Black and right.

'WHAT do you call a black man at a conservative dinner?" my friend Richard Miniter once asked. "Keynote speaker," he laughed.

That quip used to bear more than a shred of truth. Thomas Sowell has said that if you put America's black conservatives into a room, they would be too sparse for a game of pinochle. But as the conservative movement has matured, those on the black Right have grown from mere curiosities at conservative functions into an increasingly active political force.

"For every person defending Louis Farrakhan, we have someone else on the other side," CNN producer Susan Toffler said just days before the Million Man March. She named several guests she had booked to confront the pro-Farrakhan forces -- Niger Innis, Michael Myers, Star Parker, Ezola Foster. Black conservatives are not just for dinner any more.

When NATIONAL REVIEW was founded in 1955, blacks voted Republican in numbers far higher than today. The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., in fact, was a Republican. Despite Jim Crow, blacks hewed to the conservative virtues of intact families and entrepreneurship. All this ended, Jack Kemp argues, just as the 1960s began. He recently told black conservatives in Washington that Richard Nixon lost the White House in 1960 because he did not protest Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s incarceration for a parking violation that fall. John Kennedy, in contrast, offered Coretta Scott King his support. President Lyndon Johnson's embrace of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Great Society tied blacks to the Democrats for a generation.

This knot has frayed in the last half-dozen years or so. Mounting numbers of blacks, burned out by social programs that tragically underdelivered, avoided the polls at election time. Black conservatives, meanwhile, grew from a handful like author Walter Williams and activist Robert Woodson into numbers large enough to fill hotel ballrooms around the country.

National Minority Politics, a monthly review of news and opinion written primarily by black conservatives, held its second annual leadership conference in Washington on October 7. Gwen and William Richardson, the energetic, high-profile Houston couple who launched the magazine, recently inaugurated Minority Mainstream, a grassroots, non-partisan lobby to promote "strong families, free enterprise, limited government, and community-based problem-solving."

The Washington-based Project 21 is a sort of light assembly plant for conservative ideas as well as a PR firm to sell them to the media. It books black conservatives on radio and TV interviews and distributes their opinion pieces to some 200 mainstream and 250 black-oriented newspapers.

Market- and virtue-oriented black media have emerged over the last few years. Emmanuel McLittle's Destiny and Spencer Perkins's Urban Family have joined Elizabeth Wright's Issues & Views in providing black conservatives outlets in print. Armstrong Williams in Washington, Rev. Earl Jackson in Boston, and Larry Elder in Los Angeles have taken the cause to the AM dial.

Those on the black Right who have risen to power include U.S. Reps. Gary Franks (R., Conn.) and J. C. Watts (R., Okla.). The November 1994 elections saw black conservatives advance at the state level too. In North Carolina, Henry McKoy and Larry Linney won State Senate and House seats.

However, some on the black Right have grown cranky over the GOP's seeming lack of interest in making broad overtures to blacks. National Minority Politics invited every GOP White House contender to its meeting, but Buchanan and Dornan were the only ones who bothered to show up. Too bad for those who stayed away. As Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and George Allen of Virginia can attest, even doubling the 10 per cent of blacks who normally vote GOP can crumble a Democrat's base like a Malibu hillside.

Black conservatives are becoming vital links between an ascendant, generally white GOP and 13 per cent of America, most of whom still feel largely alienated from the party of Lincoln. That cranny may be an ironic place to find an influential but outnumbered group of people who preach color blindness. This surely will be a staggering challenge -- and perhaps their finest hour. -- DEROY MURDOCK