Kelly Simpson closely watched as the Democrats gathered in Boston last week to anoint their presidential candidate, John F. Kerry.

Ordinarily, she would have been there celebrating, but this year, Simpson, who recently changed her party affiliation from Democrat to Independent, was monitoring the political rhetoric from afar.

And she wasn’t too impressed.

“Our country has become too polarized across political lines,” said Simpson, a graduate student who is supporting Ralph Nader – the independent candidate – much to the chagrin of her parents, who remain loyal Democrats.

“ I think the Democrats take the African-American vote for granted and the Republicans just don’t care about us,” said Simpson. “Black people need to be independent so that both candidates work hard for our vote and not assume that we will vote for them blindly.”

Simpson is part of a younger group of African Americans who are voting their political interests, shifting away from party loyalty and supporting candidates based on issues rather than on party politics. In fact, according to recent polls, a full one-third of young African-American voters now say they’re independents, a sharp contrast from their elders, who remain ardent Democrats. This young cohort of independent voters tends to be educated and middle-class, according to polls.

Those numbers do not surprise Lenora Fulani, who ran for president twice as an Independent and is now a director of a youth organization in New York.

“This is in line with a trend that has been emerging in the country over the last 25 years,” said Fulani, who is also a grassroots organizer and has been organizing recently for Nader in Harlem. “Young people who are not voters identify themselves as independents,” said Fulani.

Still, the vast majority of Blacks – and more specifically, Black women – remain loyal to the Democrats. For example, in the 2000 presidential race, 94 percent of Black women voted for Al Gore, while only 6 percent supported George W. Bush for president, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, an African-American think tank based in Washington, D.C. Close to 9 million Black women were registered to vote in the election, and of that number, 7.6 million said they actually voted, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

There were over 13 million Black women in the United States in 2000.

In 2002, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies asked Black respondents in its national survey to identify themselves as either Democrats, Independents or Republicans. Although 63 percent claimed to be Democrats, the number was down from 74 percent in 2000, indicating that there was a shift among Black voters who had opted to become independent voters.

Ron Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, doesn’t make much of the polls, adding that Blacks remain strong supporters of the Democrats, no matter what they may profess in public polls.

“African-Americans will say, for example, that they have changed their party identification, yet when you look at how people actually vote, African-Americans voted 90 percent Democrat in the last election in each age group,” said Walters.

But Walters does concede that in recent years, more young Black women like Simpson are choosing not to affiliate with either party and instead declare themselves independent, hoping to be viewed by both parties as a crucial swing voting-block. Simpson says that she was disappointed that the Congressional Black Caucus has ignored Nader’s candidacy and supported Kerry, though many members were initially critical of Kerry and supportive of Howard Dean in the early Democratic primaries.

Tensions between Nader and the Black Caucus surfaced last month after Nader alleged that Congressman Melvin Watt of North Carolina twice used a racial epithet against him during a meeting with the Caucus, in which they urged him to drop out of the presidential race. In a letter written to Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Nader demanded an apology, a request which the Caucus dismissed. The Caucus has urged Nader, who they blame for contributing to Gore’s loss in 2000, to drop out of the presidential race.

But Fulani criticized the Caucus, saying that African-Americans, who have had a long history of being excluded from elections, should not ask another candidate to drop out of a race.

Said Fulani: “It is an outrage and an immoral request given our history.”