Farewell to the Party of Lincoln? Black Republicans in the New Deal Era

      Frederick Douglass’s well-known adage that “the Republican Party is the deck, all else is the sea” reflects the significance of the Party of Abraham Lincoln to black politics for more than five decades after the Civil War. Even by the 1930s, when the Grand Old Party lost millions of black voters to Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, many African Americans still lingered on the GOP deck. Far from being an aberration in black communities during the 1930s and 1940s, Republicans remained deeply entrenched in the African American political landscape, leading southern “Black-and-Tan” organizations, running competitive campaigns in municipal and state elections, and lobbying for civil rights. As politicians, black Republican officials like Kentucky’s Charles W. Anderson and Chicago’s Archibald Carey, Jr., sponsored, and sometimes secured, passage of groundbreaking state and local civil rights legislation. Others, such as Robert Church, Jr., and Grant Reynolds, partnered with A. Philip Randolph and other independent black leaders in protest against racial discrimination. Though they were not members of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, black Republicans remained integral figures inside communities across the nation, and their emphasis on eliminating Jim Crow and other blatant forms of institutional racism remained popular with their allies in the black middle class.¹

      In the Reconstruction years that followed the Civil War and the end of slavery, black Republican voters and politicians became fixtures of southern politics. During these transformative years of the late 1860s and 1870s, approximately 2,000 African Americans held public offices that ranged from county administrators to senators. Black Republican P. B. S. Pinchback served as governor of Louisiana, and U.S. senators Blanche Bruce and Hiram Revels represented Mississippi. Over half the politicians elected in South Carolina between 1867 and 1876 were black, including Representative Joseph Rainey and Senator Robert Smalls, who were joined in Washington, D.C., by African Americans representing southern states spanning from Virginia through the Deep South. These politicians, on both the federal and state levels, played instrumental roles in the passage of the south’s and the nation’s first civil rights laws and progressive reforms in education, orphanages, asylums, and economic development.²

      Black Republicans were also the targets of systematic violence at the hands of ex-Confederates intent on restoring white supremacy in the upended South. In 1873, an estimated one hundred and fifty African Americans were killed by a mob of white Democrats in Colfax, Louisiana, following a contested election. Similar massacres occurred across the South from New Orleans to Wilmington, North Carolina, through the end of the century. Terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan served as Democratic proxies bent on ridding the South of black voters and their white Republican allies. By the 1890s, their campaign of violence and intimidation had paid off, as Democratic politicians swept into state offices, where they rolled back voting rights, instituted racial segregation, and turned a blind eye to murderous lynch mobs resolved to keep African Americans “in their place” of inferiority. This racially oppressive Jim Crow South, built and preserved by Democrats, would remain the defining characteristic of southern politics, society, and culture for the next half century.³

      In the face of Democratic resurgence, the national Republican Party abandoned the South, and shifted its focus to northern businessmen and to industrial development. Despite this betrayal, the GOP remained one of the nation’s only institutions for black political advancement. In the South, where many African Americans could not even vote, black elites still controlled the skeletal remains of Republican parties in many states throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Among their primary roles was that of patronage dispenser during the administrations of the Republican presidents who governed all but eight years from 1897 to 1933. “Black-and-Tan” organizations, a name given to southern Republican parties by Democrats, supported the northeastern wing of the party as delegates to national conventions, and in return were rewarded with financial assistance and political appointments. They were often responsible for recommending federal marshals, attorneys, and judges in their respective states, and were even privately treated with deference by Democrats seeking federal jobs.⁴

      While the influence of black Republicans within southern politics was limited to patronage, they had a modicum of power inside the national party infrastructure. As residents of rural states that elected few Republicans to national office, they held disproportionate representation within the Republican National Committee (RNC). According to GOP rules, regardless of population, each state was allotted two members on the committee, who set the party’s agenda by planning the national convention, allocating state delegates, and running the party nominee’s presidential campaign. As state representatives within the GOP infrastructure, some black southerners had connections that extended deep into the halls of Washington, D.C., and were among the few African Americans of the early twentieth century with the ability to leverage white politicians for a share of spoils and patronage. Though a nation shrouded in discrimination forced many Black-and-Tans to adopt a public stance that did not openly challenge white supremacy, members wheeled-and-dealed behind the scenes for piecemeal benefits on behalf of their communities.⁵

      In Georgia, for example, Henry Lincoln Johnson and Benjamin J. Davis, Sr., controlled the allotment of federal patronage from the 1910s through the 1930s. Davis represented the state as a delegate to every Republican National Convention from 1908 until his death in 1945, and served as one of Georgia’s two members on the national committee and as secretary of Georgia’s Republican Executive Committee. Other African Americans in high-ranking positions included William Shaw, secretary of the Georgia Republican State Central Committee, and national committeewoman Mamie Williams. Supported by Atlanta’s large population of middle-class African Americans, Georgia’s Black-and-Tan leadership was among the most active in the South. Davis and Shaw made the black vote an important factor in Atlanta’s municipal elections through intensive registration drives, and Davis, a founding member of the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and an occasional member of the Platform Committee, successfully pressed the national party to include anti-lynching legislation on party platforms.⁶

      African Americans in other southern states possessed similar positions of influence within GOP ranks. Little Rock attorney Scipio Jones controlled federal patronage in Arkansas for almost three decades, and served as a delegate to national conventions into the 1940s. In South Carolina, N. J. Frederick served as Richland County (Columbia) commissioner and as a delegate to national conventions throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As secretary of the Republican State Central Committee and secretary