New Jersey Black Republicans: Meet Darius Mayfield

By Mark Tyler, Publisher of Atlantic City Focus, and 

Lilo H. Stainton, Health Care Reporter, NJ Spotlight News

Darius Mayfield, the Republican candidate running for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th District, considers himself “fiscally conservative, and socially normal.” 

The 12th District includes portions of Mercer, Somerset, Union, and Middlesex counties. Trenton, the state capital, and the smaller city of Plainfield are also part of the 12th District. Democrat Bonnie Watson Coleman is the incumbent. Mayfield is vying for the seat along with Green Party and Libertarian candidates.

More than 1.1 million New Jerseyans are Black, making up about 12% of the state’s population, according to data from the US Census Bureau.

In 2022, the bureau estimates that roughly 42% of Blacks who were eligible to vote cast ballots. That percentage is likely to be higher this year because more people tend to vote in presidential elections.

A 2014 report from the Pew Research Center estimated that only 5% of Blacks identified as Republican or leaning Republican at the time.

5% https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/state/new-jersey/party-affiliation/

Mayfield is running on the Republican ticket, but if pressed he would admit he feels more like an independent conservative. Mayfield voted for the first time in 2016. Although he was old enough to vote when President Obama ran in 2008, Mayfield was not excited, in part, because he considered the 44th president a “person of color” who “was not Black.” “Don’t call him the first Black president because I am what you consider a FBA, Foundational Black American,” Mayfield said. “Both of my great grandfathers were 100% Native Americans, who married freed slaves, and my family has detailed documents of my history where we came from in slavery.” Mayfield explained that Obama is not a direct descendant of slaves, who came through the Middle Passage. His mother was white, and his father was African. “That’s why somebody like Barack Obama can get up there and say there’s not much I can do just for the Black population in this country, I’ve got to govern for everybody,” Mayfield said. “While that is true, as an FBA, I understand that I can do things specifically for (the Black) community because they deserve it, and we are owed it in a lot of ways because of what we’ve gone through in this country.” That’s why Mayfield embraced the Platinum Plan, a policy initiative introduced by former President Donald Trump during his reelection bid in 2020 to increase economic opportunities for Black Americans. Among other things, the Platinum Plan promised to create 500,000 new Black-owned businesses, increase access to capital in Black communities and improve homeownership opportunities. The plan also called for making Juneteenth a federal holiday, a change codified by President Joe Biden in 2021.

How does Mayfield reconcile Trump’s apparent racism with his policy? He doesn’t believe Trump is a racist. “We’ve known the guy here in New York, New Jersey for quite some time,” Mayfield said. “We understand who Donald Trump is.”

Former IBF Cruiserweight Champion Imamu Mayfield is Darius’ cousin. Trump has sponsored some of his fights and the Mayfield family has personally been to dinner with Trump. Darius also knows of Black entrepreneurs who have gotten loans from Trump and when they attempted to pay him back, “he ripped up the check and said keep going and doing it,” Mayfield said. “Donald Trump is not only that man, but he’s also an 80-year-old white man from New York City,” Mayfield said. “So, there’s going to be some things an 80-year-old white man, just like an 80-year-old Black man, said sometimes, that don’t necessarily resonate or hit people of this generation.”

Mayfield said what he finds more important than personality are issues — such as school choice – and being able to express ideas and have them evaluated based on merit, even though they may not be popular.

Mayfield knows firsthand how important school choice could be because his mother illegally moved him from the failing New Brunswick school district five miles away to South Brunswick Township, where he could get a quality education. Both were public schools. One was failing, the other thriving. “I started off in New Brunswick, which is the hood, a lot of brown people, mostly Black people back then, and I got a knife pulled on me in first grade,” Mayfield said. His mother determined she wasn’t going to take him back to that school so she would drop him off at an aunt’s house where he would catch the bus to a better school.

When school officials found out, they threatened to take her to court if she didn’t re-enroll him in the failing district. Instead, she moved to one of the worst neighborhoods in the better school district. “Because she moved five miles down the road to South Brunswick, which was a different town, I got the quality education that I never even could have dreamed,” Mayfield said. “I think the public school system is the most systematically racist system in our country right now.” Mayfield said he believes everyone should have the right to take their children to the best schools they can find and that would also push failing schools to improve.

Mayfield said when he attends Make America Great Again, MAGA, rallies, people understand the concept. But when he talks to people about his other beliefs, they also listen and use critical thinking skills to form their opinions.

“I’m a Republican that believes in reparations and all my base knows that,” Mayfield said. “I speak to a MAGA crowd, there’s listening. There’s understanding. Everybody might not agree, but they’re going to listen to what I have to say. You feel how you feel. Be able to articulate that. Be able to explain that, and what I found in the Republican Party, and then the MAGA movement, when you do that, you’re not excoriated.” 

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