Lynette Hardaway, of Pro-Trump Duo Diamond and Silk, Dies at 51

The sisters drew intense criticism as their prominence rose.

Bree Newsome, an artist and activist, described the sisters in 2018 as “a modern-day minstrel show” aimed at “white conservatives who want to believe Trump can’t be racist or they themselves can’t be racist because there are these two Black women named Diamond and Silk who are constantly rooting for Trump.”

The sisters roundly rejected such attacks.

“While some of our supporters may be surprised to see two American (Black) women voicing their opinions about these issues, it’s not a racial or cultural thing,” they wrote on their website. “It’s about doing the right thing when it comes to ‘We the American People!’ We are just two Black chicks, who’s down with politics. We are not robotic talking heads; we are truth-tellers!”

Ms. Hardaway was born on Nov. 25, 1971 and grew up in Detroit, the second oldest of six children (Ms. Richardson was the oldest), according to their book, “Uprising: Who the Hell Said You Can’t Ditch and Switch? The Awakening of Diamond and Silk.” Their father worked in a bread factory when they were young and their mother was a homemaker who later became a pastor in North Carolina.

A complete list of Ms. Hardaway’s survivors was not immediately available.

In 2018, Republicans summoned the sisters to testify before the House Judiciary Committee after they received a note from Facebook that said the company had deemed their page to be “unsafe to the community.” The sisters said the note, along with a decline in traffic to their page, was proof that Facebook had an anticonservative bias.

“Facebook censored us for six months,” Ms. Hardaway said at the hearing, during which she frequently sparred with Democratic members of Congress and found support among Republican members.

Facebook said the sisters’ page had been flagged as a result of a communication problem, not partisan bias. Any dip in traffic, the company said, was caused by new policies that showed users more posts from friends and fewer from public pages.

In April 2020, The Daily Beast reported that Fox News, which had paid Diamond and Silk to provide weekly videos for Fox Nation, had cut ties with the sisters after they promoted conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus.