Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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with promises, “but will demand … actual performance and fulfillment of platform pledges and campaign promises.”58
Figure 2. Grant Reynolds (left) and A. Philip Randolph (right) address the Senate Armed Services Committee on behalf of the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training in 1948. LC-USZ62-128074, Library of Congress.
Entering into the 1948 presidential election, the GOP again selected two of the party’s prominent liberals, Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren, as their presidential and vice-presidential nominees. Since 1944, Dewey had burnished his reputation as the Republicans’ leading supporter of civil rights through his signing of the Ives-Quinn Act, which was the first state law to prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, and a law that banned discrimination in higher education. The Republican platform repeated many of the same civil rights promises as in 1944, but this time was silent on the issue of a national FEPC. In spite of this omission, Dewey’s record again earned him the endorsements of the majority of the country’s black newspapers.59
Throughout the fall, polls indicated a sweeping Dewey victory, prompting his campaign to avoid controversial issues, including civil rights. The NAACP lamented that “Dewey made no move to exploit his excellent record on civil rights,” in his empty, clichéd speeches. On the other hand, Truman launched an aggressive campaign to court black voters. Having already seemingly lost the Deep South following the Dixiecrat revolt at the Democratic National Convention, and facing even more dangerous opposition from the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace, Truman spent much of 1948 improving his civil rights record. In addition to his executive order desegregating the military, Truman created a Fair Employment Board to combat discrimination in the civil services, and announced his support of anti-lynch and anti-poll tax legislation. The failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a national FEPC in 1947 and 1948, combined with Dewey’s refusal to highlight his own record in the face of Truman’s vigorous campaigning, contributed to a Democratic landslide among black voters in one of the biggest upsets in presidential history. Receiving almost 80 percent of the black vote, a higher percentage than Roosevelt ever received, Truman won tight races in California, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. By ignoring the Deep South and actively courting black voters, Truman surpassed Roosevelt in pushing the national Democratic Party into identifying not only with the black economic plight but also with civil rights.60
In the spring of 1951, two figureheads of the black Republican Old Guard, Roscoe Conkling Simmons and Oscar DePriest, passed away. Ebony magazine remarked that, to many young African Americans, the two were relics of a bygone era who wooed “great masses of Negroes … like some Pied Piper into the ranks of Republicanism without doubt or question.” By the time of their deaths, not only had the ranks of black voters been radically transformed since the 1920s, but so had black Republican leadership. As a minority group in a minority party, black Republicans no longer wielded the patronage powers of their predecessors, but by 1951 black Republican leadership included Robert Church, Grant Reynolds, Archibald Carey, Jr., and scores of local politicians who were among the most vocal civil rights advocates of either party. They were central actors in the era’s civil rights battles, serving in leadership positions in the NAACP and CORE, sponsoring unprecedented legislation as elected officials, and partnering with independent activists like A. Philip Randolph to combat discrimination in employment and the military. They were also among the most vocal critics of their own party, continually prodding its leaders to embrace issues of civil rights. In a 1951 letter, Robert Church reminded Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a key figure of the Eastern Establishment, that the GOP still could surpass the Democrats on issues of black equality, writing, “The Republican Party is above all the party of Civil Rights. We can never compromise on that question.” As Republicans finally found renewed electoral success under Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership in the 1950s, and as the civil rights movement intensified, black Republicans would redouble their efforts to steer the GOP into advancing racial equality.61
CHAPTER 2
Flirting with Republicans: Black Voters in the 1950s
The return of the Republican Party to the presidency in the 1950s initiated a decade of modest resurgence in black support for the GOP. During the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, black Republicans were the beneficiaries of high-ranking federal appointments and influential positions within the party, which remained a political option for southern and middle-class blacks. By the time of the 1956 election, strategists from both parties saw cracks in the New Deal coalition, as African Americans showed signs of breaking ranks with a Democratic Party that was home to southern racists. As black journalist James Hicks wrote after a strong Republican showing in 1956, African Americans had temporarily “divorced” the Democratic Party, and “the divorcee is carrying on a flirtation with a new friend,” the GOP. Hicks’s observation about black voters in the 1950s points to the continued flexibility of black politics during a decade when their partisan affiliation had been far from solidified by the New Deal.1
Eisenhower’s moderate ideology aligned well with the Eastern Establishment, whose powerbrokers—Thomas Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Herbert Brownell, in particular—organized a “Draft Ike” movement early in 1952. Fearing that the conservative Robert Taft might win the party’s nomination, they believed the popular World War II hero was the only candidate who could win both the nomination and the general election. He promised to preserve Social Security and other New Deal programs, and openly embraced America’s new status as a world leader—positions the fiscally conservative and isolationist Taft derided as “me-tooism.” His views on civil rights, however, were initially ambiguous. Though he called for troops “without regard to color” during the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower testified in 1948 against military desegregation. During his first official press conference in the Republican primaries, he emphasized that “we must abandon segregation” and endorsed state fair employment laws, but he refused to support a national Fair Employment Practices Commission, one of the most significant policy proposals among black Republicans. Despite this stance, Eisenhower assured Brownell that if elected he “would seek to eliminate discrimination against black citizens in every area under the jurisdiction of the federal government.”2
Prior to the Republican National Convention, Eisenhower’s nomination was not yet guaranteed, and he privately courted Harold C. Burton, a delegate from Harlem who, in the spring of 1952, had become one of the party’s most vocal black Republicans after Robert Church, Jr., died in April. The meeting backfired as an angered Burton left, visibly upset by Eisenhower’s refusal to support an FEPC plank on the party’s platform. At the start of the July convention, Burton and another African American, Charles Hill, announced they would go against the rest of New York’s delegation and oppose Eisenhower unless the party enacted a pro-FEPC plank. As Burton hoped, his defection was widely reported in the national media, and was a front page story in black newspapers. Seeking to avoid further embarrassment and negative attention, Eisenhower again met with Burton, and promised to “use my influence, if I am elected President, to see that the Negro and every other citizen of America get their rights.” While not explicitly endorsing a federal FEPC, the final GOP platform promised to enact “Federal legislation to further just and equitable treatment in the area of discriminatory employment practices.” Though not completely satisfied, Burton agreed to support Eisenhower, believing “those who would surround” him as president would be “liberal.”3
With the convention held in Chicago, Illinois Republicans saw to it that their most important black ally, alderman Archibald Carey, Jr., was granted time for a floor speech. Given twenty-five uninterrupted, nationally broadcast minutes, Rev. Carey began by asserting that “the Democratic Party of late has been the party of promises…. As a Negro-American I have been sorely disappointed, and millions of freedom-loving people of every race have been disappointed with me.” While President Truman had promised to end the poll tax, enact a federal FEPC, and pass an anti-lynch law, these failed to survive a Democratic Congress. Carey continued, claiming that