The Republican Party’s overtures to black voters have been awkward. And with newly re-established College Republican chapters on historically black college campuses and a calculated deployment of Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus to the National Urban League and the National Association of Black Journalists, they continue. In an op-ed for the New York Times, University of Connecticut historian Jelani Cobb takes the GOP to task for its ongoing and seemingly blithe racial ignorance.

Cobb writes:

The party that hopes to attract black students is the party whose congressional leadership filed a baseless lawsuit against the first African-American president. It is the party whose representatives allied with birthers who demanded that the president prove his citizenship. It is the party that has endorsed the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and made it more difficult for the very people it is courting to actually cast a ballot for its candidates. Senator Paul himself has expressed ambivalence about enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Read the rest for a quick history lesson on why the GOP has a long way to go before it can really win black voters.