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