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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ they believed the popular World War II hero was the only candidate who could win both the nomination and the general election. He promised to preserve Social Security and other New Deal programs, and openly embraced America’s new status as a world leader—positions the fiscally conservative and isolationist Taft derided as “me-tooism.” His views on civil rights, however, were initially ambiguous. Though he called for troops “without regard to color” during the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower testified in 1948 against military desegregation. During his first official press conference in the Republican primaries, he emphasized that “we must abandon segregation” and endorsed state fair employment laws, but he refused to support a national Fair Employment Practices Commission, one of the most significant policy proposals among black Republicans. Despite this stance, Eisenhower assured Brownell that if elected he “would seek to eliminate discrimination against black citizens in every area under the jurisdiction of the federal government.”²

      Prior to the Republican National Convention, Eisenhower’s nomination was not yet guaranteed, and he privately courted Harold C. Burton, a delegate from Harlem who, in the spring of 1952, had become one of the party’s most vocal black Republicans after Robert Church, Jr., died in April. The meeting backfired as an angered Burton left, visibly upset by Eisenhower’s refusal to support an FEPC plank on the party’s platform. At the start of the July convention, Burton and another African American, Charles Hill, announced they would go against the rest of New York’s delegation and oppose Eisenhower unless the party enacted a pro-FEPC plank. As Burton hoped, his defection was widely reported in the national media, and was a front page story in black newspapers. Seeking to avoid further embarrassment and negative attention, Eisenhower again met with Burton, and promised to “use my influence, if I am elected President, to see that the Negro and every other citizen of America get their rights.” While not explicitly endorsing a federal FEPC, the final GOP platform promised to enact “Federal legislation to further just and equitable treatment in the area of discriminatory employment practices.” Though not completely satisfied, Burton agreed to support Eisenhower, believing “those who would surround” him as president would be “liberal.”³

      With the convention held in Chicago, Illinois Republicans saw to it that their most important black ally, alderman Archibald Carey, Jr., was granted time for a floor speech. Given twenty-five uninterrupted, nationally broadcast minutes, Rev. Carey began by asserting that “the Democratic Party of late has been the party of promises…. As a Negro-American I have been sorely disappointed, and millions of freedom-loving people of every race have been disappointed with me.” While President Truman had promised to end the poll tax, enact a federal FEPC, and pass an anti-lynch law, these failed to survive a Democratic Congress. Carey continued, claiming that while some Democrats may cry, “‘The Dixiecrats did it.’ I answer—there is no Dixiecrat Party—only the Democrat.” Turning inward, he reminded the audience that “the Republican Party has not occupied the White House since it lost the Negro vote.” He then delivered the best remembered verses of his long career—lines that scholars later argued directly influenced Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The cadence of his poetic words echoed through Chicago’s International Amphitheater as he proclaimed, “some will say, ‘The time is not ripe,’” but “we Negro-Americans, sing with all Americans … Let freedom ring!” His voice grew louder with each phrase:

      That’s exactly what we mean, from every mountain side, let freedom ring! Not only from the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of 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!⁴

      Carey had powerfully laid out the black Republican vision of civil rights. When looking at American politics, he saw the Democratic Party not as the party of the working man, but as the party of the Jim Crow South. Though the GOP was admittedly not perfect, as Burton’s fight for an FEPC plank demonstrated, to Carey it still offered a preferable alternative. His primary focus was the eradication of legal barriers against African Americans, believing that, once guaranteed equal opportunity, they would enter a color-blind society where they would succeed on their individual merits. These principles were shared not only by much of the GOP’s Eastern Establishment, but also by civil rights activists like King, who dreamed of the day when African Americans would be judged “by the content of their character.” While the New Deal-inflected activism of many black leaders was absent in Carey’s message, which hoped to rally black voters behind a collective desire for civil rights, not economic policies benefiting the poor, his demands for “freedom”—essentially, the eradication of state-sanctioned discrimination—were shared by civil rights leaders across partisan lines. In the words of the president of a Texas NAACP branch, Carey “left no doubt in the minds of the Republican Party, the Democrats, the Americans, [and] the World as to what the American Negro wants.”⁵

      Winning the nomination with delegates from the East and West coasts, and the progressive midwestern states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, Eisenhower solidified his relationship with the Eastern Establishment. In an appeal to the party’s broader base, he selected California Senator Richard Nixon, one of the country’s most rabid anti-Communists, as his vice presidential nominee. Despite his ruthless attacks on alleged Communists, the ever-calculating Nixon had carefully maintained a close relationship with influential party liberals, and generally supported most civil rights legislation in Congress. California’s largest black newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, had endorsed him in his 1950 Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Linking civil rights to the Cold War, Nixon believed that “we must be vigilant against the doctrines of [segregationists] … who are just as dangerous to the preservation of the American way of life on the one hand as are the Communists on the other.” In many ways, Nixon and Eisenhower were similar in that they maintained close relations with eastern party leaders and supported moderate civil rights measures, though issues of black equality were never at the forefront of either’s agenda.⁶

      For their part, Democrats nominated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, after President Truman declined to run for a second term. Like Eisenhower, Stevenson argued that fair-employment legislation should be left to the states, but was open to a federal law if states failed to act. Fearing another Dixiecrat revolt, the Democratic convention passed a weakened civil rights plank to appease southerners. Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell called the plank “virtually nothing,” and labeled Chicago’s black Congressman, William Dawson, an “Uncle Tom” for helping write it. Stevenson’s most blatant appeal to Dixiecrats was the selection of Alabama Senator John Sparkman as his running mate. Though one of the South’s more moderate politicians, Sparkman supported segregation, once declaring, “I am against the Civil Rights proposals—always have been and always will be.”⁷

      Recognizing an easy target, Republicans were quick to attack Sparkman’s nomination. One advisor called for the party to demand that Stevenson “again and again … repudiate Senator Sparkman, whose views on the Negro and civil rights represent a point of extreme vulnerability for the Democrats.” Another strategist urged the campaign to “tie Sparkman completely around Stevenson’s neck with the ‘White Supremacy’ label.” Thomas Dewey did just that, publicly asserting, “so long as Senator Sparkman is on that ticket, this is a Jim Crow ticket.” Republican advertisements in black newspapers featured the slogans, “Jim Crow Sparkman Would Be One Heartbeat from the White House” and “He Never Voted for You—Why Should You Vote for Him?”⁸

      The anti-Sparkman theme was also hammered home in campaign speeches by Carey. The RNC Minorities Division, headed by Val Washington of the Chicago Defender, organized Carey’s itinerary, making him one of the most active African Americans on the campaign trail for either party. By November, he had traveled over twenty thousand miles, with appearances in fourteen states. In Denver he was greeted with a “torchlight parade,” and introduced by the governor before speaking to listeners on one of the state’s largest radio stations. He also met privately with СКАЧАТЬ