Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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saw a considerable degree of black ticket splitting. African Americans in Cleveland, a city that gave Roosevelt some of his highest percentages of black support in 1932 and 1936, cast the majority of their votes for Republican candidates for senator, governor, and mayor in 1938 and 1939. African Americans similarly remained key supporters of local Republican machines in the GOP strongholds of Philadelphia and Seattle. In Kentucky, black voters were essential to the election of Republican governor Simeon Willis in 1943, and continued to vote overwhelmingly for the state’s Republican candidates through the rest of the decade. So crucial were black voters to GOP success that party officials in Louisville formed a Negro Personnel Committee to guarantee black patronage.34
The Black-and-Tan organizations of Memphis and Atlanta continued to thrive in the 1940s. George W. Lee formed a political relationship with Representative B. Carroll Reece of eastern Tennessee, who voted for laws that guaranteed fair federal employment, banned lynching, and outlawed the poll tax. Benjamin Hooks, the future national executive director of the NAACP, recalled that “it was not difficult for me to join up with the Republican Party” on returning to Memphis after graduating from law school in 1948, and he partnered with Lee in organizing black voters. Vernon Jordan, who later became president of the National Urban League, recalled a similar story regarding his upbringing in Atlanta. As an eighth grader in 1948, Jordan attended a local Republican meeting led by a white lawyer, Elbert Tuttle, who later became one of the most important enforcers of civil rights on the federal bench. Accompanying Tuttle in the party’s leadership were African Americans William Shaw, John Wesley Dobbs, and John H. Calhoun. The meeting had a profound impact on Jordan, who later remarked with pride that “Blacks played an active participatory role in the Republican Party in Georgia, and I have never forgotten that my first political meeting was an integrated occasion.” In 1949, Dobbs and Calhoun partnered with black Democrats to form the Atlanta Negro Voters League, which spearheaded one of the most successful voter registration drives in the South. Though nominally bipartisan, the organization was practically an extension of the city’s Republican establishment through the 1950s.35
Even in Roosevelt’s 1936 sweep, nearly one-third of the black state legislators elected were Republican. Black Republican politicians in the New Deal era often found success in states that were evenly divided between the two parties. As such, both Democrats and Republicans had the incentive to slate African Americans in competitive elections, and to make sincere efforts to court black voters. Additionally, freed from the national politics of the New Deal, black Republican politicians, such as state legislators E. Washington Rhodes of Pennsylvania and J. Mercer Burrell of New Jersey, emphasized a civil rights agenda favored by most African Americans. In 1943, Francis Rivers ran on a joint Republican and American Labor Party ticket for a county-wide judicial position on the New York City Civil Court. Winning the majority of the black vote, he won the post, which he retained through the 1950s. At the time, it was the highest judicial post held by an African American, and the best paid position of any black public official in the country. Even communist organizer Benjamin Davis, Jr., son of Atlanta’s Black-and-Tan leader, called Rivers’s election part of the “high-water mark” of the city’s “progressive coalition.” Elsewhere, Lawrence O. Payne, editor of Ohio’s largest black newspaper, the Call and Post, was elected to multiple terms on the Cleveland City Council from 1929 through the 1930s, and was succeeded by his protégé William O. Walker, who represented African Americans on the city council through the 1940s.36
As fierce advocates of racial equality, Depression-era black Republican politicians led their states in passing meaningful civil rights legislation. After winning his 1934 bid for the state legislature, Philadelphia’s Hobson Reynolds spearheaded the passage of the Pennsylvania Civil Rights Act of 1935, which banned discrimination in places of public accommodation. Cleveland attorney Chester K. Gillespie, who also served as president of the city’s NAACP, represented black voters in Ohio’s House of Representatives from 1933 to 1944, where he sponsored legislation that ended discrimination at Ohio State University and combated discrimination in state employment. Similarly, Richard McClain, a black dentist from Cincinnati, sponsored a 1935 bill that banned discrimination in employment in publicly contracted jobs.37
In the Midwest, Indianapolis NAACP attorney Robert Lee Brokenburr became Indiana’s first black state senator, an office he held from 1940 to 1964. In the 1940s, he sponsored legislation that established a fair employment commission, banned discrimination in public accommodations and education, and prohibited race-based hate speech. Two additional black Republicans, William Fortune and Wilbur Grant, joined Brokenburr in the state legislature as the decade progressed, where they sponsored bills prohibiting segregation in all public schools and colleges. Republican Charles Jenkins represented black Chicagoans in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1930 to 1955, and coordinated with the NAACP to secure passage of fair employment legislation, amend riot laws to provide financial assistance to black victims of white mobs, and prohibit state funding of racially segregated schools.38
Even black Republicans in segregated Kentucky saw electoral success. In 1935, Charles W. Anderson, who had previously headed Louisville’s NAACP, became the first African American to serve in the legislature of a southern state since Reconstruction. During his eleven-year tenure in the General Assembly, he successfully fought to expand educational opportunities by desegregating the state’s graduate and nursing schools. His successor, Jesse Lawrence, helped pass additional legislation that further desegregated higher education in the state. In 1945, Eugene Clayton won his race for a seat on Louisville’s Board of Aldermen, making him the first African American elected to a city council in the South since Reconstruction. Oneth M. Travis, a member of Kentucky’s Republican State Central Committee from Lexington, and the first African American appointed to the State Board of Education, similarly used his position to narrow the salary gap between black and white teachers.39
As the nation headed toward World War II and slowly emerged from years of economic crisis, one of the primary goals of the Republican Party in the 1940 presidential election was to win back African Americans. Their nominee, Wendell Willkie, represented the party’s burgeoning Eastern Establishment that would rise to power throughout the decade. Centered in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, and bolstered by moderate Republicans in other states with large African American populations, the Eastern Establishment sought to restore the GOP’s progressive legacy and wrest control of the party from midwestern and western conservatives. Willing to support moderate government activism in economic policies, its leaders, including Willkie, also sought to win back African American voters through endorsing civil rights. Since the 1920s, Willkie had publicly fought against the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in his home state of Indiana, served as a trustee of the Hampton Institute, a historically black university, and supported the National Urban League. In a campaign speech at the NAACP’s annual convention, an appearance that was itself groundbreaking, he employed the rhetoric of the country’s most militant activists, declaring, “When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes of our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.” After his death four years later, the NAACP named its renovated headquarters the Wendell Willkie Memorial Building.40
Prior to the election, the Republican Program Committee commissioned Howard University political scientist Ralph Bunche to write a report detailing how the GOP could regain black voters. Bunche argued that while the New Deal “has fallen far short of meeting adequately the minimal needs of the Negro,” Republicans must formulate their own “constructive program for the economic and political betterment” of African Americans. Largely ignoring Bunche’s suggestion on economic policy, black Republicans continued to argue that African Americans wanted, first and foremost, the eradication of legalized discrimination. Appearing before the Committee on Resolutions at the 1940 Republican National Convention, Robert Church was quiet on economic issues, but demanded that the party make efforts to eliminate black disfranchisement in the South and enact legislation banning segregation. Written by Francis Rivers, the “Negro plank” of the party platform was one of the strongest ever approved, pledging Republican support to end “discrimination in the civil service, the army, navy, and all other branches of the Government.” On the subject of economics, however, the plank was less specific, simply claiming that African Americans “shall be given a square deal in the economic and political life of this nation.”41