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Over the past year-and-a-half, Sen. Rand Paul has spoken at historically black colleges, gathered with African American leaders in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown, and criticized a justice system he says unfairly targets minorities. His message is unmistakable: Im a different kind of Republican whos not afraid to engage with communities that typically vote for Democrats.

Yet in 2010, when he was a long-shot tea party candidate for Senate, and during his first two years in the job, Paul was rarely seen or heard from in Kentuckys African American community, according to interviews with more than a dozen black leaders in the Bluegrass State, including seven of the eight African American state legislators. Indeed, his much-publicized courtship has occurred almost entirely as the Republican began plotting a potential run for president.

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The officials, almost all Democrats, largely agreed that Paul deserves credit for spending time in minority communities and addressing issues that havent been high on the GOPs priority list. But many were skeptical that Paul is acting out of long-held beliefs about racial injustice, given his earlier absence and his controversial 2010 remarks questioning whether the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses, which hes sought to surmount ever since.

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I see Sen. Paul as really being an opportunist here, said Democratic state Sen. Reggie Thomas. His actions over the last couple years, now that he wants to run for president, really belie his feelings hes expressed.

For him or anyone else to think he can show up in our community, smile, shake a few hands, take a few pictures, and that represents something significant in terms of him conveying a message that answers the questions or addresses the issues we are concerned about, added state Rep. Reginald Meeks of Louisville, to me thats being pretty callous and pretty shallow.

Aside from attending Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrations, dispatching field representatives from time to time and working with a tea party-affiliated African American pastor, Paul barely registered in Kentuckys black communities during his first few years in office, according to the interviews.

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But that started to change after Mitt Romney won only 6 percent of the African American vote and 27 percent of the Latino vote in the 2012 presidential election, numbers that triggered alarms among party leaders. By the spring of 2013, Paul had seized on a message of broadening the Republican base, making high-profile speeches at historically black colleges as well as increasing his outreach to black community leaders and activists in Kentucky.

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Kentucky black leaders vs. Rand Paul