Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington

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      Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP

      POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

       Series Editors:

      Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

      Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

      BLACK REPUBLICANS

      AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GOP

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      Joshua D. Farrington

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      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112

      www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4852-4

       To Dad

      CONTENTS

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       Introduction

       Chapter 1. Farewell to the Party of Lincoln? Black Republicans in the New Deal Era

       Chapter 2. Flirting with Republicans: Black Voters in the 1950s

       Chapter 3. Bit by Bit: Civil Rights and the Eisenhower Administration

       Chapter 4. Ye Cannot Serve Both God and Mammon: The 1960 Presidential Election

       Chapter 5. Somebody Had to Stay and Fight: Black Republicans and the Rise of the Right

       Chapter 6. Fighting the Enemy Within: Black Republicans in the Wake of Goldwater

       Chapter 7. A Piece of the Action: Black Capitalism and the Nixon Administration

       Chapter 8. Not a Silent Minority: Black Republicans in the 1970s

       Epilogue

       Archival Sources and Abbreviations

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      We Negro-Americans, sing with all Americans …

      Let freedom ring—From every mountain side, let

      freedom ring! Not only from the Green Mountains

      and White Mountains of Vermont and New

      Hampshire; Not only from the Catskills of New

      York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the

      Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Great Smokies

      of Tennessee, and from the Blue Ridge Mountains

      of Virginia … may the Republican Party, under

      God, from every mountain side, Let Freedom Ring!”

      —Archibald Carey, Jr., Floor Speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention

      BLACK REPUBLICANS

      AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GOP

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      Introduction

      In 1986, the Republican Party of Memphis, Tennessee, sent a form letter to residents of the city’s African American neighborhoods promising to bring “economic growth” through tax cuts. Included among the recipients was Roberta Church, who once served on Tennessee’s Republican State Executive Committee, held influential positions in the administrations of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and was the daughter of Robert Church, one of the most powerful black Republicans of the twentieth century. Scrawling her response on the back of the envelope, the third generation black Republican found it “very ironic” that the Republican Party of Memphis—a party that her father had single-handedly built decades earlier—had become a lily-white haven whose only effort to reach out to African Americans came via a generic letter tone-deaf to the needs of her community. She then lamented that “since the passing of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, and Nelson Rockefeller who tried to have the party live up to its founding principles,” the party had become home to the conservative “Goldwater wing,” advocating policies that had little room for moderates like herself.1

      Most black Republican activists who joined Roberta Church inside the Grand Old Party (GOP) would no doubt have echoed her reply. These men and women spent decades of their lives fighting from within the Republican Party for civil rights and “first-class citizenship.” During these transformative decades of the mid-twentieth century, black Republicans forged an alliance with white liberals and moderates in their party, and were constant lobbyists for a proactive civil rights agenda at the national, state, and municipal levels. They were spokesmen for their communities, untiring advocates for civil rights, and voices of conscience inside the party. While the GOP’s relationship with African Americans changed dramatically from the New Deal to the 1970s, the many black Republicans who remained inside the party actively engaged in the struggle for civil rights in areas such as fair employment, housing, voting, and desegregation of schools and public accommodations. This book tells their story.

      A 1973 survey of black Republican leaders in Chicago offers a particularly illuminating picture. The study found a “high incidence of participation in the civil rights movement,” including “active involvement in protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins.” One of the Republicans sampled, Genoa Washington, was a current state representative and had previously served as president of the Chicago branch of


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