Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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At the 1956 national convention, the GOP touted Eisenhower’s civil rights bill, but carefully avoided endorsing Brown v. Board of Education in its platform, which instead “accepted” the court’s decision and concurred that it should be implemented with “all deliberate speed.” The rest of the platform was short on specific pledges, but provided a thorough list of Eisenhower’s modest civil rights accomplishments. E. Frederic Morrow made it his personal mission to include a black woman “who would appear on a television screen as a Negro, rather than some fair-skinned person who might be mistaken for white,” in a prime-time speaking slot. He selected Dr. Helen Edmonds, a history professor at North Carolina College, who has been described by contemporary scholar Pero Dagbovie as “arguably the most widely known black woman historian before the post-civil rights era.” Although North Carolina’s Lily-White Republican leadership warned that a television appearance by Edmonds would hurt them back home, RNC chairman Leonard Hall sided with Morrow, and agreed to give Edmonds one of the eight coveted slots to second Eisenhower’s nomination. While her boilerplate speech was not as stirring as Carey’s four years prior, her appearance as the first black woman to second the nomination of a presidential candidate had the symbolic resonance desired by Morrow and Hall.44
Though hosting an unremarkable convention, the Republicans managed to outshine Democrats on civil rights. Thirty-six black delegates attended the Republican convention, compared to twenty-four at the Democratic convention. Adlai Stevenson again received the party’s nomination, and he again selected a moderate southerner, Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver, as his running mate. Though the Republican civil rights plank was meticulously restrained regarding Brown, the Democratic plank avoided even a pledge to follow the court’s orders, simply stating that the decision had “consequences of vast importance.” Roy Wilkins criticized both platforms, but noted that the GOP’s was “a thin shade stronger than the Democratic platform.” The NAACP’s chief lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, declared, “the liberals in the Democratic party sold us out.”45
Vice President Richard Nixon stood out among the two parties’ tickets as the most vocal advocate of civil rights during the campaign. Simeon Booker, the Washington bureau chief of Jet magazine, later described the vice president as the GOP’s “civil-rights workhorse” and “Mr. Civil Rights during the Eisenhower Administration.” Nixon gained respect and publicity in black communities through his work as the head of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC), Eisenhower’s alternative to a national FEPC. The committee was created by a 1953 executive order, and was tasked with ensuring fair employment in businesses that held federal contracts. Its first noteworthy success occurred in Washington, D.C., when, as a direct result of private meetings between Nixon and city leaders, the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company desegregated its business offices and hired its first black clerical and switchboard workers. The Capital Transit Company soon followed and employed its first black bus and trolley drivers. Among other limited successes, the committee was responsible for four hundred black workers being hired at a South Carolina power plant, and for the first African Americans hired at an Esso refinery in Louisiana.46
Though the PCGC offered imperfect solutions to systemic employment discrimination, many credited Nixon with its piecemeal success. E. Frederic Morrow was “impressed” by “Nixon’s keenness of mind, deep perception of a centuries-old problem, and his apparent sincerity of purpose.” The NAACP’s Henry Lee Moon privately remarked, “If the election were held today and I had to choose between Stevenson and Nixon, I’d vote for Nixon.” However, many southern whites criticized the vice president’s newfound interest in civil rights. One journalist wrote, “generally speaking, the south does not go along with a lot of his views,” and Eisenhower’s personal friend, South Carolina Governor James Byrnes, complained bitterly of Nixon’s position on the committee. Even press secretary James Hagerty admitted that Nixon was becoming increasingly unpopular in the South because he was “connected in Southerners’ minds with the Negro difficulty.”47
Nixon embraced his role as the administration’s “civil rights workhorse” in the 1956 campaign. At a Lincoln Day speech in New York, he linked the GOP directly to Brown, proclaiming that “a great Republican Chief Justice, Earl Warren, ordered an end to racial segregation in the nation’s schools.” On April 22, he appeared before and after Commencement, a made-for-television movie about racial discrimination that aired on the NBC network. In his prime time remarks, Nixon called for an end to discrimination in private enterprise, telling viewers that fair employment made “good business, good citizenship and plain good sense.” In an October speech, he described his hope that “most of us here will live to see the day when American boys and girls shall sit, side by side, at any school—public or private—with no regard paid to the color of their skin.” Just weeks before the election, he campaigned in Harlem, and received national headlines for his attack on the Democratic Party’s southern bloc, arguing, “a political party at the national level cannot long endure or merit support when it’s half for and half against equality of treatment.”48
In denouncing the prominence of the Democratic Party’s southern wing, Nixon had tapped into increasing disillusionment among black leaders with the party of James Eastland. In addition to the failure of Eisenhower’s civil rights bill to survive the Judiciary Committee, the signing of the “Southern Manifesto” in the spring of 1956 fully revealed the commitment of southern Democrats to Jim Crow. Written primarily as a denunciation of Brown, the manifesto condemned “the Supreme Court’s encroachment on the rights reserved to the States,” and symbolized the immense weight southerners still carried inside the Democratic Party’s congressional delegation. Signed by nineteen Democratic senators and eighty-two representatives, the document drew the signatures of every southern senator except Estes Kefauver, Albert Gore, Sr., and Lyndon Johnson.49
Republicans attempted to exploit black discontent with the Democratic Party’s southern wing throughout the 1956 campaign. E. Frederic Morrow wrote in his diary that black cynicism toward Democrats “has been detected … and the results have been gratifying to me and to all of us here at the White House.” Former RNC Chairman, and staunch supporter of the Eastern Establishment, Representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania spoke on behalf of the party at the NAACP’s annual convention. Prior to his appearance, he convinced Illinois representative Leo Allen to support Eisenhower’s civil rights bill in the House Rules Committee so that he could contrast the Democrats’ four-four split with unanimous Republican support. The rift in the Democratic Party served as the central theme of Scott’s June 29 NAACP address, where he declared, “The Democratic Party is split hopelessly … its Congress is in control of the Southern Do-Naught-Crats.” He concluded with an argument that would be repeated again and again by Republicans throughout the fall: “A vote for the Democrats this year in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia is a vote for Southern Democrat control of Congress, it’s a vote for the Democrat control of the House Rules Committee where Civil Rights bills get their suffocation treatment. A vote for any Democrat in a Federal election is a vote for Eastland.”50
Former GOP congressional candidate Grant Reynolds, who joined the Liberal Party in 1950, returned to the Republican aisle out of his anger that “Eastland was made chairman of the Judiciary Committee.” Touring across the country with boxer Joe Louis, Reynolds declared, “I’m supporting the entire Republican ticket … the people who signed the Southern Manifesto were among the leaders of the Democratic Party, and I can’t see Negroes in the same party.” T. R. M. Howard, who had recently fled from Mississippi to Chicago because of death threats to his family after he condemned Emmett Till’s murder, formed Task Force ’56, an organization designed to attract black voters to the Republican Party. In speeches across the country, he exclaimed, “the hell and damnation heaped on Negroes in the south today is being heaped by southern Democrats. I cannot see how the Negro is going to be able to vote for Democrats in the north, without at the same time voting for my neighbor, Jim Eastland.” In a campaign form letter sent to black voters by the RNC’s Minorities Division, Val Washington asked, “Haven’t many of us been cutting our own throats by voting for Democrat Congressmen and Senators? What has it gotten us? Nothing but headaches, because we have been voting committee chairmanships