Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP
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Reflecting on his fifty-year effort to steer the Grand Old Party toward black voters, Memphis power broker George W. Lee declared, «Somebody had to stay in the Republican Party and fight.» As Joshua Farrington recounts in his comprehensive history, Lee was one of many black Republican leaders who remained loyal after the New Deal inspired black voters to switch their allegiance from the «party of Lincoln» to the Democrats. Ideologically and demographically diverse, the ranks of twentieth-century black Republicans included Southern patronage dispensers like Lee and Robert Church, Northern critics of corrupt Democratic urban machines like Jackie Robinson and Archibald Carey, civil rights agitators like Grant Reynolds and T. R. M. Howard, elected politicians like U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke and Kentucky state legislator Charles W. Anderson, black nationalists like Floyd McKissick and Nathan Wright, and scores of grassroots organizers from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Black Republicans believed that a two-party system in which both parties were forced to compete for the African American vote was the best way to obtain stronger civil rights legislation. Though they were often pushed to the sidelines by their party's white leadership, their continuous and vocal inner-party dissent helped moderate the GOP's message and platform through the 1970s. And though often excluded from traditional narratives of U.S. politics, black Republicans left an indelible mark on the history of their party, the civil rights movement, and twentieth-century political development. Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP marshals an impressive amount of archival material at the national, state, and municipal levels in the South, Midwest, and West, as well as in the better-known Northeast, to open up new avenues in African American political history.
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Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP
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On the campaign trail, Republicans spent twice as much as Democrats in their efforts to woo black voters. Younger, more assertive African Americans like Francis E. Rivers were assigned prominent roles in the campaign. Light complexioned with blue eyes, Rivers had degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School, and was described by a peer as carrying himself “as one might imagine British nobility would.” His daily lunch routine included ordering a “martini, made with Tanqueray gin, up, with a twist.” Though distinctly upper crust, Rivers saw himself as a “New Negro,” no longer drawn to Abraham Lincoln, and in the early 1930s, Harlem voters elected him to the New York State Assembly on the basis of his unequivocal advocacy for civil rights. In 1936, Rivers was named director of the RNC’s Colored Voters Division’s eastern campaign, where he produced pro-Landon films featured in black theaters and sponsored a thirty-city tour of Jesse Owens, fresh from spectacular victories at the Berlin Olympics.30
The biggest hurdle Rivers faced among African Americans was his party’s failure to offer a meaningful alternative to New Deal relief. Without their own program to sell, black Republicans focused on highlighting discrimination within Roosevelt’s agencies. A well distributed statement signed by Rivers and sixty-five other black Republican leaders, including Roscoe Conkling Simmons, Oscar DePriest, Robert Church, and Perry Howard, provided a laundry list of examples of inequality within the New Deal, hoping that disgust over discrimination would outweigh support of its benefits. Some black Republicans also challenged the New Deal on ideological grounds. Rivers warned that Democrats sought to reduce the African American to “‘an unemployable,’ whom it will treat like the American Indian was treated, and confine the colored man on modern reservations of relief.” Perry Howard proclaimed, “Capital is in the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is the poor man’s party,” a sentiment that served Democrats more than it did his own party.31
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