Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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since it lost the Negro vote.” He then delivered the best remembered verses of his long career—lines that scholars later argued directly influenced Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The cadence of his poetic words echoed through Chicago’s International Amphitheater as he proclaimed, “some will say, ‘The time is not ripe,’” but “we Negro-Americans, sing with all Americans … Let freedom ring!” His voice grew louder with each phrase:
That’s exactly what we mean, from every mountain side, let freedom ring! Not only from the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of 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!4
Carey had powerfully laid out the black Republican vision of civil rights. When looking at American politics, he saw the Democratic Party not as the party of the working man, but as the party of the Jim Crow South. Though the GOP was admittedly not perfect, as Burton’s fight for an FEPC plank demonstrated, to Carey it still offered a preferable alternative. His primary focus was the eradication of legal barriers against African Americans, believing that, once guaranteed equal opportunity, they would enter a color-blind society where they would succeed on their individual merits. These principles were shared not only by much of the GOP’s Eastern Establishment, but also by civil rights activists like King, who dreamed of the day when African Americans would be judged “by the content of their character.” While the New Deal-inflected activism of many black leaders was absent in Carey’s message, which hoped to rally black voters behind a collective desire for civil rights, not economic policies benefiting the poor, his demands for “freedom”—essentially, the eradication of state-sanctioned discrimination—were shared by civil rights leaders across partisan lines. In the words of the president of a Texas NAACP branch, Carey “left no doubt in the minds of the Republican Party, the Democrats, the Americans, [and] the World as to what the American Negro wants.”5
Winning the nomination with delegates from the East and West coasts, and the progressive midwestern states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, Eisenhower solidified his relationship with the Eastern Establishment. In an appeal to the party’s broader base, he selected California Senator Richard Nixon, one of the country’s most rabid anti-Communists, as his vice presidential nominee. Despite his ruthless attacks on alleged Communists, the ever-calculating Nixon had carefully maintained a close relationship with influential party liberals, and generally supported most civil rights legislation in Congress. California’s largest black newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, had endorsed him in his 1950 Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Linking civil rights to the Cold War, Nixon believed that “we must be vigilant against the doctrines of [segregationists] … who are just as dangerous to the preservation of the American way of life on the one hand as are the Communists on the other.” In many ways, Nixon and Eisenhower were similar in that they maintained close relations with eastern party leaders and supported moderate civil rights measures, though issues of black equality were never at the forefront of either’s agenda.6
For their part, Democrats nominated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, after President Truman declined to run for a second term. Like Eisenhower, Stevenson argued that fair-employment legislation should be left to the states, but was open to a federal law if states failed to act. Fearing another Dixiecrat revolt, the Democratic convention passed a weakened civil rights plank to appease southerners. Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell called the plank “virtually nothing,” and labeled Chicago’s black Congressman, William Dawson, an “Uncle Tom” for helping write it. Stevenson’s most blatant appeal to Dixiecrats was the selection of Alabama Senator John Sparkman as his running mate. Though one of the South’s more moderate politicians, Sparkman supported segregation, once declaring, “I am against the Civil Rights proposals—always have been and always will be.”7
Recognizing an easy target, Republicans were quick to attack Sparkman’s nomination. One advisor called for the party to demand that Stevenson “again and again … repudiate Senator Sparkman, whose views on the Negro and civil rights represent a point of extreme vulnerability for the Democrats.” Another strategist urged the campaign to “tie Sparkman completely around Stevenson’s neck with the ‘White Supremacy’ label.” Thomas Dewey did just that, publicly asserting, “so long as Senator Sparkman is on that ticket, this is a Jim Crow ticket.” Republican advertisements in black newspapers featured the slogans, “Jim Crow Sparkman Would Be One Heartbeat from the White House” and “He Never Voted for You—Why Should You Vote for Him?”8
The anti-Sparkman theme was also hammered home in campaign speeches by Carey. The RNC Minorities Division, headed by Val Washington of the Chicago Defender, organized Carey’s itinerary, making him one of the most active African Americans on the campaign trail for either party. By November, he had traveled over twenty thousand miles, with appearances in fourteen states. In Denver he was greeted with a “torchlight parade,” and introduced by the governor before speaking to listeners on one of the state’s largest radio stations. He also met privately with Eisenhower, who reassured him that he supported military integration “one hundred percent,” and was “immensely sorry” for bowing to the “pressures of war” when he testified against it. The general further told Carey that he would consider signing a federal FEPC law if it was passed by Congress, and pledged commitment to “full freedom” for African Americans. During the final days of the campaign, Carey again met with Eisenhower, and the two traveled together from New York to Chicago, where they rode in an open car through black neighborhoods and placed a wreath on a monument honoring black soldiers. On the night of November 3, the two appeared together on a national television broadcast, where Carey delivered excerpts from his fiery convention speech.9
Val Washington also placed E. Frederic Morrow on Eisenhower’s staff. Morrow had previously served twelve years as an NAACP field secretary, where he was twice almost murdered during his investigations of lynchings. He had also led the effort to integrate the New Jersey Young Republicans, after a series of petitions to state GOP leaders, becoming one of the organization’s first black members and eventually its vice chairman. In 1952, he was approached by Washington, who wanted “strong, able Blacks” with proven militancy “in every echelon of the party structure during the campaign,” so that they could “influence the leaders of the party and liberalize their thinking.” Morrow accepted Washington’s offer and was assigned by Eisenhower’s staff to the official campaign train. Just ten days after being hired, he refused to ride the train “for token purposes” in “strategic areas,” and threatened to quit unless he was used as more than just a stage prop. He was soon reassigned duties on the train as a speechwriter and drafted responses for the campaign’s “Truth Squad.” At a campaign stop in Morrow’s home town of Hackensack, New Jersey, Eisenhower defended his aide after a group of local officials complained that his critiques of party leaders caused them “great embarrassment.” According to Morrow, Eisenhower “gave them hell for intruding into his personal bailiwick,” and during his public remarks mentioned Morrow by name and praised his service to the party.10
Eisenhower received the endorsement of some of the country’s most prominent African Americans. Edward G. Brown’s National Negro Council returned to GOP ranks and denounced the Stevenson-Sparkman ticket as “a Democrat-Dixiecrat coalition.” Bishop D. Ward Nichols, head of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which at the time represented 1.6 million African Americans, told the press that he would “vigorously support” Eisenhower, after he privately promised to “take immediate steps” to desegregate Washington, D.C. Leading clubwomen also endorsed the Republican nominee, such as Jane Morrow Spaulding of the National Association of Colored Women, who served as cochair of the advisory committee of the Women’s Division of Citizens for Eisenhower. Daisy Lampkin, national NAACP board member and cofounder of the National Council of Negro Women, left the Democratic Party to join the Republican campaign, declaring it “impossible … as a self-respecting American and an intelligent Negro” to support a ticket that included Sparkman.11
Privately, Lampkin feared that her Democratic colleagues in the NAACP, particularly Walter