Ask 10 black people what political party they vote for and it’s very likely between 8 and 9 of them will reply Democrat. Blacks simply just don’t vote and are not Republicans. On many key (and minor) issues the Republican party are seen by many as the party which ignores black issues or creates policies against black people.

But the black community was once Republican, in fact the Republican party was created on a platform in many ways to help black people!

The Republican party formed in the aftermath of the disbanding of the Whigs, as History.com summarises:

In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the “tyranny” of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.

With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories by popular sovereignty, the Whigs disintegrated. By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party.

src: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/republican-party-founded

By 1860 Lincoln had won the presidency over a divided democrat party, leading the civil war the Republicans helmed by Lincoln became the northern victors and abolished slavery in 1865.

Following this they tried to push for racial equality and black members were growing in number throughout the party membership and in it’s ranks. The Republican party was the party of black people.

But where did it all go wrong?

The first signs of blacks leaving their beloved Republican party happened during the Depression. during the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt’s second administration put out the New Deal, this democrat party campaign gave hope to many, including many blacks, who were being crushed under the weight of poverty. Still many remained loyal to the Republicans.

By the 1960s around two thirds of black voters aligned with the republican party, the final push toward Democrat happened when the Republicans leader became Barry Goldwater and then further when helmed by Nixon they put out what is now known as the ‘Southern Strategy’.

Goldwater made a push to win over white voters, generally Martin Luther King stayed out of political party alignment but of Goldwater he warned:

“The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism…On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represents a philosophy that is morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I have no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that does not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.”

Goldwater’s stance had a profound impact on the remaining black voters and then when Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips, started to use the Southern Stategy the nails were hammered hard into the coffin.

Phillips said in a 1970 New York Times Article;

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that…but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

Wikipedia summarizes the Southern Strategy as follows:

In American politics, southern strategy refers to methods the Republican Party used to gain political support in the South by appealing to the racism against African Americans harbored by many southern white voters.^[1][2][3]

As the African American Civil Rights Movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened pre-existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South to the Republican Party that had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped push the Republican party much more right.

In academia, “southern strategy” refers primarily to “top down” narratives of the political realignment of the South, which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white southerners’ racial resentments in order to gain their support. This top-down narrative of the southern strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed southern politics following the civil rights era. This view has been questioned by historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and Joseph Crespino, who have presented an alternative, “bottom up” narrative, which Lassiter has called the “suburban strategy”. This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South, but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of de facto segregation in the suburbs, rather than overt resistance to racial integration, and that the story of this backlash is a national, rather than a strictly southern one.

Since that time Black voters have largely sided with Democratic presidential nominees. None has received less than 82 percent of the black vote since Kennedy’s 68 percent in 1960.

Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/14/331298996/why-did-black-voters-flee-the-republican-party-in-the-1960s