Farrington Joshua D. - Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP

Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

Series Editors:

Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levelslocal, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

BLACK REPUBLICANS

AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GOP

Joshua D. Farrington

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191044112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-4852-4

To Dad

CONTENTS

We Negro-Americans, sing with all Americans

Let freedom ringFrom every mountain side, let

freedom ring! Not only from the Green Mountains

and White Mountains of Vermont and New

Hampshire; Not only from the Catskills of New

York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the

Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Great Smokies

of Tennessee, and from the Blue Ridge Mountains

of Virginia may the Republican Party, under

God, from every mountain side, Let Freedom Ring!

Archibald Carey, Jr., Floor Speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention

BLACK REPUBLICANS

AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GOP

Introduction

In 1986, the Republican Party of Memphis, Tennessee, sent a form letter to residents of the citys African American neighborhoods promising to bring economic growth through tax cuts. Included among the recipients was Roberta Church, who once served on Tennessees Republican State Executive Committee, held influential positions in the administrations of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and was the daughter of Robert Church, one of the most powerful black Republicans of the twentieth century. Scrawling her response on the back of the envelope, the third generation black Republican found it very ironic that the Republican Party of Memphisa party that her father had single-handedly built decades earlierhad become a lily-white haven whose only effort to reach out to African Americans came via a generic letter tone-deaf to the needs of her community. She then lamented that since the passing of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, and Nelson Rockefeller who tried to have the party live up to its founding principles, the party had become home to the conservative Goldwater wing, advocating policies that had little room for moderates like herself.

Most black Republican activists who joined Roberta Church inside the Grand Old Party (GOP) would no doubt have echoed her reply. These men and women spent decades of their lives fighting from within the Republican Party for civil rights and first-class citizenship. During these transformative decades of the mid-twentieth century, black Republicans forged an alliance with white liberals and moderates in their party, and were constant lobbyists for a proactive civil rights agenda at the national, state, and municipal levels. They were spokesmen for their communities, untiring advocates for civil rights, and voices of conscience inside the party. While the GOPs relationship with African Americans changed dramatically from the New Deal to the 1970s, the many black Republicans who remained inside the party actively engaged in the struggle for civil rights in areas such as fair employment, housing, voting, and desegregation of schools and public accommodations. This book tells their story.

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 partys 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 peersincluding Democratsfor 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 citys 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 NAACPs 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.

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

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. 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 centurys 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.