Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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He was a powerbroker not only in the state capitol, but within the states’ black establishment. Black Republicans like Washington were a constant voice for black equality inside the party’s infrastructure, while also playing influential roles in civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Unlike contemporary black Republicans of the twenty-first century, many of whom have a tenuous relationship with other African American leaders, black Republicans of the mid-twentieth century were recognized by their peers—including Democrats—for their contributions to the black freedom struggle. L. K. Jackson, whom Martin Luther King, Sr., called “the Daddy of the militant civil rights movement,” was not only the leader of numerous direct action protests in Gary, Indiana, but was also one of the city’s loudest supporters of the Republican Party. Benjamin Hooks, who headed the national NAACP from 1977 to 1992, often referenced his years as a Republican civil rights activist in Memphis, and claimed that his black Republican mentors spent their lives “beating the drum for equality.” Two of the most well known black Republicans of the civil rights era, Edward W. Brooke and Jackie Robinson, joined Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and other civil rights leaders in receiving the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. The NAACP officially praised Samuel C. Jackson, one of the most powerful African Americans in the Nixon administration, for carrying “the cause of civil rights into the high echelons of the GOP.” The Congressional Black Caucus recognized his colleague in the Nixon White House, Arthur Fletcher, in 2005 as “a true pioneer in the movement for racial and socioeconomic equality.” These men, and many others, worked within their party to promote the aims of the civil rights movement.3
One would be hard pressed, however, to find substantive analysis of black Republicans in the historical literature on black politics, which has tended to portray the Democratic Party as the exclusive home of African Americans since the 1940s. Countless authors have written with an underlying assumption that black voters bid farewell to “the party of Lincoln” during the New Deal era and never looked back. Typically ignored altogether, when mentioned black Republicans have too often been dismissed as accommodationists without community support or elderly partisans clutching to hallowed memories of Abraham Lincoln. As historian Richard Walter Thomas writes, black Republicans since the 1930s have been “relegated to the dust bin of black political history.”4
Though this narrative of black partisanship remains popular in the accounts of many scholars and journalists, a number of recent studies point towards significant partisan fluidity among black voters in the midcentury U.S., and demonstrate that near monolithic black identification with the Democratic Party did not fully solidify until the 1960s.5 Black voters from the 1930s through 1960s practiced a high degree of ticket splitting, with many casting their vote for Democratic presidents but Republican gubernatorial, senate, congressional, and municipal candidates. Indeed, it was on the local level, even in communities that voted reliably Democratic in presidential elections, where black and white Republican candidates repeatedly secured electoral victories in the mid-twentieth century’s fluid political landscape. For this reason, this study takes a wide-angled view, examining Republican politics on the national, state, and local levels. As often as black Republicans may have been marginalized within the national establishment, they found powerful white allies on the state and local levels.
Deeming the political arena as the best avenue to achieve civil rights victories, black Republicans stressed that African Americans should actively work inside both parties, forcing each side to compete for the African American vote. This argument for bipartisanship (accompanied by nonpartisan independence) was well received by many within the middle class leadership of the civil rights establishment. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and other black leaders shied away from committing their allegiance to a Democratic Party still dominated by race-baiting southerners devoted to preserving white supremacy. Indeed, the Democratic Party’s primary advantage over Republicans prior to the early 1960s was its connection to the New Deal’s labor and welfare state provisions, not a stronger commitment than the GOP to civil rights. Both Republicans and Democrats had relatively equal records on civil rights, and strategies promoting black participation in both parties were commonplace throughout the civil rights era. Martin Luther King and the NAACP’s strategic stances of partisan independence would have been less effective had black voters not been willing to support state and local Republican candidates who embraced civil rights. This two-party strategy was a unifying force, connecting black Republicans to a larger network of nonpartisan activists. To black Republicans and their independent allies, the GOP offered African Americans an additional vehicle to pursue an active civil rights agenda, and provided them access to the power necessary to achieve political reform.
Their value to midcentury politics notwithstanding, black Republicans make few appearances in the plethora of books on the modern Republican Party, even those focused on issues of race. Some of these works give a great deal of attention to liberal and moderate Republican opposition to the rising tide of conservatism within the party, but the people they discuss are almost exclusively white elites.6 In the few instances where black Republicans are mentioned, they are treated as victims caught off guard by a party turned racist, or are defined by extremists who fell far to the right of the black Republican mainstream.7
Black Republican activism in the South is particularly understudied.8 So-called “Black-and-Tan” organizations, the name given by Democrats to integrated southern Republican parties with black leadership, play a prominent role in this book. African Americans held positions of power and harnessed black voters in Memphis, Louisville, Atlanta, and other cities across the South. Their activism, however, has been overlooked in contemporary studies of southern Republicanism.9 Even scholars who mention the presence of southern black Republicans tend to write them off as marginal figures stuck in Reconstruction era politics.10 Additional depictions of a Democratic “Solid South” devoid of Republicans similarly ignore Black-and-Tan organizations, and popular narratives of the “rise” of southern conservative Republicans implicitly ignore a parallel form of “Black-and-Tan” southern Republicanism characterized by its biracial leadership’s commitment to black advancement. Though mostly confined to the major cities of the urban South, Black-and-Tan leaders like Robert Church of Memphis were important figures in southern black politics, wielding power and influence in both their communities and the national GOP.
Though African Americans have largely been left out of party narratives, there have been a number of biographies of individual black Republicans that emphasize their contributions to the civil rights movement.11 Overreliance on biographies, though valuable sources, runs the risk of cordoning off black Republicans from a larger network of fellow black partisans. Additionally, a number of recent works have examined persistent strains of black social, cultural, and religious conservatism. These studies play an important role in expanding our knowledge of black political thought; however, they may serve to further obscure popular perceptions of black Republicans by focusing exclusively on the Right.12 Rather than placing mainstream black Republicans of the mid-twentieth century within a middle class consensus that existed among most African Americans of the same socioeconomic status, many writers have incorrectly used the terms “black conservative” and “black Republican” interchangeably.13 This book, on the other hand, examines the full ideological range of black Republicanism in the twentieth century, emphasizing their moderate and liberal stances on issues of social justice.
Paying particular attention to the voices and actions of black Republicans—most of whom openly objected to the ideals and strategies of the post-World War II conservative movement—this book treats them as savvy political operators who used their partisan affiliation to advance the goals of the civil rights movement. Rather than viewing black Republicans as pawns of a hopelessly lily-white party, or as out-of-touch relics, it argues that they were pragmatists who saw the potential benefits in two-party competition throughout the mid-twentieth century. From the presidential nominations of Wendell Willkie in 1940 to Richard Nixon in 1960, the Eastern Establishment dominated the party at the national level, running on platforms that rivaled or surpassed their Democratic counterparts in the field of civil rights. To black Republicans, this moderate establishment offered a viable alternative for black voters,