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

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      Introduction

      In 1986, the Republican Party of Memphis, Tennessee, sent a form letter to residents of the city’s African American neighborhoods promising to bring “economic growth” through tax cuts. Included among the recipients was Roberta Church, who once served on Tennessee’s 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 Memphis—a party that her father had single-handedly built decades earlier—had 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.¹

      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 СКАЧАТЬ