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

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      Figure 2. Grant Reynolds (left) and A. Philip Randolph (right) address the Senate Armed Services Committee on behalf of the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training in 1948. LC-USZ62-128074, Library of Congress.

      Entering into the 1948 presidential election, the GOP again selected two of the party’s prominent liberals, Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren, as their presidential and vice-presidential nominees. Since 1944, Dewey had burnished his reputation as the Republicans’ leading supporter of civil rights through his signing of the Ives-Quinn Act, which was the first state law to prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, and a law that banned discrimination in higher education. The Republican platform repeated many of the same civil rights promises as in 1944, but this time was silent on the issue of a national FEPC. In spite of this omission, Dewey’s record again earned him the endorsements of the majority of the country’s black newspapers.⁵⁹

      Throughout the fall, polls indicated a sweeping Dewey victory, prompting his campaign to avoid controversial issues, including civil rights. The NAACP lamented that “Dewey made no move to exploit his excellent record on civil rights,” in his empty, clichéd speeches. On the other hand, Truman launched an aggressive campaign to court black voters. Having already seemingly lost the Deep South following the Dixiecrat revolt at the Democratic National Convention, and facing even more dangerous opposition from the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace, Truman spent much of 1948 improving his civil rights record. In addition to his executive order desegregating the military, Truman created a Fair Employment Board to combat discrimination in the civil services, and announced his support of anti-lynch and anti-poll tax legislation. The failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a national FEPC in 1947 and 1948, combined with Dewey’s refusal to highlight his own record in the face of Truman’s vigorous campaigning, contributed to a Democratic landslide among black voters in one of the biggest upsets in presidential history. Receiving almost 80 percent of the black vote, a higher percentage than Roosevelt ever received, Truman won tight races in California, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. By ignoring the Deep South and actively courting black voters, Truman surpassed Roosevelt in pushing the national Democratic Party into identifying not only with the black economic plight but also with civil rights.⁶⁰

      In the spring of 1951, two figureheads of the black Republican Old Guard, Roscoe Conkling Simmons and Oscar DePriest, passed away. Ebony magazine remarked that, to many young African Americans, the two were relics of a bygone era who wooed “great masses of Negroes … like some Pied Piper into the ranks of Republicanism without doubt or question.” By the time of their deaths, not only had the ranks of black voters been radically transformed since the 1920s, but so had black Republican leadership. As a minority group in a minority party, black Republicans no longer wielded the patronage powers of their predecessors, but by 1951 black Republican leadership included Robert Church, Grant Reynolds, Archibald Carey, Jr., and scores of local politicians who were among the most vocal civil rights advocates of either party. They were central actors in the era’s civil rights battles, serving in leadership positions in the NAACP and CORE, sponsoring unprecedented legislation as elected officials, and partnering with independent activists like A. Philip Randolph to combat discrimination in employment and the military. They were also among the most vocal critics of their own party, continually prodding its leaders to embrace issues of civil rights. In a 1951 letter, Robert Church reminded Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a key figure of the Eastern Establishment, that the GOP still could surpass the Democrats on issues of black equality, writing, “The Republican Party is above all the party of Civil Rights. We can never compromise on that question.” As Republicans finally found renewed electoral success under Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership in the 1950s, and as the civil rights movement intensified, black Republicans would redouble their efforts to steer the GOP into advancing racial equality.⁶¹

      CHAPTER 2

      Flirting with Republicans: Black Voters in the 1950s

      The return of the Republican Party to the presidency in the 1950s initiated a decade of modest resurgence in black support for the GOP. During the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, black Republicans were the beneficiaries of high-ranking federal appointments and influential positions within the party, which remained a political option for southern and middle-class blacks. By the time of the 1956 election, strategists from both parties saw cracks in the New Deal coalition, as African Americans showed signs of breaking ranks with a Democratic Party that was home to southern racists. As black journalist James Hicks wrote after a strong Republican showing in 1956, African Americans had temporarily “divorced” the Democratic Party, and “the divorcee is carrying on a flirtation with a new friend,” the GOP. Hicks’s observation about black voters in the 1950s points to the continued flexibility of black politics during a decade when their partisan affiliation had been far from solidified by the New Deal.¹

      Eisenhower’s moderate ideology aligned well with the Eastern Establishment, whose powerbrokers—Thomas СКАЧАТЬ