African Americans in New York City help to form a multi-racial independent political party, the New Alliance Party, which serves as an alternative to the Democratic Party in poor and working-class black communities.

The National Black Political Convention meets in Gary, Indiana, brings together 8,000 black activists from across nation to discuss which political path is best for the black community. Gary’s Mayor, Richard Hatcher, strongly advocates for an independent political alternative

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. organizes the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., to demand economic justice for the poor. There are efforts to recruit him to run for U.S. President as an independent. King listens but decides he is better positioned to lead outside of party politics. “I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics” says King. Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver is nominated to run for U.S. President on the anti-war and anti-racist Peace and Freedom Party line; meanwhile, Charlene Mitchell runs for president on the Communist Party ticket.

Malcolm X notes in his ‘Ballot or the Bullet’ speech, “I’m not trying to knock out the Democrats for the Republicans. We’ll get to them in a minute. But it’s true; you put the Democrats first, and the Democrats put you last.” Black sharecropper and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hammer gives an impassioned plea for black voting rights at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City representing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Under political pressure, the Civil Rights Act is passed that year, followed by the Voting Rights Act the following year, helping to legally dismantle Jim Crow.

As part of the burgeoning civil rights movement that included mass civil disobedience campaigns in the South, African Americans form the Afro-American Party in Alabama to protest the Democratic Party’s disfranchisement of black voters in the state.

A number of African Americans run on third-party tickets, including newspaper publisher Charlotta A. Bass, for U.S. Vice President on the Progressive Party ticket (with endorsements from DuBois and black labor leader, artist, and activist Paul Robeson), and NAACP organizer (and major civil rights leader) Ella Baker, running for New York City Council on the Liberal Party ticket.

Attorney and Communist Party newspaper editor Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. is elected for the first of three times to the New York City Council, representing Harlem. Meanwhile a number of other African Americans would run on the American Labor Party ticket, including Brooklyn-based community activist Ada B. Jackson, and soon W. E. B. DuBois, for U.S. Senate in New York.

Over 5,000 African Americans join the Communist Party in major northern cities, specifically New York City, as well as in parts of the South, including in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Three years earlier, a black CP Congressional candidate from Norfolk received 500 votes.

When the Progressive Party regrouped from its loss in 1912, Du Bois urges a vote for its nominee Robert La Follette, believing that opposing the two major parties was the most fundamental political point to be made by black voters.

African American historian and journalist W.E.B. Du Bois initially builds a black base in the Progressive Party in 1912 in order to place African Americans in the balance of power in northern cities in the national presidential contest that year. In subsequent elections he supports the Socialist and Progressive parties.