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

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      Eisenhower made his most substantial gains among southern blacks, prompting the New York Times to declare, “if you look South, the Negro voter has returned to the Republican party.” Moreover, while black turnout decreased in the North, the same was not true of the South, where turnout increased in many of the South’s largest cities, including Atlanta, Norfolk, Charlotte, Chattanooga, and Tampa. Though many southern blacks remained disenfranchised, those who could vote overwhelmingly supported Eisenhower. Black voters in Jefferson County (Birmingham), Alabama, cast an estimated 75 percent of their ballots for Eisenhower, and upwards of 90 percent of black voters in Macon County (Tuskegee) supported him. In Montgomery, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy joined approximately 59 percent of the city’s black voters in casting ballots for the president. King later remarked that “I do not recall a single person telling me he voted for Stevenson.” African Americans in Atlanta, who had cast 74 percent of their votes for Stevenson in 1952, gave Eisenhower 86 percent of their votes in 1956. Similarly dramatic increases were reported in New Orleans and in Columbia, Darlington, and Charleston, South Carolina. In North Carolina, Eisenhower received over 60 percent of the vote in predominantly black precincts in Durham, Raleigh, and Greensboro.⁵⁶

      Southern black voters also helped secure Eisenhower victories in Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. A 1957 report by the RNC Research Division concluded that Eisenhower’s slim six-thousand-vote plurality in Tennessee “can be accounted for by the increased Republican vote among Negroes of the city of Memphis alone.” Due in large part to George W. Lee’s organizing, the Republicans won twenty-three of the city’s thirty-eight majority-black precincts, giving Eisenhower 54 percent of the city’s African American vote. Likewise, the majority of black voters in Virginia supported a Republican presidential candidate for the first time since the New Deal. While Eisenhower had won just over 25 percent of the black vote in Richmond in 1952, he received almost 75 percent in 1956. His support among black voters in Norfolk soared from 16 to 77 percent.⁵⁷

      Though support for Eisenhower among northern blacks was far less impressive than his showings in the South, he made modest inroads in many black districts. He even won the majority of black votes in cities like Baltimore, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Columbus, Ohio. The vote for Eisenhower increased in Harlem from 20.8 percent in 1952 to 33.7 percent in 1956. In Chicago’s black districts, the vote for the president rose from under 30 to 37 percent, and his support in seven majority-black wards in Cleveland rose from 31 to 48 percent. In Boston’s majority-black Ward Nine, support for Eisenhower grew from 28.1 to 48.9 percent, and his support in thirty-nine of Gary, Indiana’s, majority-black precincts grew from 26 to 41 percent. In only a handful of cities did Eisenhower’s black support remain stagnant.⁵⁸

      In their post-election analysis, black leaders were careful to point out that support for the GOP was just as much a vote against the Democratic Party as it was an endorsement of Eisenhower. Roy Wilkins attributed Republican victory to “the growing resentment against the pernicious role of southern Democrats in hamstringing all civil rights legislation and especially in slowing down school desegregation.” Black Republican P. B. Young argued that in his state of Virginia, “the shift was in large part an expression of protest. Negroes resented the insults, and smears hurled at them by angry state officials, legislators and newspapers, because of the Supreme Court decision.” A postelection study conducted by the RNC suggested that black voters in Maryland supported the GOP largely in response to the southern leanings of the state’s Democratic leadership. Overall, the report found that Republican gains were “moderate” in cities where local Democrats “give recognition to Negroes,” but “the big switch” toward Republicans occurred in areas where “Negroes enjoy no status in the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders oppose civil rights.”⁵⁹

      Other factors also explain Eisenhower’s strong showing. Louisiana Weekly, a black newspaper, argued in its endorsement of the president, “Without a question Ike has moved forward on the civil rights question.” A 1957 study of black voters by Virginia Union University professors found that in addition to disillusionment with Democrats, African Americans were swayed by “the number of high level governmental appointments by Eisenhower,” “the personal prestige of the President,” and the successful desegregation of Washington, D.C. Harry A. Cole, Maryland’s black Republican state senator, claimed that the shift in his state “was mostly due to the great respect for Eisenhower and to intensive organizing efforts on the precinct level.” Economic prosperity also played a part, at the very least calming black fears of a depression under a Republican administration. According to a black Republican congressional candidate from Philadelphia, “if a man is hungry, he’s mainly interested in feeding himself and his family, and doesn’t have much time to worry about broader things…. Now times are good, and he has time to look around.” Though this argument did not convince most black workers in northern cities to support the Republican presidential candidate, many within the middle class and in the South believed that the GOP offered a means to achieve civil rights reform outside a deeply divided Democratic Party.⁶⁰

      Modest black support for the GOP in 1956 extended beyond Eisenhower. New York Senate candidate Jacob Javits’s campaign advertisements urged black voters to “MAKE YOUR VOTE COUNT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS! PUT JAVITS IN THE SENATE…. So I can block Eastland … and other manifesto signers.” Also earning the endorsement of Adam Clayton Powell, Javits won the race and received over 30 percent of Harlem’s vote. In Kentucky, black voters were credited by Republicans and the NAACP with providing Thurston Morton a slim majority over the incumbent Democrat, Senator Earle Clements. Maryland’s incumbent GOP Senator, John Marshall Butler, won the majority of Baltimore’s black precincts. Atlanta’s Republican Congressional candidate, Randolph Thrower, received 86 percent of the black vote. Likewise, black voters in Richmond, Virginia, cast the majority of their votes for the Republican Congressional candidate, and black areas of Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina, voted overwhelmingly for Republican gubernatorial candidate Kyle Hayes. Black Republicans still hadn’t found a convincing argument that appealed to working-class pocket books, but as the 1956 election demonstrated, they held the upper hand, if tentatively, on civil rights.⁶¹

      On January 20, 1957, Marian Anderson, the renowned black vocalist who had been barred from performing at Washington’s segregated Constitution Hall eighteen years earlier, performed in a fully integrated city at President Eisenhower’s inauguration ceremony, and was assigned a front row seat on the presidential inaugural platform. E. Frederic Morrow became the first African American to marshal a division of the inaugural parade, and, later that day, he and his wife became the first African Americans invited to sit in the presidential review stand. As the Democratic Party continued to be weighed down by its powerful southern wing in the 1950s, a wing that party liberals like Adlai Stevenson carefully avoided offending, the Republican Party made significant inroads among black voters, especially in the middle class and in southern cities. The results of the 1956 election indicated that many African Americans were willing to support Republican candidates who promised to advance the cause of civil rights. However, as James Hicks suggested, while many blacks had temporarily “divorced” the Democratic Party and begun a flirtation with a new Republican suitor, “the divorcee … isn’t going to let him in unless he puts a ring on her finger.” The question that remained in the minds of many African Americans who had flirted with Eisenhower and the GOP was how far he and his party would go to win their affection.⁶²

      CHAPTER 3

      Bit by Bit: Civil Rights and the Eisenhower Administration

      Though many African Americans supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 in hopes that the GOP would surpass the Democratic Party on issues of civil rights, the president proved to be a lukewarm ally. He had had few interactions with African Americans in his life before the presidency. Born in Jim Crow Texas and spending nearly all his adult life in a segregated army, he was insulated from racial СКАЧАТЬ