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

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СКАЧАТЬ 1944 booklet touting the civil rights records of liberal Republican governors. During an August meeting in New York, the RAC issued another “Declaration to the Republican Party,” demanding that the GOP’s congressmen fulfill the FEPC pledge they made in their 1944 platform. Over the next two years, RAC members continued to promote the declaration to the national committee and Republican politicians as part of an intense lobbying campaign for federal and state FEPC legislation.⁴⁸

      By the mid-1940s, the passage of a federal fair employment law had become one of the primary objectives of black Republicans and the broader civil rights leadership. In addition to leading the RAC, Church partnered with A. Philip Randolph to form the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. Despite their differences on economic policy, Randolph recognized that Church “was a persona grata in the offices of Republican leaders of place and power … there was no other person of color in the country who could reach as many outstanding Republican spokesmen of power as he could.” Working closely with NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, Jr., Church canvassed the halls of Congress, sometimes waiting up to five hours in politicians’ offices. He touted fair employment as a potential Republican alternative to the New Deal, one that would open jobs to African Americans in places where they were previously barred and help them get off government relief and instead earn for themselves. In private letters to Republican leaders, Church argued, “FEPC is bread and butter, rent and fuel and clothing for millions of colored voters.” Though Church’s argument swayed some congressional Republicans to support an FEPC law, it failed to convince Ohio Senator Robert Taft to place fair employment above the “rights” of businesses. And as the leader of midwestern and conservative Republicans, Taft’s opposition ensured the failure of any FEPC legislation in Congress through the decade.⁴⁹

      Though unsuccessful in Washington, D.C., black Republicans saw a groundswell of fair employment legislation on the state level. Nearly all of the eleven states that passed FEPC laws between 1945 and 1951 were controlled by Republican governors or Republican legislatures. Eight of the eleven victories were pushed through by both a Republican governor and legislature in states from New England to the Pacific Northwest. Republicans also sponsored municipal fair employment ordinances, such as Cleveland’s extensive 1950 law that covered both public and private-sector jobs. Most of the FEPC measures passed during this period were modeled after New York’s Ives-Quinn bill. Signed into law by Governor Dewey on March 12, 1945, the bill was promoted by powerful liberal Republicans Fiorello La Guardia and Irving Ives. It banned racial discrimination in employment and created a commission to investigate claims. Within a year after its passage, rail companies eliminated “colored only” sections on trains, unions eradicated white-only clauses, and many businesses hired their first black employees. Within two years, the number of black women employed in clerical and sales jobs more than quadrupled.⁵⁰

      Many black voters were drawn to pro-FEPC Republicans on the state level, and leading up to the 1946 midterm elections the RAC focused on promoting candidates who supported fair employment. The elections bore fruit: black voters played an essential role in the victories of liberal Republican senators and congressmen in Missouri, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago. In Kentucky, Senator John Sherman Cooper and Congressman Thruston Morton received an estimated 90 percent of the black vote, and black Republican Dennis Henderson was elected to the General Assembly. The passage of FEPC laws under Republican governors and state legislatures, coupled with the 1945 death of Roosevelt and continued disillusionment with the prominent role of white southerners in the Democratic Party, had reversed the trend of black Democratic support that had begun ten years earlier. While some black Democrats simply chose to remain at home, an estimated 15 percent nationwide switched their support to the Republican Party, which assumed control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932.⁵¹

      The 1946 elections also launched the political careers of two of the mid-century’s most important black Republicans: Grant Reynolds and Archibald Carey, Jr. As an army chaplain during World War II, Reynolds was honorably discharged after his commanding officers grew tired of his complaints against racial discrimination. His continued activism after returning home to New York drew him into activist circles, and he listed Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins among his friends. He was also an ally of Thomas Dewey, who helped pay for his education at Columbia Law School and appointed him state commissioner of corrections after he delivered a fiery 1944 campaign speech on the governor’s behalf in Madison Square Garden. In 1946, Reynolds ran against Harlem’s venerable Democratic congressman Adam Clayton Powell, campaigning on a liberal platform that called for a substantial rise in the national minimum wage, anti-poll tax legislation, a national FEPC, low-rent public housing, and an end to segregation in the military. Attacking “Parttime Powell’s” notorious absentee record, he earned the support of some of Harlem’s most recognized citizens, with boxer Joe Louis, author Zora Neale Hurston, singer-actress Etta Moten, and A. Philip Randolph’s wife working in his campaign headquarters. His supporters argued that it was important for Harlem to be represented by a Republican who would work alongside liberals in the GOP to break the stranglehold of the Democratic South on civil rights legislation.⁵²

      As Powell did in all his elections, he ran in the Republican primary, and his loss to Reynolds that spring was the only electoral defeat of his entire career. Fearing another, more catastrophic upset, Democratic stars, including Eleanor Roosevelt, rallied to Powell’s side, providing important financial support and campaign appearances. Though Harlem media advertised the race as “giant versus giant,” and Reynolds pulled some of the strongest numbers of any Republican congressional candidate in Harlem before or since, the wildly popular Powell cruised to victory on election day. The relative strength of Reynolds’s campaign, however, demonstrated to both parties the full emergence of black Republicans who were willing to challenge both parties to confront the existing racial status quo.⁵³

      Though Reynolds could not overcome the Powell juggernaut, militant black Republicans scored a major victory in Chicago with the election of Archibald Carey, Jr., to the Board of Aldermen. Fair-skinned, red-haired, and freckled, Carey came from an elite family entrenched in GOP politics, with his father serving as postmaster in Athens, Georgia, prior to becoming an advisor to Chicago mayor William Thompson. Carey, Jr., continued in his father’s partisan footsteps, believing that southern Democrats would always hold back their party when it came to civil rights. As the pastor of Chicago’s influential Woodlawn AME Church, he was also one of the country’s leading black ministers. Through Carey’s financial and institutional support, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement, was formed inside Woodlawn AME, with his personal office becoming its first headquarters. The church served as the host location of CORE’s first national convention in 1943, and the organization’s cofounder, James Farmer, described Carey as “CORE’s patron saint.” In his 1946 campaign, Carey challenged incumbent Old Guard Republican Oscar DePriest, who was elected alderman of Chicago’s Third Ward in 1943. Running on a platform that emphasized his civil rights militancy, Carey won the Republican primary and the subsequent general election against venerable Democrat Roy Washington.⁵⁴

      Carey also served stints as vice president of the Chicago NAACP during his nine-year tenure on the Board of Aldermen, where he established himself as one of the city’s most radical elected officials. He sponsored measures that expanded public housing, established the Chicago Council on Human Relations, and created a Division of Human Relations in the police department that offered courses “to teach police to protect minorities.” In 1948, he sponsored an ordinance that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing and provided housing to residents displaced by “slum clearance” programs. The “Carey Ordinance” was met with a fury of opposition by the city’s Democratic machine, with Mayor Martin Kennelly taking the floor in a board meeting for the only time of his entire term to voice opposition. Though the open housing law fell to defeat, Carey emerged, in the words of a subsequent profile in the New Republic, as one of the nation’s “most vigorous fighters” for progressive urban reform.⁵⁵

      Following his defeat by Adam Clayton Powell, Grant Reynolds set his sights on military СКАЧАТЬ