This past Saturday afternoon in Atlanta, the once jocular and front-running, now defiant and rapidly crumbling GOP presidential contender Herman Cain announced that he's indefinitely "suspending" his bid for the White House -- and in the process he killed black Republicanism.

That probably wasn't his plan, but after running a race filled with gaffes and gimmicks and lacking any humility or substance, Cain left the conservative movement unharmed and the mainstream GOP alive and well, but he may have finally laid to rest the peculiar strain of political thought that's been driving black Republicans ever since the kinder, gentler Rockefeller Republicanism of former Sen. Edward Brooke and the late NAACP President Benjamin Hooks was replaced by the talking-point parroting brand that found its ultimate distillation in Cain.

After Cain's woeful run, American politics may have finally seen the last of the "I'm not like those other blacks" candidate -- and good riddance.

Cain called himself conservative, but he mostly encouraged supporters to see him as the ultimate anti-Obama -- claiming to be the "real black man" in the presidential race and saying America needed "a leader, not a reader." Yet when the time came, Cain couldn't back up those claims.