Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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voters in the North had already begun the process of realignment toward more sympathetic Democratic politicians.16
The national Democratic Party, however, was not a welcoming alternative, as it still had a large southern bloc and made few efforts to court African Americans. There were no black delegates at the 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston, and black attendants were segregated behind humiliating chicken wire. By contrast, forty-nine black delegates attended the Republican convention in Kansas City, though the party’s nominee was not much of an improvement over his lackluster predecessors. Herbert Hoover, a former U.S. secretary of commerce with few black contacts in his home state of Iowa, ignored black Republicans like Robert Church and instead courted southern Lily-Whites in order to secure his nomination. His supporters deleted phrasing from the platform that condemned Lily-White discrimination against Black-and-Tans, and a former Klansman was named his southern campaign manager.17
In spite of Hoover’s nomination, many black Republicans remained loyal to the party. Robert Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier and Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press served as publicity directors of the RNC Colored Voters Division, and Nannie Burroughs and Daisy Lampkin of the National Association of Colored Women mobilized on behalf of the Women’s Division. Some joined Robert Church in vocally criticizing Hoover’s nomination. Near the end of the campaign, in response to growing fears of black desertion, Hoover met with Church, and promised that his administration would respect southern Black-and-Tan leadership. Church subsequently purchased a full page ad in the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s most widely circulated black newspapers, where he reluctantly endorsed Hoover. Though he was “not satisfied with some of Mr. Hoover’s [Lily-White] company,” Church argued that Al Smith, the Democratic nominee, would be politically indebted to white southerners despite his northern, progressive background, concluding, “the Republican Party offers us little. The Democratic Party offers us nothing.”18
Following Church’s endorsement, nineteen of the twenty-five largest black newspapers that had previously supported Smith changed their endorsements to Hoover. Though Smith made inroads within the black electorate in northern cities on election day, Hoover retained the majority of black voters. His political debt to African Americans, however, was overshadowed by victories in the upper and border South driven by record-setting white support. Though these southern gains were due in large part to anti-Catholic sentiment against his opponent, Hoover’s southern success further enticed him to pursue policies that expanded his Lily-White base.19
Disregarding his campaign promise to Church, Hoover stripped many Black-and-Tans of patronage influence by doling out federal appointments to their Lily-White opponents. He sat idly by as Lily-Whites launched campaigns to unseat Black-and-Tans in Louisiana and Texas, and personally requested that the Republican Party of Georgia dismiss Benjamin Davis, Sr., because it “humiliated” whites to go through him for federal jobs. Cloaking himself in the mantle of reform, Hoover promised to end “corruption” in southern Republican parties and to replace current (black) leadership with the “highest type” of citizen. “It is time for the cream to rise to the top,” he declared in a thinly veiled allusion to Lily-White ascendance.20
Hoover’s most obvious gesture to white southerners was the Supreme Court nomination of a Lily-White Republican from North Carolina, John J. Parker, who once claimed, “participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil.” As a result of coordinated pressure from the NAACP and labor unions, the Senate rejected the nomination in what turned out to be a major turning point in black politics. At the time, it was the largest demonstration yet of black political independence, and in the following midterm elections black voters helped defeat pro-Parker Republican senators in Kansas and Ohio.21
Leading up to Hoover’s 1932 reelection campaign, most black Republican leaders continued to give him begrudged support, but rank-and-file black voters were growing increasingly weary of the party. In addition to his support of Lily-Whites, Hoover failed to provide meaningful relief for Americans at the outbreak of the Great Depression, an economic disaster that especially devastated black workers. Many African Americans agreed with Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert Vann, who famously wrote that it was time to “turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall,” as the Democratic presidential nominee, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, emerged as a viable candidate. While cautious not to offend white southerners by endorsing racial equality, Roosevelt pledged federal action to combat the Depression and promised African Americans “as full a measure of citizenship in every detail of my administrative power, as accorded citizens of any other race or group.” Hoover still won the majority of black voters on election day, but Roosevelt made considerable inroads among African Americans in northern cities. The tide was turning among black voters.22
Although President Roosevelt did not pursue a civil rights agenda, his New Deal provided impoverished black families with tangible benefits. By the spring of 1935, more than 20 percent of African Americans were on welfare provided by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. In major cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, more than 40 percent of African Americans received some form of federal relief, and the Works Progress Administration alone provided over one million African Americans with jobs. Its educational programs taught more than one million African Americans how to read, and other agencies poured millions of dollars into improving schools and public housing utilized by black families. Roosevelt also far outpaced his Republican predecessors in terms of black appointments, and named a number of white racial liberals to powerful cabinet posts. His wife, Eleanor, publicly identified with the struggles and aspirations of African Americans, and provided an unprecedented ally in the White House. And though the New Deal was rife with blatant discrimination—some of which enshrined structural racism into federal policy and widened the economic gap between whites and blacks for decades to come—still, to many poor African Americans, discriminatory relief was better than none at all.23
As members of the party out of power, black Republicans could no longer provide African Americans with patronage or access to the federal government, a fact that undermined their ability to court new voters. Black-and-Tans in the South focused much of their attention in the 1930s and 1940s on combating Lily-Whites for representation in the RNC and at national conventions, goals far removed from the Depression-era concerns of impoverished African Americans. Old Guard black Republicans who had been active for decades relied on outdated rhetoric that had little appeal to new generations of black voters. Roscoe Conkling Simmons, for example, told a crowd of African Americans during a 1930 congressional campaign, “If I had one word to the Negro in Chicago, it would be patience.” This message failed to resonate with an increasingly assertive and politically aware black electorate. Similarly, though Congressman Oscar DePriest was the darling of black Chicago for three terms, he lost community support when he opposed New Deal legislation, and in 1934 narrowly lost his seat to a man who himself had been a Republican just four years earlier, Arthur Mitchell, the first African American Democrat elected to Congress.24
Like many black elites, DePriest embraced Booker T. Washington’s message of individual responsibility and racial uplift through self-help. Just as self-sufficiency was one’s personal duty, so too was it the responsibility of African Americans to collectively advance through racial solidarity and self-determination, not external reliance on “the dole system,” as he described government assistance. To this end, DePriest opposed New Deal “handouts,” but supported community-driven responses to the Great Depression. For instance, he mobilized the Third Ward Republican organization to provide 65,000 meals in the winter of 1930–1931, and picketed the Sopkin Apron factory alongside workers who demanded better wages and improved conditions. While opposing federal intervention in the economy, DePriest did believe it was the government’s responsibility to protect civil rights. Unlike his Democratic successor in Congress, who rarely rocked the boat on issues of racial equality, DePriest consistently supported anti-lynching legislation and the integration of public facilities. He also wrote, and secured passage of, an anti-discrimination amendment that applied to the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the New Deal’s largest programs.25
To many black Republicans like DePriest, the New Deal was a step backward for racial progress. Grant Reynolds, one of the most active black Republicans of the mid-twentieth