRA has nonprofit status.

In July she launched three radio ads on WLSS, a talk radio station reaching from southern St. Petersburg to Venice, and more are scheduled to run in Charlotte County. One urges listeners to “Look beyond Barack Obama’s skin color and soaring rhetoric and see an arrogant, elitist millionaire.” Another refers to Obama’s friends as “unrepentant terrorists.” Another begins with the statement “The Democratic Party is a racist party.”

Greer, the state party chairman, said the party is no longer donating to the NBRA. While pictures of himself and Gov. Charlie Crist were on the cover of the magazine, along with favorable articles about them, Greer said he had no knowledge of the other content until after the magazine was published.

“Mrs. Rice has some very strong views on certain issues,” Greer said. “It showed us that before we donate to anything, regardless of how it appears, the party needs to ensure it takes a look at all the content.”

Republican John McCain’s campaign staff said they were aware of the NBRA but declined to comment. A photo on the NRBA’s Web site shows McCain posing with Rice at the NAACP convention in July.

Dismissing the National Black Republican Association as an inconsequential fringe group would mean ignoring that it was founded by and has received tens of thousands of dollars in funding from the Republican Party. In a tight presidential campaign in Florida, its radio ads, magazine and billboards carry some potential to either erode black support for Obama or backfire against McCain.

Republican Party executive committees in Highlands, Hillsborough, Manatee and Charlotte counties contributed $500 or more each to put up the billboards in their communities.

Rep. Jennifer Carroll, R-Fleming Island, the first black female Republican elected to the state Legislature and a supporter of Rice, admitted that calling Democrats racists might not be the best way of getting out the message that the Republican Party is better for blacks.

“But it certainly gets your attention,” Carroll said. “There’s value in that.”

At a local print shop in July, while Rice was proofreading the new issue, she detailed her plans to set up a booth at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati.

Formerly a lawyer and a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, she has a melodic voice suited to delivering both closing arguments and drill commands.

“I imagine we’re going to be the most visited booth at the convention, and there’s going to be blood on the floor,” she said. “I’m looking forward to it. I tell you, I am having so much fun. I feel that for the first time in my life I’m actually making a difference in what’s happening in the political arena.”

The new issue of The Black Republican contains a letter to Obama asking him to “apologize for the Democratic Party’s racist past,” and an article entitled, “Bill Clinton says Barack Obama must ‘kiss my ass’ for his support.”

Turnover on the board

In 2004, when Republican Party leaders in Palm Beach County learned that nearly twice as many African-Americans in Florida voted for President Bush as did in 2000, they celebrated and began dreaming of possibilities.

“We wanted to carry that out and see what we could make happen if we initiated a national organization,” said Andre Cadogan, an engineer who chaired the county’s black Republican caucus at the time.

The Palm Beach County Republican Party donated about $20,000 in seed money to start the National Black Republican Association in 2005, Cadogan said. Rice was a natural choice to lead the group. She and Cadogan had met while they were both campaigning for Bush. Rice was eager and had time to devote to the cause.

Rice’s confrontational style was already part of her reputation. As a charter member of the local Black Republican Club, party leaders had to ask her to stop passing out homemade buttons that read “Democratic Party, Poverty Pimps” at a campaign event.

Like nearly everyone else originally part of the NBRA, Cadogan has since dropped out. The original board included eight members from around the country, and Rice’s husband. In a matter of months, all the board members except Rice, her husband and Cadogan resigned. E-mails provided by one former board member detail that Rice’s style had led to the resignations.

After Hurricane Katrina, for example, Rice insisted on sending out a press release praising President Bush’s response to the disaster. The board balked because members thought Bush’s response was imperfect at best, and those who died or lost their homes were disproportionately black.

Burstion-Donbraye said Rice’s efforts seemed to lack common sense and ignore the variety of opinions within the Republican Party. She resigned, fearing her reputation was at stake.

Don Scoggins of Virginia, former NBRA board member and president of Republicans for Black Empowerment, said the board disagreed with Rice’s attack strategy.

“We would tell her, ‘You can’t go around bashing the Democratic Party and then expect them to come to our side in droves,’ ” Scoggins said. “She would take the approach, ‘Well, you’re not a real Republican, then.’”

Rice said board members left because they disagreed on organizational rules, and that what happened at the beginning of the organization was “not relevant.”

Today the organization’s vice chairman is Richard St. Paul, a city councilman in New Rochelle, N.Y., who declined to be interviewed, saying the association’s rules allowed only Rice to speak to media. The only other person with a leadership role is Darlene Wood-Harvey, the secretary and treasurer, who, according to her personal Web site, is white and an artist who has lived in Sarasota and Virginia. She did not respond to e-mail and phone messages. The e-mail address listed for her on the NBRA Web site goes to Rice.

Nonprofit status questioned

Without a board to back Rice, building grassroots support fell to a conservative campaign operation out of Washington, D.C. BMW Direct is known for its direct mail campaigns that, at least initially, cost nearly as much as they bring in.

For two years, BMW Direct ran a 527 political fundraising committee for the NBRA, called the Black Republican Freedom Fund.

About 1,000 members signed up and began receiving copies of The Black Republican magazine.

But of the $400,000 raised in donations to the NBRA in the 2006 election cycle, 80 percent went back to BMW Direct or to pay other fundraising costs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Rice managed to put up a “Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican” billboard in South Carolina in 2006, and, leading up to the elections, ran a radio ad in swing states. In the ad a black woman says, “Dr. King was a real man,” and another responds, “You know he was a Republican.”

Rice said she wanted to start a conversation about the history of the Republican Party. The tactic proved its worth in media coverage. She ticks off the news outlets that covered the campaign.

“I spent a few thousand and garnered half a million in free coverage by my estimate,” Rice said.

But the coverage was never what she hoped for. She considered the reporters who wrote about her liberals who sought to denigrate her organization.

Typical of some of her interactions with the media, when Hillsborough Community College Prof. Keith Berry hosted Rice on his weekly political radio show, he eventually had to hang up on her because he could not get a question in once Rice started talking about the history of the two parties.

“You would have flunked my history class,” Berry told Rice.

Rice closed the 527 in December according to IRS records and its former treasurer, Scott Mackenzie of BMW Direct, who said she was no longer using the firm.

So for the past seven months, donations have come through the nonprofit NBRA — which leading experts in campaign finance say could be illegal.

Nonprofits such as the NBRA, which is classified as a 501 (c)(4) under the IRS code, are not allowed to help elect candidates or push partisan politics as their primary purpose.

“It’s suspicious,” said Stephen Weissman, associate director for policy at the Campaign Finance Institute. “There are grounds to be concerned, and I think there’s enough reasons why the IRS should be concerned.”

Nonprofits such as the NBRA are not required to name their contributors, and it is exempt from paying taxes because the group is supposed to be furthering the general “social welfare.”

The director of the University of Miami’s graduate taxation program, Frances Hill, said the NBRA seemed to be in clear violation of the law. Hill, who donated $1,500 to Hillary Clinton, testified before Congress on the need for stricter oversight of political group’s finances.

“Their name alone and what they appear to be promoting, also the link to the McCain campaign on their Web site, all appears to be problematic — you can’t get more inconsistent with exempt status than that,” said Hill, who also directs the tax program at the Campaign Legal Center.

Rice described the purpose of the association as educating African-Americans and returning them to their Republican Party roots.

“They have been convinced wrongly the Republican Party is a racist party,” Rice said. “Black voters feel they have no choice, because they don’t want to vote for the party of the Ku Klux Klan. We tell them, ‘You are in bed with the party of the Ku Klux Klan.’”

She declined to provide a list of current donors, saying that if she did the media would use it to “trash us.” She said primary contributors include herself, her family members, and “hundreds of thousands of little people all around the country giving $5 or $10.”

After an initial interview, Rice declined to respond to requests to answer follow-up questions, including those about how the organization operates.

Childhood lessons

Frances Rice learned to be tough at an early age. Growing up poor in Atlanta during segregation shaped her political views, she said.

When her father left the family, Rice helped raise her four siblings in a government housing project. She was 12, and her mother took a job working long hours in a laundry.

“We succeeded because she instilled personal responsibility,” Rice said. “If she had bought into a socialist policy of government handouts we’d still be poor there.”

She went on to earn a law degree and an MBA. She retired after 20 years in the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel.

Rice’s brother, Ralph Lee Presley, who runs a youth program in Atlanta, said his sister became a Republican to escape associations with the poverty she grew up in.

Rice said she blames the Democratic Party for the racism she experienced growing up and believes the party is responsible for perpetuating poverty in the black community.

Rice attended Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr.’s father preached.

“Daddy King” as he was called, was a Republican, but, according to Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who studied the King family, he publicly switched his allegiance to the Democrats and said he would vote for John F. Kennedy.

Martin Luther King Jr. took care not to claim any political party, said Clayborne Carson, a professor at Stanford University who directs the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. But there are photos of him campaigning for President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, in 1964. Many blacks became Democrats during the civil rights movement.

Rice’s brother said the rest of Rice’s family became Democrats, too, and they still are.

As with other things, Rice makes her own choices. To disregard her as an agitator would be to overlook the resolve and discipline she brings even to her personal life.

At just over 5 feet tall, she is slender. She walks on a treadmill at 5.6 mph. every day for two miles and lifts weights. She does not eat sugar, salt, or dairy. Sleep is eight hours every night.

“It takes a lot of talent, energy, time, dedication and willingness to be trashed by the mainstream media in order to do this,” Rice said.