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CHAPTER 1

Farewell to the Party of Lincoln? Black Republicans in the New Deal Era

Frederick Douglass’s well-known adage that “the Republican Party is the deck, all else is the sea” reflects the significance of the Party of Abraham Lincoln to black politics for more than five decades after the Civil War. Even by the 1930s, when the Grand Old Party lost millions of black voters to Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, many African Americans still lingered on the GOP deck. Far from being an aberration in black communities during the 1930s and 1940s, Republicans remained deeply entrenched in the African American political landscape, leading southern “Black-and-Tan” organizations, running competitive campaigns in municipal and state elections, and lobbying for civil rights. As politicians, black Republican officials like Kentucky’s Charles W. Anderson and Chicago’s Archibald Carey, Jr., sponsored, and sometimes secured, passage of groundbreaking state and local civil rights legislation. Others, such as Robert Church, Jr., and Grant Reynolds, partnered with A. Philip Randolph and other independent black leaders in protest against racial discrimination. Though they were not members of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, black Republicans remained integral figures inside communities across the nation, and their emphasis on eliminating Jim Crow and other blatant forms of institutional racism remained popular with their allies in the black middle class.¹

In the Reconstruction years that followed the Civil War and the end of slavery, black Republican voters and politicians became fixtures of southern politics. During these transformative years of the late 1860s and 1870s, approximately 2,000 African Americans held public offices that ranged from county administrators to senators. Black Republican P. B. S. Pinchback served as governor of Louisiana, and U.S. senators Blanche Bruce and Hiram Revels represented Mississippi. Over half the politicians elected in South Carolina between 1867 and 1876 were black, including Representative Joseph Rainey and Senator Robert Smalls, who were joined in Washington, D.C., by African Americans representing southern states spanning from Virginia through the Deep South. These politicians, on both the federal and state levels, played instrumental roles in the passage of the south’s and the nation’s first civil rights laws and progressive reforms in education, orphanages, asylums, and economic development.²

Black Republicans were also the targets of systematic violence at the hands of ex-Confederates intent on restoring white supremacy in the upended South. In 1873, an estimated one hundred and fifty African Americans were killed by a mob of white Democrats in Colfax, Louisiana, following a contested election. Similar massacres occurred across the South from New Orleans to Wilmington, North Carolina, through the end of the century. Terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan served as Democratic proxies bent on ridding the South of black voters and their white Republican allies. By the 1890s, their campaign of violence and intimidation had paid off, as Democratic politicians swept into state offices, where they rolled back voting rights, instituted racial segregation, and turned a blind eye to murderous lynch mobs resolved to keep African Americans “in their place” of inferiority. This racially oppressive Jim Crow South, built and preserved by Democrats, would remain the defining characteristic of southern politics, society, and culture for the next half century.³

In the face of Democratic resurgence, the national Republican Party abandoned the South, and shifted its focus to northern businessmen and to industrial development. Despite this betrayal, the GOP remained one of the nation’s only institutions for black political advancement. In the South, where many African Americans could not even vote, black elites still controlled the skeletal remains of Republican parties in many states throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Among their primary roles was that of patronage dispenser during the administrations of the Republican presidents who governed all but eight years from 1897 to 1933. “Black-and-Tan” organizations, a name given to southern Republican parties by Democrats, supported the northeastern wing of the party as delegates to national conventions, and in return were rewarded with financial assistance and political appointments. They were often responsible for recommending federal marshals, attorneys, and judges in their respective states, and were even privately treated with deference by Democrats seeking federal jobs.⁴

While the influence of black Republicans within southern politics was limited to patronage, they had a modicum of power inside the national party infrastructure. As residents of rural states that elected few Republicans to national office, they held disproportionate representation within the Republican National Committee (RNC). According to GOP rules, regardless of population, each state was allotted two members on the committee, who set the party’s agenda by planning the national convention, allocating state delegates, and running the party nominee’s presidential campaign. As state representatives within the GOP infrastructure, some black southerners had connections that extended deep into the halls of Washington, D.C., and were among the few African Americans of the early twentieth century with the ability to leverage white politicians for a share of spoils and patronage. Though a nation shrouded in discrimination forced many Black-and-Tans to adopt a public stance that did not openly challenge white supremacy, members wheeled-and-dealed behind the scenes for piecemeal benefits on behalf of their communities.⁵

In Georgia, for example, Henry Lincoln Johnson and Benjamin J. Davis, Sr., controlled the allotment of federal patronage from the 1910s through the 1930s. Davis represented the state as a delegate to every Republican National Convention from 1908 until his death in 1945, and served as one of Georgia’s two members on the national committee and as secretary of Georgia’s Republican Executive Committee. Other African Americans in high-ranking positions included William Shaw, secretary of the Georgia Republican State Central Committee, and national committeewoman Mamie Williams. Supported by Atlanta’s large population of middle-class African Americans, Georgia’s Black-and-Tan leadership was among the most active in the South. Davis and Shaw made the black vote an important factor in Atlanta’s municipal elections through intensive registration drives, and Davis, a founding member of the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and an occasional member of the Platform Committee, successfully pressed the national party to include anti-lynching legislation on party platforms.⁶

African Americans in other southern states possessed similar positions of influence within GOP ranks. Little Rock attorney Scipio Jones controlled federal patronage in Arkansas for almost three decades, and served as a delegate to national conventions into the 1940s. In South Carolina, N. J. Frederick served as Richland County (Columbia) commissioner and as a delegate to national conventions throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As secretary of the Republican State Central Committee and secretary of the Orleans Parish Central Committee, Walter L. Cohen led the Louisiana Republican Party from 1898 until his death in 1930, and was appointed to one of the most valued federal posts in the South, comptroller of customs for the Port of New Orleans.⁷

Black control of southern Republican organizations did not always go unchallenged. Their opponents, self-professed “Lily-Whites,” consisted mainly of southern industrialists who were skeptical of Democratic populist appeals, and sought to “purify” the GOP of African Americans in order to bring competitive two-party politics to the South. On issues of white supremacy, there were few differences between Lily-Whites and race-baiting Democrats. Though they assumed control of the GOP in some states, such as North Carolina, their ascendance was far from guaranteed, as the case of Mississippi demonstrates. Despite fierce Lily-White opposition in the Magnolia State, a delegation led by black attorney Perry W. Howard was seated at the 1924 Republican National Convention, and Howard was elected to represent the state alongside an African American woman, Mary Booze, on the national committee. Locally, S. D. Redmond, a black dentist from Jackson, became chairman of the state executive committee, a post he held until 1948. Though Lily-Whites would continue to challenge Howard’s leadership, the victories of his Black-and-Tan faction in the mid-1920s solidified his power for the next three decades. Howard attended all but one national convention as a delegate from 1912 to 1960, and served as one of Mississippi’s two members on the national committee until his death in 1961, the longest tenure of a committeeperson in party history.⁸

Despite being a fierce competitor of Lily-Whites, Howard was mostly silent on the issue of civil rights. In 1921, he became the highest paid black federal employee, when President Warren G. Harding appointed him special assistant to the attorney general. After moving to Washington, D.C., he rarely returned to Mississippi, and, unlike Benjamin Davis, Sr., of Georgia and other more race-conscious Black-and-Tans, Howard declined to challenge his party on issues of race, and even joined conservatives in opposing anti-lynch legislation. His accommodationism appealed to Mississippi’s Democratic establishment, who defended him in 1928 after he was indicted on charges of selling federal jobs. Not only did Democrats receive over 90 percent of Howard’s appointments, but they also enjoyed the presence of an allegedly corrupt black official as the head of the state’s Republican Party.⁹

As much as Howard represented the most dubious example of Black-and-Tan politics, the Republican Party of neighboring Tennessee sustained the hope many African Americans placed in the GOP. The state’s party was shared by traditionally Republican Appalachian counties in the east and Black-and-Tans in the west led by Robert R. Church, Jr., of Memphis. The son of one of the wealthiest black men in America, Church retired from the family-owned Solvent Savings Bank as a twenty-seven-year-old millionaire, and devoted his life to politics. He was first elected as a delegate to the 1912 Republican National Convention, and over the subsequent decades served on the state Republican Executive Committee and the Republican State Primary Board.¹⁰

His standing in the party was enhanced by his ability to finance a large share of southern and midwestern Republican campaigns with his own money, or money he raised via his family’s extensive business network. Preferring to wield influence behind the scenes, and in spite of vehement opposition from state Democrats, Church secured patronage for major southern appointments, including several racially progressive federal judges and the U.S. attorney general for West Tennessee. He also recommended African Americans to positions inside his district and within the federal government. Because of Church, African Americans made up almost 80 percent of Memphis’s mail carriers in the 1920s, who received the same salary and pension as their white coworkers. On the national level, he secured positions for Charles W. Anders as the internal revenue collector for New York’s wealthiest district and James A. Cobb as judge of the Washington, D.C., municipal court. One of the South’s most rabid segregationists, Alabama senator James Heflin, gave inadvertent homage to Church’s influence when reciting a derogatory poem on the floor of the Senate in 1929: “Offices up a ’simmon tree / Bob Church on de ground / Bob Church say to de ’pointing power / Shake dem ’pointments down.”¹¹

In addition to securing federal posts for African Americans, Church was deeply concerned with issues of black social and political equality. A close friend of NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson, Church served on the organization’s national board of directors and contributed to its growing presence in the South by subsidizing nearly seventy branches in fourteen states. He also organized the Lincoln League of Memphis to ward off Lily-White opponents in February 1916. The league registered almost 10,000 voters by the fall, and black Republicans outnumbered Lily-Whites by a four-to-one margin, comprising almost one-third of Shelby County’s total electorate.¹²

Three years later, Church expanded the league into a national organization comprised of some of the country’s most influential African Americans. In February 1920, four hundred delegates attended the Lincoln League’s first national convention in Chicago, and demanded that the Republican National Committee increase the presence of African Americans in the forthcoming presidential campaign. RNC Chairman Will H. Hays responded by appointing five members of the league, Church, James Weldon Johnson, Roscoe Conkling Simmons, S. A. Furniss, and William H. Lewis, to the Advisory Committee on Policies and Platforms. On election day, Church further demonstrated his importance to the GOP when black voters helped secure President Harding’s victory in Tennessee, the only southern state to swing to the Republican column.¹³

Figure 1. Black-and-Tan leaders outside Robert Church, Jr.’s Solvent Savings Bank and Trust in Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1920s. Left to right: Church, Henry Lincoln Johnson, Roscoe Conkling Simmons, Walter L. Cohen, John T. Fisher, and Perry W. Howard. M.S.0071.038087.001, Robert R. Church Family of Memphis Collection, University Libraries Preservation and Special Collections, University of Memphis.

As Church assumed a national role in the 1920s, his pupil, George W. Lee, took control of duties in Memphis. A World War I veteran commissioned by the Army as a lieutenant, Lee founded a successful insurance company in the 1920s. “Lt. Lee,” as he referred to himself, secured the promotion of the county’s first black rural mail carrier, post office station superintendent, and foreman, and the mid-South region’s first assistant postal distribution officer. An active member of the Memphis NAACP and Urban League, Lee also drafted resolutions for the national Lincoln League demanding that the Republican Party increase federal appointments of African Americans, pass anti-lynch legislation, and reach out to black voters by combating Jim Crow. Like Church’s, Lee’s partisan affiliation was not based on sentimental attachment, but, in his own words, he sought to use “the machinery of the Republican Party to advance the cause of the Negro.”¹⁴

African Americans in northern cities also found positions within Republican ranks. Black Republicans held influence in Seattle, Washington, which had a long history of progressive Republicanism that reached out to black voters, where they continued to obtain local and state patronage positions from the national party throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Well into the late 1930s, African Americans in Philadelphia remained a vital constituency of the city’s Republican machine, whose black supporters included E. Washington Rhodes (a state legislator and publisher of the Philadelphia Tribune) and city magistrates J. Austin Norris and Edward Henry. Black Republicans also played a prominent role in Chicago, home to one of the largest GOP machines in the country. Roscoe Conkling Simmons, nephew of Booker T. Washington and president of the South Ward Republican Committee, politically organized waves of black immigrants fleeing the South, and procured licenses for black undertakers, barbers, and pharmacists. His work culminated in the 1928 election of black Republican Oscar DePriest to the U.S. House of Representatives.¹⁵

Though African Americans had a presence in the RNC and state parties in the 1920s, the decade’s three Republican presidents did little to ease a growing frustration among rank-and-file black voters. Presidents Harding and Calvin Coolidge failed to reverse the policies of their Democratic predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, that segregated federal departments. Coolidge, one of the most hands-off presidents in U.S. history, could barely even denounce lynching or the Ku Klux Klan, let alone actively pursue a civil rights agenda. Most notably, despite Republican control of both houses of Congress and the White House throughout the decade, the party failed to pass a promised anti-lynching law. By the end of the decade, black voters in the North had already begun the process of realignment toward more sympathetic Democratic politicians.¹⁶

The national Democratic Party, however, was not a welcoming alternative, as it still had a large southern bloc and made few efforts to court African Americans. There were no black delegates at the 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston, and black attendants were segregated behind humiliating chicken wire. By contrast, forty-nine black delegates attended the Republican convention in Kansas City, though the party’s nominee was not much of an improvement over his lackluster predecessors. Herbert Hoover, a former U.S. secretary of commerce with few black contacts in his home state of Iowa, ignored black Republicans like Robert Church and instead courted southern Lily-Whites in order to secure his nomination. His supporters deleted phrasing from the platform that condemned Lily-White discrimination against Black-and-Tans, and a former Klansman was named his southern campaign manager.¹⁷

In spite of Hoover’s nomination, many black Republicans remained loyal to the party. Robert Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier and Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press served as publicity directors of the RNC Colored Voters Division, and Nannie Burroughs and Daisy Lampkin of the National Association of Colored Women mobilized on behalf of the Women’s Division. Some joined Robert Church in vocally criticizing Hoover’s nomination. Near the end of the campaign, in response to growing fears of black desertion, Hoover met with Church, and promised that his administration would respect southern Black-and-Tan leadership. Church subsequently purchased a full page ad in the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s most widely circulated black newspapers, where he reluctantly endorsed Hoover. Though he was “not satisfied with some of Mr. Hoover’s [Lily-White] company,” Church argued that Al Smith, the Democratic nominee, would be politically indebted to white southerners despite his northern, progressive background, concluding, “the Republican Party offers us little. The Democratic Party offers us nothing.”¹⁸

Following Church’s endorsement, nineteen of the twenty-five largest black newspapers that had previously supported Smith changed their endorsements to Hoover. Though Smith made inroads within the black electorate in northern cities on election day, Hoover retained the majority of black voters. His political debt to African Americans, however, was overshadowed by victories in the upper and border South driven by record-setting white support. Though these southern gains were due in large part to anti-Catholic sentiment against his opponent, Hoover’s southern success further enticed him to pursue policies that expanded his Lily-White base.¹⁹

Disregarding his campaign promise to Church, Hoover stripped many Black-and-Tans of patronage influence by doling out federal appointments to their Lily-White opponents. He sat idly by as Lily-Whites launched campaigns to unseat Black-and-Tans in Louisiana and Texas, and personally requested that the Republican Party of Georgia dismiss Benjamin Davis, Sr., because it “humiliated” whites to go through him for federal jobs. Cloaking himself in the mantle of reform, Hoover promised to end “corruption” in southern Republican parties and to replace current (black) leadership with the “highest type” of citizen. “It is time for the cream to rise to the top,” he declared in a thinly veiled allusion to Lily-White ascendance.²⁰

Hoover’s most obvious gesture to white southerners was the Supreme Court nomination of a Lily-White Republican from North Carolina, John J. Parker, who once claimed, “participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil.” As a result of coordinated pressure from the NAACP and labor unions, the Senate rejected the nomination in what turned out to be a major turning point in black politics. At the time, it was the largest demonstration yet of black political independence, and in the following midterm elections black voters helped defeat pro-Parker Republican senators in Kansas and Ohio.²¹

Leading up to Hoover’s 1932 reelection campaign, most black Republican leaders continued to give him begrudged support, but rank-and-file black voters were growing increasingly weary of the party. In addition to his support of Lily-Whites, Hoover failed to provide meaningful relief for Americans at the outbreak of the Great Depression, an economic disaster that especially devastated black workers. Many African Americans agreed with Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert Vann, who famously wrote that it was time to “turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall,” as the Democratic presidential nominee, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, emerged as a viable candidate. While cautious not to offend white southerners by endorsing racial equality, Roosevelt pledged federal action to combat the Depression and promised African Americans “as full a measure of citizenship in every detail of my administrative power, as accorded citizens of any other race or group.” Hoover still won the majority of black voters on election day, but Roosevelt made considerable inroads among African Americans in northern cities. The tide was turning among black voters.²²

Although President Roosevelt did not pursue a civil rights agenda, his New Deal provided impoverished black families with tangible benefits. By the spring of 1935, more than 20 percent of African Americans were on welfare provided by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. In major cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, more than 40 percent of African Americans received some form of federal relief, and the Works Progress Administration alone provided over one million African Americans with jobs. Its educational programs taught more than one million African Americans how to read, and other agencies poured millions of dollars into improving schools and public housing utilized by black families. Roosevelt also far outpaced his Republican predecessors in terms of black appointments, and named a number of white racial liberals to powerful cabinet posts. His wife, Eleanor, publicly identified with the struggles and aspirations of African Americans, and provided an unprecedented ally in the White House. And though the New Deal was rife with blatant discrimination—some of which enshrined structural racism into federal policy and widened the economic gap between whites and blacks for decades to come—still, to many poor African Americans, discriminatory relief was better than none at all.²³

As members of the party out of power, black Republicans could no longer provide African Americans with patronage or access to the federal government, a fact that undermined their ability to court new voters. Black-and-Tans in the South focused much of their attention in the 1930s and 1940s on combating Lily-Whites for representation in the RNC and at national conventions, goals far removed from the Depression-era concerns of impoverished African Americans. Old Guard black Republicans who had been active for decades relied on outdated rhetoric that had little appeal to new generations of black voters. Roscoe Conkling Simmons, for example, told a crowd of African Americans during a 1930 congressional campaign, “If I had one word to the Negro in Chicago, it would be patience.” This message failed to resonate with an increasingly assertive and politically aware black electorate. Similarly, though Congressman Oscar DePriest was the darling of black Chicago for three terms, he lost community support when he opposed New Deal legislation, and in 1934 narrowly lost his seat to a man who himself had been a Republican just four years earlier, Arthur Mitchell, the first African American Democrat elected to Congress.²⁴

Like many black elites, DePriest embraced Booker T. Washington’s message of individual responsibility and racial uplift through self-help. Just as self-sufficiency was one’s personal duty, so too was it the responsibility of African Americans to collectively advance through racial solidarity and self-determination, not external reliance on “the dole system,” as he described government assistance. To this end, DePriest opposed New Deal “handouts,” but supported community-driven responses to the Great Depression. For instance, he mobilized the Third Ward Republican organization to provide 65,000 meals in the winter of 1930–1931, and picketed the Sopkin Apron factory alongside workers who demanded better wages and improved conditions. While opposing federal intervention in the economy, DePriest did believe it was the government’s responsibility to protect civil rights. Unlike his Democratic successor in Congress, who rarely rocked the boat on issues of racial equality, DePriest consistently supported anti-lynching legislation and the integration of public facilities. He also wrote, and secured passage of, an anti-discrimination amendment that applied to the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the New Deal’s largest programs.²⁵

To many black Republicans like DePriest, the New Deal was a step backward for racial progress. Grant Reynolds, one of the most active black Republicans of the mid-twentieth century, claimed that African Americans “got the shaft” from Roosevelt. Whereas landowning farmers were given buyouts that revolutionized American agriculture, and ethnic whites were appointed to some of the most powerful positions in the country, Reynolds argued, “blacks got an invitation to go on welfare…. The New Deal confined us to a period of dependency.” Similarly, acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston believed that the New Deal “was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes” by making African Americans “dependent upon the Government for their daily bread.” Though out of step with most African Americans, black Republicans like Reynolds and Hurston did not oppose the New Deal out of callous disregard for the plight of the poor, but out of a genuine concern that accepting economic relief was not in the long-term interest of black advancement.²⁶

Their opposition to the New Deal additionally did not mean black Republicans were not progressive when it came to civil rights. Betty Hill, a wealthy black Republican organizer from California, feared that Roosevelt had “fooled” many African Americans into settling for government scraps, but she was also a civil rights pioneer in the West who served seventeen years as chair of the Los Angeles NAACP and led the campaign to end discrimination against black nurses in state hospitals. Her activism, which included assuming the presidency of the California Republican Women’s Committee, helped push California’s GOP establishment, including Governor Earl Warren, into supporting an active civil rights agenda by the 1940s. Hill was not alone among Republicans in powerful positions within the NAACP, and, until her death in 1960, could count two of the national branch’s chief representatives, Clarence Mitchell, Jr., and James Nabrit, Jr., as fellow Republicans-in-arms.²⁷

While black Republicans like Hill were deeply skeptical of the New Deal, issues of economic policy were secondary to their focus on civil rights. Robert Church was leery of government relief, but his philosophical disagreements with federal expansion were rarely discussed in his public remarks or private correspondence. While this may have been a deliberate strategy not to alienate himself from poor blacks, his inattention to poverty also reflected the centrality of social and political equality to his vision of black progress. Indeed, as the GOP began to lose African American voters in the New Deal era, black Republicans like Church adopted even more militant positions on civil rights. Concede welfare to Democrats, they reasoned, but pressure the GOP to become the party of civil rights by supporting fair employment, open housing, desegregation of the military, and protection of voting rights. Though this was a daunting task in a party with constituencies that included corporate interests and western states with few black voters, black Republicans believed it was better than the alternative, as southern racists remained a dominant bloc within the Democratic establishment, preventing even liberals like Roosevelt from endorsing legislation as fundamental as an anti-lynching law.

Black Republicans’ relationship with labor, a Democratic constituency that became intertwined with the civil rights movement during Roosevelt’s presidency, was more complicated than their opposition to welfare. Because of their positions in and relationship with business management, black elites had a history of opposing collective bargaining. Perry Howard and other black Republicans worked as lawyers for the Pullman Company, for example, and vocally opposed A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1910s and 1920s. By the 1930s, however, more militant Republicans like Robert Church recognized the fusion between African Americans and labor. Church and other leading black Republicans endorsed the right of collective bargaining, even opposing the Republican-sponsored, anti-union, Taft-Hartley bill. Younger black Republicans saw unions, unlike welfare, as a positive force that ensured black jobs and promoted self-sufficiency. Though Church, Grant Reynolds, and other black Republicans would become close friends with independent labor leaders, particularly Randolph, rank-and-file black union members still looked skeptically at those whose loyalties linked them with a generally anti-labor party.²⁸

As the presidential election of 1936 neared, both parties saw black voters as a valuable swing vote. For the first time in party history, Democrats sent black delegates to their national convention and invited an African American to speak on the floor. The Republican convention featured a marked increase in black delegates, who were given leading spots on the Credentials and Resolutions Committees. Black delegates on the Credentials Committee even succeeding in seating South Carolina’s Black-and-Tan delegation over the state’s Lily-White faction, concluding a multiyear dispute. Roscoe Conkling Simmons was given a high-profile spot on the floor to deliver a speech seconding the presidential nomination of Alf Landon, a racially progressive governor of Kansas who opposed Lily-Whites, condemned lynching, and called for an end to discrimination in federal employment.²⁹

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

Despite one of the most aggressive campaigns among black voters in the party’s history, the Republican message often fell on deaf ears. Though black Republican criticisms of discrimination within the New Deal may have been technically accurate, and in line with their broader attack on institutionalized racism, millions of African Americans viewed its programs as a source of jobs, food, and shelter. On election day, black voters moved solidly into the Democratic column, with over 70 percent nationwide casting their ballots for Roosevelt. However, the GOP still had a strong presence among middle- and upper-class African Americans, who cast a slight majority of their votes for Landon. Indeed, 70 percent of the men and women listed in the 1937 Who’s Who in Colored America, a biographical anthology of black America’s elite, still identified themselves as Republicans.³²

It is important to note that widespread African American support for Roosevelt in 1936 did not reflect equivalent support of the Democratic Party. Many black voters could be accurately described as “Roosevelt Republicans,” or those who, as the NAACP noted, “voted for Roosevelt, in spite of the Democratic party,” whose prominent southern wing continued to protect Jim Crow. Indeed, the late 1930s and 1940s were a period of unparalleled black voting independence and fluidity. In his now classic treatise on race relations, An American Dilemma (1944), sociologist Gunnar Myrdal suggested that “it is not certain whether the Northern Negro vote will remain Democratic, but it is certain that it has become more flexible and will respond more readily to the policies of the two parties toward the Negro.” Polls in the late 1930s and 1940s indicated that black registered voters were split 40-40 between the two parties, with the remaining 20 percent self-identified as independent. In the words of Florida’s Progressive Voters’ League, a black organization that endorsed both Republicans and Democrats, “We believe in the principle of ‘men and measures,’ rather than blind allegiance to any one political party.”³³

In this context, the period saw a considerable degree of black ticket splitting. African Americans in Cleveland, a city that gave Roosevelt some of his highest percentages of black support in 1932 and 1936, cast the majority of their votes for Republican candidates for senator, governor, and mayor in 1938 and 1939. African Americans similarly remained key supporters of local Republican machines in the GOP strongholds of Philadelphia and Seattle. In Kentucky, black voters were essential to the election of Republican governor Simeon Willis in 1943, and continued to vote overwhelmingly for the state’s Republican candidates through the rest of the decade. So crucial were black voters to GOP success that party officials in Louisville formed a Negro Personnel Committee to guarantee black patronage.³⁴

The Black-and-Tan organizations of Memphis and Atlanta continued to thrive in the 1940s. George W. Lee formed a political relationship with Representative B. Carroll Reece of eastern Tennessee, who voted for laws that guaranteed fair federal employment, banned lynching, and outlawed the poll tax. Benjamin Hooks, the future national executive director of the NAACP, recalled that “it was not difficult for me to join up with the Republican Party” on returning to Memphis after graduating from law school in 1948, and he partnered with Lee in organizing black voters. Vernon Jordan, who later became president of the National Urban League, recalled a similar story regarding his upbringing in Atlanta. As an eighth grader in 1948, Jordan attended a local Republican meeting led by a white lawyer, Elbert Tuttle, who later became one of the most important enforcers of civil rights on the federal bench. Accompanying Tuttle in the party’s leadership were African Americans William Shaw, John Wesley Dobbs, and John H. Calhoun. The meeting had a profound impact on Jordan, who later remarked with pride that “Blacks played an active participatory role in the Republican Party in Georgia, and I have never forgotten that my first political meeting was an integrated occasion.” In 1949, Dobbs and Calhoun partnered with black Democrats to form the Atlanta Negro Voters League, which spearheaded one of the most successful voter registration drives in the South. Though nominally bipartisan, the organization was practically an extension of the city’s Republican establishment through the 1950s.³⁵

Even in Roosevelt’s 1936 sweep, nearly one-third of the black state legislators elected were Republican. Black Republican politicians in the New Deal era often found success in states that were evenly divided between the two parties. As such, both Democrats and Republicans had the incentive to slate African Americans in competitive elections, and to make sincere efforts to court black voters. Additionally, freed from the national politics of the New Deal, black Republican politicians, such as state legislators E. Washington Rhodes of Pennsylvania and J. Mercer Burrell of New Jersey, emphasized a civil rights agenda favored by most African Americans. In 1943, Francis Rivers ran on a joint Republican and American Labor Party ticket for a county-wide judicial position on the New York City Civil Court. Winning the majority of the black vote, he won the post, which he retained through the 1950s. At the time, it was the highest judicial post held by an African American, and the best paid position of any black public official in the country. Even communist organizer Benjamin Davis, Jr., son of Atlanta’s Black-and-Tan leader, called Rivers’s election part of the “high-water mark” of the city’s “progressive coalition.” Elsewhere, Lawrence O. Payne, editor of Ohio’s largest black newspaper, the Call and Post, was elected to multiple terms on the Cleveland City Council from 1929 through the 1930s, and was succeeded by his protégé William O. Walker, who represented African Americans on the city council through the 1940s.³⁶

As fierce advocates of racial equality, Depression-era black Republican politicians led their states in passing meaningful civil rights legislation. After winning his 1934 bid for the state legislature, Philadelphia’s Hobson Reynolds spearheaded the passage of the Pennsylvania Civil Rights Act of 1935, which banned discrimination in places of public accommodation. Cleveland attorney Chester K. Gillespie, who also served as president of the city’s NAACP, represented black voters in Ohio’s House of Representatives from 1933 to 1944, where he sponsored legislation that ended discrimination at Ohio State University and combated discrimination in state employment. Similarly, Richard McClain, a black dentist from Cincinnati, sponsored a 1935 bill that banned discrimination in employment in publicly contracted jobs.³⁷

In the Midwest, Indianapolis NAACP attorney Robert Lee Brokenburr became Indiana’s first black state senator, an office he held from 1940 to 1964. In the 1940s, he sponsored legislation that established a fair employment commission, banned discrimination in public accommodations and education, and prohibited race-based hate speech. Two additional black Republicans, William Fortune and Wilbur Grant, joined Brokenburr in the state legislature as the decade progressed, where they sponsored bills prohibiting segregation in all public schools and colleges. Republican Charles Jenkins represented black Chicagoans in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1930 to 1955, and coordinated with the NAACP to secure passage of fair employment legislation, amend riot laws to provide financial assistance to black victims of white mobs, and prohibit state funding of racially segregated schools.³⁸

Even black Republicans in segregated Kentucky saw electoral success. In 1935, Charles W. Anderson, who had previously headed Louisville’s NAACP, became the first African American to serve in the legislature of a southern state since Reconstruction. During his eleven-year tenure in the General Assembly, he successfully fought to expand educational opportunities by desegregating the state’s graduate and nursing schools. His successor, Jesse Lawrence, helped pass additional legislation that further desegregated higher education in the state. In 1945, Eugene Clayton won his race for a seat on Louisville’s Board of Aldermen, making him the first African American elected to a city council in the South since Reconstruction. Oneth M. Travis, a member of Kentucky’s Republican State Central Committee from Lexington, and the first African American appointed to the State Board of Education, similarly used his position to narrow the salary gap between black and white teachers.³⁹

As the nation headed toward World War II and slowly emerged from years of economic crisis, one of the primary goals of the Republican Party in the 1940 presidential election was to win back African Americans. Their nominee, Wendell Willkie, represented the party’s burgeoning Eastern Establishment that would rise to power throughout the decade. Centered in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, and bolstered by moderate Republicans in other states with large African American populations, the Eastern Establishment sought to restore the GOP’s progressive legacy and wrest control of the party from midwestern and western conservatives. Willing to support moderate government activism in economic policies, its leaders, including Willkie, also sought to win back African American voters through endorsing civil rights. Since the 1920s, Willkie had publicly fought against the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in his home state of Indiana, served as a trustee of the Hampton Institute, a historically black university, and supported the National Urban League. In a campaign speech at the NAACP’s annual convention, an appearance that was itself groundbreaking, he employed the rhetoric of the country’s most militant activists, declaring, “When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes of our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.” After his death four years later, the NAACP named its renovated headquarters the Wendell Willkie Memorial Building.⁴⁰

Prior to the election, the Republican Program Committee commissioned Howard University political scientist Ralph Bunche to write a report detailing how the GOP could regain black voters. Bunche argued that while the New Deal “has fallen far short of meeting adequately the minimal needs of the Negro,” Republicans must formulate their own “constructive program for the economic and political betterment” of African Americans. Largely ignoring Bunche’s suggestion on economic policy, black Republicans continued to argue that African Americans wanted, first and foremost, the eradication of legalized discrimination. Appearing before the Committee on Resolutions at the 1940 Republican National Convention, Robert Church was quiet on economic issues, but demanded that the party make efforts to eliminate black disfranchisement in the South and enact legislation banning segregation. Written by Francis Rivers, the “Negro plank” of the party platform was one of the strongest ever approved, pledging Republican support to end “discrimination in the civil service, the army, navy, and all other branches of the Government.” On the subject of economics, however, the plank was less specific, simply claiming that African Americans “shall be given a square deal in the economic and political life of this nation.”⁴¹

As they had in 1936, black Republicans played an active role in the campaign. Rivers oversaw the production of literature that promised an end to segregation in the armed forces and other branches of the federal government. Boxing legend Joe Louis toured the country on the party’s behalf, and Robert Vann returned to GOP ranks, citing Willkie’s forthright stance and Roosevelt’s cowardice on civil rights. He joined Claude Barnett, director of the Associated Negro Press, and Chester Franklin, editor of The Call (Kansas City), as key members of the Non-Partisan Negro Citizens Committee for Willkie. Popular among the black publishing elite, Willkie earned the endorsement of some of the country’s leading black newspapers by the end of the campaign, including Vann’s Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, New York Age, Philadelphia Tribune, and Cleveland Gazette.⁴²

Despite these efforts, the election results were disappointing. Though Willkie increased the Republican majority among members of the black middle class, he made little headway among those who relied on New Deal programs. He did significantly better than Landon, winning, by some estimates, 40 to 50 percent of the total black vote, but the persistence of “Roosevelt Republicans” remained in the election outcomes. According to surveys conducted after the election, though Roosevelt won the majority of black votes, only 42 percent of African Americans who voted for him were registered Democrats. Indeed, depending on the geographic region, 50 to 80 percent of black professionals remained registered Republicans. Ralph Bunche remarked on this phenomenon in 1941, writing that while “the underprivileged Negro gives enthusiastic support to the Democratic party,” among the middle class “it is still fashionable to be a Republican.”⁴³

In 1944, Robert Church founded the Republican American Committee (RAC) to lobby for fair employment and other civil rights measures. Five years earlier, the Democratic machine of Memphis seized his mansion, allegedly for failure to pay taxes, and burned it to the ground as part of a fire department “exercise.” Undeterred by intimidation, Church moved to Chicago and Washington, D.C., where he intensified his advocacy for civil rights. The RAC’s first meeting in February 1944 drew two hundred black Republicans from across the country to Chicago. They named Church president, and elected Grace Evans, Edward Jourdain, Charles W. Anderson, and Lawrence O. Payne as vice presidents. All were representative of the party’s more militant black leaders who identified with the Eastern Establishment. The organization issued a “Declaration by Negro Republican Workers” that condemned “the unholy and vicious alliance” between conservative Republicans and southern Democrats, “whose avowed objectives are to defeat progressive legislation and maintain ‘so-called white supremacy.’” They urged their party to abolish discrimination in the armed forces, pass fair employment legislation, and end discrimination in federal housing aid.⁴⁴

The Platform Committee of the 1944 Republican National Convention was sensitive to Church’s demands. Representing the RAC, he appeared before the committee to emphasize the growing independence and importance of African Americans as one of the nation’s largest swing votes, and stressed that the party had never won a presidential election without their support. The party’s final platform offered an explicit pledge to support legislation for a national Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce a federal ban on racial discrimination in employment. It also called for an end to segregation in the armed forces, and promised to pursue an amendment that would outlaw the poll tax. The RAC endorsed the platform, and NAACP head Walter White praised its FEPC plank as “unequivocal and excellent.” The Democrats’ civil rights plank, dismissed by White as a “splinter,” was silent on fair employment and other major issues. The platform initially seemed to confirm the RAC’s argument that civil rights could best be secured by working within the Republican Party.⁴⁵

New York governor Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee, continued in this positive direction during the campaign. Criticizing the New Deal as corrupt and inefficient, Dewey offered a Republican alternative for the poor, supporting a moderate economic agenda that included unemployment insurance, disability pay, and increased funding of education. On issues of civil rights, he supported fair employment legislation and the eradication of discrimination within the federal government. He also had a proven track record with black voters, winning Harlem in 1942. By the fall of 1944, he had secured a number of major black endorsements, including one from the National Negro Council, whose director, Edgar G. Brown, declared that “the Governor’s forceful and fearless public career has impressed the Negro deeply and has restored his long and earlier confidence in the Republican party.”⁴⁶

Throughout the fall of 1944, predictions of renewed African American support for the GOP filled national newspapers and magazines. The New Republic warned, “The Democratic Party is threatened with the loss of large segments of the important Negro vote,” and Harper’s claimed, “the Negro vote … is shifting back into the Republican column.” The NAACP emphasized the independence of African Americans, declaring that their vote “no longer belongs to any one political party.” Like Willkie, Dewey earned endorsements from major black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, and New York Amsterdam News. Despite the governor’s appeal, however, the GOP received its fourth straight loss to President Roosevelt on election day. Though Dewey connected with the black middle class’s aspirations for civil rights reform, and won roughly 40 percent of the entire black vote, the draw of the New Deal, and the incumbent, again plagued his party among the working class.⁴⁷

The Republican American Committee continued to lobby party leaders following Dewey’s loss. In January 1945, Church demanded a greater role for African Americans in the RNC, and chairman Herbert Brownell (a member of Dewey’s inner circle) responded by replacing the aged Colored Voters Division with a new Minorities Division. Inspired by Dewey’s successful black outreach in New York, the division was headed by Valores (“Val”) Washington, the former general manager of the Chicago Defender, who caught Brownell’s eye after publishing a 1944 booklet touting the civil rights records of liberal Republican governors. During an August meeting in New York, the RAC issued another “Declaration to the Republican Party,” demanding that the GOP’s congressmen fulfill the FEPC pledge they made in their 1944 platform. Over the next two years, RAC members continued to promote the declaration to the national committee and Republican politicians as part of an intense lobbying campaign for federal and state FEPC legislation.⁴⁸

By the mid-1940s, the passage of a federal fair employment law had become one of the primary objectives of black Republicans and the broader civil rights leadership. In addition to leading the RAC, Church partnered with A. Philip Randolph to form the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. Despite their differences on economic policy, Randolph recognized that Church “was a persona grata in the offices of Republican leaders of place and power … there was no other person of color in the country who could reach as many outstanding Republican spokesmen of power as he could.” Working closely with NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, Jr., Church canvassed the halls of Congress, sometimes waiting up to five hours in politicians’ offices. He touted fair employment as a potential Republican alternative to the New Deal, one that would open jobs to African Americans in places where they were previously barred and help them get off government relief and instead earn for themselves. In private letters to Republican leaders, Church argued, “FEPC is bread and butter, rent and fuel and clothing for millions of colored voters.” Though Church’s argument swayed some congressional Republicans to support an FEPC law, it failed to convince Ohio Senator Robert Taft to place fair employment above the “rights” of businesses. And as the leader of midwestern and conservative Republicans, Taft’s opposition ensured the failure of any FEPC legislation in Congress through the decade.⁴⁹

Though unsuccessful in Washington, D.C., black Republicans saw a groundswell of fair employment legislation on the state level. Nearly all of the eleven states that passed FEPC laws between 1945 and 1951 were controlled by Republican governors or Republican legislatures. Eight of the eleven victories were pushed through by both a Republican governor and legislature in states from New England to the Pacific Northwest. Republicans also sponsored municipal fair employment ordinances, such as Cleveland’s extensive 1950 law that covered both public and private-sector jobs. Most of the FEPC measures passed during this period were modeled after New York’s Ives-Quinn bill. Signed into law by Governor Dewey on March 12, 1945, the bill was promoted by powerful liberal Republicans Fiorello La Guardia and Irving Ives. It banned racial discrimination in employment and created a commission to investigate claims. Within a year after its passage, rail companies eliminated “colored only” sections on trains, unions eradicated white-only clauses, and many businesses hired their first black employees. Within two years, the number of black women employed in clerical and sales jobs more than quadrupled.⁵⁰

Many black voters were drawn to pro-FEPC Republicans on the state level, and leading up to the 1946 midterm elections the RAC focused on promoting candidates who supported fair employment. The elections bore fruit: black voters played an essential role in the victories of liberal Republican senators and congressmen in Missouri, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago. In Kentucky, Senator John Sherman Cooper and Congressman Thruston Morton received an estimated 90 percent of the black vote, and black Republican Dennis Henderson was elected to the General Assembly. The passage of FEPC laws under Republican governors and state legislatures, coupled with the 1945 death of Roosevelt and continued disillusionment with the prominent role of white southerners in the Democratic Party, had reversed the trend of black Democratic support that had begun ten years earlier. While some black Democrats simply chose to remain at home, an estimated 15 percent nationwide switched their support to the Republican Party, which assumed control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932.⁵¹

The 1946 elections also launched the political careers of two of the mid-century’s most important black Republicans: Grant Reynolds and Archibald Carey, Jr. As an army chaplain during World War II, Reynolds was honorably discharged after his commanding officers grew tired of his complaints against racial discrimination. His continued activism after returning home to New York drew him into activist circles, and he listed Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins among his friends. He was also an ally of Thomas Dewey, who helped pay for his education at Columbia Law School and appointed him state commissioner of corrections after he delivered a fiery 1944 campaign speech on the governor’s behalf in Madison Square Garden. In 1946, Reynolds ran against Harlem’s venerable Democratic congressman Adam Clayton Powell, campaigning on a liberal platform that called for a substantial rise in the national minimum wage, anti-poll tax legislation, a national FEPC, low-rent public housing, and an end to segregation in the military. Attacking “Parttime Powell’s” notorious absentee record, he earned the support of some of Harlem’s most recognized citizens, with boxer Joe Louis, author Zora Neale Hurston, singer-actress Etta Moten, and A. Philip Randolph’s wife working in his campaign headquarters. His supporters argued that it was important for Harlem to be represented by a Republican who would work alongside liberals in the GOP to break the stranglehold of the Democratic South on civil rights legislation.⁵²

As Powell did in all his elections, he ran in the Republican primary, and his loss to Reynolds that spring was the only electoral defeat of his entire career. Fearing another, more catastrophic upset, Democratic stars, including Eleanor Roosevelt, rallied to Powell’s side, providing important financial support and campaign appearances. Though Harlem media advertised the race as “giant versus giant,” and Reynolds pulled some of the strongest numbers of any Republican congressional candidate in Harlem before or since, the wildly popular Powell cruised to victory on election day. The relative strength of Reynolds’s campaign, however, demonstrated to both parties the full emergence of black Republicans who were willing to challenge both parties to confront the existing racial status quo.⁵³

Though Reynolds could not overcome the Powell juggernaut, militant black Republicans scored a major victory in Chicago with the election of Archibald Carey, Jr., to the Board of Aldermen. Fair-skinned, red-haired, and freckled, Carey came from an elite family entrenched in GOP politics, with his father serving as postmaster in Athens, Georgia, prior to becoming an advisor to Chicago mayor William Thompson. Carey, Jr., continued in his father’s partisan footsteps, believing that southern Democrats would always hold back their party when it came to civil rights. As the pastor of Chicago’s influential Woodlawn AME Church, he was also one of the country’s leading black ministers. Through Carey’s financial and institutional support, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement, was formed inside Woodlawn AME, with his personal office becoming its first headquarters. The church served as the host location of CORE’s first national convention in 1943, and the organization’s cofounder, James Farmer, described Carey as “CORE’s patron saint.” In his 1946 campaign, Carey challenged incumbent Old Guard Republican Oscar DePriest, who was elected alderman of Chicago’s Third Ward in 1943. Running on a platform that emphasized his civil rights militancy, Carey won the Republican primary and the subsequent general election against venerable Democrat Roy Washington.⁵⁴

Carey also served stints as vice president of the Chicago NAACP during his nine-year tenure on the Board of Aldermen, where he established himself as one of the city’s most radical elected officials. He sponsored measures that expanded public housing, established the Chicago Council on Human Relations, and created a Division of Human Relations in the police department that offered courses “to teach police to protect minorities.” In 1948, he sponsored an ordinance that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing and provided housing to residents displaced by “slum clearance” programs. The “Carey Ordinance” was met with a fury of opposition by the city’s Democratic machine, with Mayor Martin Kennelly taking the floor in a board meeting for the only time of his entire term to voice opposition. Though the open housing law fell to defeat, Carey emerged, in the words of a subsequent profile in the New Republic, as one of the nation’s “most vigorous fighters” for progressive urban reform.⁵⁵

Following his defeat by Adam Clayton Powell, Grant Reynolds set his sights on military desegregation, forming the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training with A. Philip Randolph. On March 22, 1948, Randolph and Reynolds met with President Harry Truman, and warned that African Americans would no longer settle for a segregated military. The duo appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee the following week, and threatened to encourage African Americans to boycott the draft unless the military banned discrimination. Using his ties to Governor Dewey, Reynolds courted Republicans to join his crusade, and led efforts to include a platform plank at the Republican National Convention in June that called for an end to military segregation. Congressional Republicans followed suit. Even the conservative Senator Robert Taft allied with liberal Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in sponsoring anti-discrimination amendments to the 1948 draft bill. In the House, Speaker Joseph Martin and Jacob Javits joined black Democrats Adam Clayton Powell and William Dawson in offering similar amendments. Having secured Republican support, Reynolds and Randolph wrote a letter to Truman informing him that he must act, since there was now “a bipartisan mandate to end military segregation.” On July 26, 1948, Truman yielded and issued an executive order integrating the armed forces.⁵⁶

While Republicans in Congress embraced the opportunity to embarrass Truman on the issue of military desegregation, they were far less willing to fulfill their own promises from the 1946 campaign to pass a federal fair employment law, despite controlling Congress. Conservative Republicans joined with southern Democrats in opposing FEPC legislation, and in a rare moment of candor, Speaker of the House Joseph Martin, who had publicly endorsed the party’s fair employment plank in 1944, told a group of black Republicans in 1947, “I’ll be frank with you. We are not going to pass a FEPC bill,” as the party’s corporate donors “would stop their contributions if we passed a law.” While he assured them with a vague promise that “we intend to do a lot for the Negroes,” the damage had already been done in the party’s refusal to actively pursue a permanent federal FEPC. Though liberal Republican congressmen like Irving Ives of New York and James Fulton of Pennsylvania sponsored legislation in 1947 and 1948, it quickly fizzled without significant support from either party’s leadership.⁵⁷

Recalling his endorsements of the GOP in 1944 and 1946, Edgar G. Brown of the National Negro Council described the Republican-controlled Congress as the “cruelest disillusionment” since Reconstruction. In October 1947, the Republican American Committee issued a statement claiming they were “deeply disturbed and justifiably apprehensive over the failure of the first Republican-controlled Congress in sixteen (16) years,” and warned party leaders “of the dangers which lie ahead if it continues its policy of inaction.” Signed by some of the country’s leading black Republicans, including Robert Church, Lawrence O. Payne, Charles W. Anderson, Archibald Carey, and George W. Lee, the document advised congressional Republicans they would no longer be content with promises, “but will demand … actual performance and fulfillment of platform pledges and campaign promises.”⁵⁸

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