Despite diversity brag, few black delegates at the 2012 Republican convention

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Bositis’ team contacted every state delegation to conduct their count, yielding a total of about 47 black delegates. He said three states, Georgia, Illinois and Virginia, simply refused to respond.

Bell, the Georgia delegate, said his delegation included 6 African-Americans, though it was unclear whether any of them are alternates or “at large” delegates, of whom the Joint Center identified 22 at this year’s RNC.

By contrast there are scheduled to be just under 1,500 African-Americans at the Democratic National Convention next month, according to data supplied to the Joint Center by the Democratic Party. Bositis says the rules of the DNC also mean that at least half of delegates are women. And he said that typically, well over half of black Democratic delegates are women.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Republican party is struggling to attract African-American supporters with the nation’s first black president — a member of the opposing party — sitting in the White House, though Bositis says that’s not the problem.

“The Republican party has become much more of a southern institution,” Bositis said, adding that the party’s center of gravity has become southern white conservatives.

Black RNC delegates themselves had differing explanations for their small numbers, ranging from fellow African-Americans defaulting to the Democratic Party and Barack Obama, to the logistical challenges of advancing within the party apparatus.

“Traditionally, to be a delegate you’ve done a lot of work within the party for a number of years,” Kevin Fulton, a black Romney delegate from Texas, told theGrio. “So for instance in Houston, you have a number of young Republican parties run by blacks, [including] “College Republicans, city Republicans …the thing is, probably you won’t see those people at these types of functions, probably for another election cycle or two.”

And while convention organizers seemed reluctant to get into the numbers, black delegates themselves seemed very interested in knowing how many of them were there.

“Many of us have really pressed the party” on outreach to African-Americans, said Walter Allen III, a California delegate for Mitt Romney and the mayor pro tem of the city of Covina, who has been a Republican for nearly 20 years.

“We don’t want the party to look like it’s a bunch of old, white guys.”

Follow Joy Reid on Twitter a @thereidreport