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

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СКАЧАТЬ in private enterprise, telling viewers that fair employment made “good business, good citizenship and plain good sense.” In an October speech, he described his hope that “most of us here will live to see the day when American boys and girls shall sit, side by side, at any school—public or private—with no regard paid to the color of their skin.” Just weeks before the election, he campaigned in Harlem, and received national headlines for his attack on the Democratic Party’s southern bloc, arguing, “a political party at the national level cannot long endure or merit support when it’s half for and half against equality of treatment.”⁴⁸

      In denouncing the prominence of the Democratic Party’s southern wing, Nixon had tapped into increasing disillusionment among black leaders with the party of James Eastland. In addition to the failure of Eisenhower’s civil rights bill to survive the Judiciary Committee, the signing of the “Southern Manifesto” in the spring of 1956 fully revealed the commitment of southern Democrats to Jim Crow. Written primarily as a denunciation of Brown, the manifesto condemned “the Supreme Court’s encroachment on the rights reserved to the States,” and symbolized the immense weight southerners still carried inside the Democratic Party’s congressional delegation. Signed by nineteen Democratic senators and eighty-two representatives, the document drew the signatures of every southern senator except Estes Kefauver, Albert Gore, Sr., and Lyndon Johnson.⁴⁹

      Republicans attempted to exploit black discontent with the Democratic Party’s southern wing throughout the 1956 campaign. E. Frederic Morrow wrote in his diary that black cynicism toward Democrats “has been detected … and the results have been gratifying to me and to all of us here at the White House.” Former RNC Chairman, and staunch supporter of the Eastern Establishment, Representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania spoke on behalf of the party at the NAACP’s annual convention. Prior to his appearance, he convinced Illinois representative Leo Allen to support Eisenhower’s civil rights bill in the House Rules Committee so that he could contrast the Democrats’ four-four split with unanimous Republican support. The rift in the Democratic Party served as the central theme of Scott’s June 29 NAACP address, where he declared, “The Democratic Party is split hopelessly … its Congress is in control of the Southern Do-Naught-Crats.” He concluded with an argument that would be repeated again and again by Republicans throughout the fall: “A vote for the Democrats this year in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia is a vote for Southern Democrat control of Congress, it’s a vote for the Democrat control of the House Rules Committee where Civil Rights bills get their suffocation treatment. A vote for any Democrat in a Federal election is a vote for Eastland.”⁵⁰

      Former GOP congressional candidate Grant Reynolds, who joined the Liberal Party in 1950, returned to the Republican aisle out of his anger that “Eastland was made chairman of the Judiciary Committee.” Touring across the country with boxer Joe Louis, Reynolds declared, “I’m supporting the entire Republican ticket … the people who signed the Southern Manifesto were among the leaders of the Democratic Party, and I can’t see Negroes in the same party.” T. R. M. Howard, who had recently fled from Mississippi to Chicago because of death threats to his family after he condemned Emmett Till’s murder, formed Task Force ’56, an organization designed to attract black voters to the Republican Party. In speeches across the country, he exclaimed, “the hell and damnation heaped on Negroes in the south today is being heaped by southern Democrats. I cannot see how the Negro is going to be able to vote for Democrats in the north, without at the same time voting for my neighbor, Jim Eastland.” In a campaign form letter sent to black voters by the RNC’s Minorities Division, Val Washington asked, “Haven’t many of us been cutting our own throats by voting for Democrat Congressmen and Senators? What has it gotten us? Nothing but headaches, because we have been voting committee chairmanships to race-hating manifesto signers like Eastland of Mississippi.”⁵¹

      Black Republicans were more active on the campaign trail in 1956 than they had been in years. The Minorities Division printed ninety thousand copies of “Abe and Ike, In Deed Alike,” a booklet that documented Eisenhower’s civil rights accomplishments and profiled high-ranking black appointees. Thalia Thomas, the division’s ranking woman, conducted a cross-country speaking tour of an estimated hundred thousand miles. Helen Edmonds was given her own tour after a black Republican field agent in Ohio reported favorable responses to her speech at the national convention. By the end of the campaign, she had delivered approximately fifty speeches across the Midwest and the East coast, and was interviewed on numerous television and radio broadcasts. Archibald Carey similarly spoke on the GOP’s behalf across the country, served as cochair of the Friends for Ike organization, and wrote a widely distributed campaign pamphlet. On the grassroots level, George W. Lee spent $15,000 to expand the Lincoln League in Memphis; by the end of the election he had amassed nearly seven hundred and fifty ward and precinct workers, distributed eighty-nine thousand pieces of literature, and sponsored almost forty rallies.⁵²

      Eisenhower’s most renowned black supporter was also one of the most surprising: Harlem’s Democratic representative, Adam Clayton Powell. Given limited access to President Truman, Powell had been cultivating a relationship with Eisenhower since the inauguration. In February 1954, he told a union rally that Eisenhower did more “to restore the Negro to the status of first class citizenship than any President since Abraham Lincoln.” In an October 1954 essay published in Reader’s Digest, Powell wrote, “In less than two years in the White House President Eisenhower, without political trumpeting, has quietly started a revolution which, I firmly believe, means an era of greater promise for Negro citizens.” In an early October 1956 meeting at the White House attended by Eisenhower, Val Washington, and others, Powell announced that he was “prepared to lead an independent movement for the President on a nationwide basis and take an active part in the balance of the campaign.” On October 19, he officially launched “Independent Democrats for Eisenhower,” and was given a $50,000 budget from the GOP for a national tour. His rhetoric closely mirrored that of black Republicans, praising Eisenhower’s “silent revolution” and arguing that Stevenson “has to be either a hypocrite, a liar, a double-talker, or a double-dealer” for accepting the endorsements of both Eleanor Roosevelt and James Eastland.⁵³

      Although Eisenhower gladly accepted the active role of black supporters on the campaign trail, civil rights remained relatively absent from his rhetoric. One of the major reasons Eisenhower could generally avoid this issue was Adlai Stevenson’s silence. Following the president’s endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1956, the NAACP condemned Stevenson for having “not even given lip service” to the proposed bill. Two days after a white mob drove Autherine Lucy out of the University of Alabama, Stevenson, engaged in a tight February primary race against Kefauver, told a black audience that “gradualism” was the key to successful integration of southern schools. Throughout the fall, he continued to assure the South that he would not rock the boat on civil rights, peppering his speeches with phrases that were becoming increasingly unacceptable to black voters: “We must proceed gradually”; “We cannot by the stroke of a pen reverse customs and traditions that are older than the Republic”; “We will not improve the present condition [of southern blacks] … by coercive Federal action.” While Stevenson finally endorsed Brown before a Harlem audience late in the campaign, it appeared to many as pandering, particularly as he still refused to support the use of federal troops to enforce the decision. Failing to spark much enthusiasm among African Americans, Stevenson secured the endorsement of only one of the nation’s ten largest black newspapers.⁵⁴

      After the votes were counted on election day, it was evident that not only had Eisenhower won in a landslide (Stevenson won only the Deep South and Missouri), but that he had made gains among black voters. Pollster George Gallup reported in January 1957 that “of all the major groups of the nation’s population, the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket last November was the Negro voter.” He estimated that the national black vote for Eisenhower was approximately 38 percent, an increase of 18 percentage points from 1952. A 1957 report by the NAACP came to a similar conclusion after a study of predominantly black areas in sixty-three cities, estimating that Eisenhower received 36.8 percent of the black vote. Of the cities examined, СКАЧАТЬ