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CHAPTER 2

Flirting with Republicans: Black Voters in the 1950s

The return of the Republican Party to the presidency in the 1950s initiated a decade of modest resurgence in black support for the GOP. During the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, black Republicans were the beneficiaries of high-ranking federal appointments and influential positions within the party, which remained a political option for southern and middle-class blacks. By the time of the 1956 election, strategists from both parties saw cracks in the New Deal coalition, as African Americans showed signs of breaking ranks with a Democratic Party that was home to southern racists. As black journalist James Hicks wrote after a strong Republican showing in 1956, African Americans had temporarily “divorced” the Democratic Party, and “the divorcee is carrying on a flirtation with a new friend,” the GOP. Hicks’s observation about black voters in the 1950s points to the continued flexibility of black politics during a decade when their partisan affiliation had been far from solidified by the New Deal.¹

Eisenhower’s moderate ideology aligned well with the Eastern Establishment, whose powerbrokers—Thomas Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Herbert Brownell, in particular—organized a “Draft Ike” movement early in 1952. Fearing that the conservative Robert Taft might win the party’s nomination, 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 Eisenhower, who reassured him that he supported military integration “one hundred percent,” and was “immensely sorry” for bowing to the “pressures of war” when he testified against it. The general further told Carey that he would consider signing a federal FEPC law if it was passed by Congress, and pledged commitment to “full freedom” for African Americans. During the final days of the campaign, Carey again met with Eisenhower, and the two traveled together from New York to Chicago, where they rode in an open car through black neighborhoods and placed a wreath on a monument honoring black soldiers. On the night of November 3, the two appeared together on a national television broadcast, where Carey delivered excerpts from his fiery convention speech.⁹

Val Washington also placed E. Frederic Morrow on Eisenhower’s staff. Morrow had previously served twelve years as an NAACP field secretary, where he was twice almost murdered during his investigations of lynchings. He had also led the effort to integrate the New Jersey Young Republicans, after a series of petitions to state GOP leaders, becoming one of the organization’s first black members and eventually its vice chairman. In 1952, he was approached by Washington, who wanted “strong, able Blacks” with proven militancy “in every echelon of the party structure during the campaign,” so that they could “influence the leaders of the party and liberalize their thinking.” Morrow accepted Washington’s offer and was assigned by Eisenhower’s staff to the official campaign train. Just ten days after being hired, he refused to ride the train “for token purposes” in “strategic areas,” and threatened to quit unless he was used as more than just a stage prop. He was soon reassigned duties on the train as a speechwriter and drafted responses for the campaign’s “Truth Squad.” At a campaign stop in Morrow’s home town of Hackensack, New Jersey, Eisenhower defended his aide after a group of local officials complained that his critiques of party leaders caused them “great embarrassment.” According to Morrow, Eisenhower “gave them hell for intruding into his personal bailiwick,” and during his public remarks mentioned Morrow by name and praised his service to the party.¹⁰

Eisenhower received the endorsement of some of the country’s most prominent African Americans. Edward G. Brown’s National Negro Council returned to GOP ranks and denounced the Stevenson-Sparkman ticket as “a Democrat-Dixiecrat coalition.” Bishop D. Ward Nichols, head of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which at the time represented 1.6 million African Americans, told the press that he would “vigorously support” Eisenhower, after he privately promised to “take immediate steps” to desegregate Washington, D.C. Leading clubwomen also endorsed the Republican nominee, such as Jane Morrow Spaulding of the National Association of Colored Women, who served as cochair of the advisory committee of the Women’s Division of Citizens for Eisenhower. Daisy Lampkin, national NAACP board member and cofounder of the National Council of Negro Women, left the Democratic Party to join the Republican campaign, declaring it “impossible … as a self-respecting American and an intelligent Negro” to support a ticket that included Sparkman.¹¹

Privately, Lampkin feared that her Democratic colleagues in the NAACP, particularly Walter White and Roy Wilkins, were tempering their criticisms of Sparkman to help Stevenson. Believing the organization’s national leadership was overly partisan, she warned White, “It would be tragic if the GOP wins with no Negro support. We would be in a very bad bargaining position.” Similarly, as vice president of Chicago’s NAACP, Archibald Carey privately told Wilkins that while “I still love you … you are horribly biased.” Carey was livid over an NAACP report that criticized Sparkman and Nixon as equally unsatisfactory candidates, “leaving the unwary public believing that on civil rights their records were the same.” He continued, “I think you honestly believe that all the Democratic talk for civil rights is genuine, whereas the Republican opposition represents an even deeper sinister and venal attitude.” Carey could understand African American support for Truman, though he believed Truman was more “talk” than action, but it was difficult to comprehend why black leaders would support a ticket that included a southern segregationist. To black Republicans, Democrats were still the party of the South, as proven by Sparkman’s nomination, and could never deliver on empty civil rights promises made by party liberals. White and Wilkins, however, were willing to overlook Sparkman in hopes that Stevenson would continue Truman’s example of supporting both black civil rights and working-class interests.¹²

Eisenhower welcomed black endorsements, but civil rights were secondary to his emphasis on foreign policy and “honest government.” He also believed he could use his enormous national appeal to make inroads among moderate whites in the South drawn to the GOP’s support of the private sector. He was greeted by a Charlotte, North Carolina, crowd of forty thousand, and his visit marked the first time a presidential nominee had campaigned in the city since 1896. A similar crowd welcomed him in Columbia, South Carolina, where he received the endorsement of the segregationist Democratic governor, James Byrnes, and professed his fondness for the minstrel song “Dixie.” On the other hand, he did not shy away from civil rights, telling the crowd, “We will move forward rapidly to make equality of opportunity a living fact for every American.” In another southern campaign stop, George W. Lee and Benjamin Hooks organized an Eisenhower tour of the heart of black Memphis, Beale Street, and the general made an “impromptu” stop at Lee’s office. Additionally, Jesse Lawrence, Kentucky’s black Republican state representative, joined the Eisenhower train as it moved through Indiana and Kentucky. In Louisville, GOP Congressional candidate John Robinson insisted that African Americans sit on stage with Eisenhower, who told a crowd of ten thousand that his administration would “be guided by one idea … there shall be no second-class citizenship among all Americans.”¹³

On election day, despite support for Eisenhower among many in the black middle class, more than 80 percent of black voters remained loyal to the party of Franklin Roosevelt. The middle class made up only 10 to 13 percent of the black population in the 1950s, leaving the majority of African Americans impoverished or in the working class. While many prominent blacks were aghast at Sparkman’s nomination, it would take more for most African Americans to leave a party that represented, in their minds, workers like themselves. Those in the middle class could focus on combating Jim Crow through the two-party system, but, in the words of E. Frederic Morrow, “civil rights is not the burning question” among the majority of black voters, many of whom feared “loss of jobs gained under Democrats.” According to Morrow, “this powerful desire to hold on to the status quo was the most difficult problem for Republican campaigners,” as many black workers felt uncomfortable deserting the Democrats after they “had prospered in a fashion never known before the 20 years prior to 1952.” That a majority of black voters cast ballots for a presidential ticket that included an avowed segregationist from Alabama suggests the primacy of economics and New Deal-era government activism to many black voters. Among middle-class Republicans, many of whom were already skeptical of government relief, civil rights and pragmatic two-party politics were essential to their rationale for supporting Eisenhower, who they believed would join with liberals in the Eastern Establishment in combating institutional discrimination.¹⁴

Among black workers and the poor, Eisenhower faced the same problems as Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey had, in failing to shake the image of the GOP as the party of elites. As one Democratic organizer argued, black voters should not give up the “many basic gains for the common man” by supporting the party of “rich, privileged corporations.” When only nuanced differences exited between the civil rights positions of Eisenhower and Stevenson, the legacy of Roosevelt and Truman outweighed any hypothetical promises Republicans could offer. James Nabrit, Jr., a Republican NAACP lawyer, noted, “as a member of the working class,” most black voters in northern cities would only support candidates “which have as one of their major policies the welfare of workers.” Political scientist Samuel Lubell similarly concluded in the 1950s that “Negro attachment to the Democratic party has been as much economic as racial in motivation. As the lowest-paid worker in our industrial society, the Negro is both class and race conscious.” Thus far, aside from advocating for the creation of a national FEPC, black Republicans had no answer to the question of economic interest.¹⁵

Though the figures among black voters were disheartening, black Republicans saw Eisenhower’s election as a boon to restoring their influence in federal patronage. E. Frederic Morrow advised Eisenhower’s chief of staff, former New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams, to place “Negroes in positions of responsibility wherever the party has jurisdiction,” and Adams later noted that the president himself “made a point of insisting that he wanted qualified Negroes to be considered.” The Minorities Division became the party’s central funnel for black appointees, and on Val Washington’s watch Eisenhower far surpassed the appointment rates of Roosevelt and Truman. According to Washington, he and his assistant, Thalia Thomas, “cracked job barriers in many departments.” Whenever they were informed of a “lily-white agency,” they would immediately send “a letter prodding them” to hire blacks, and would also “ship a copy to the White House.” Major black appointments included Jewell Stratford Rogers as assistant U.S. district attorney, L. B. Toomer as registrar of the U.S. Treasury, and Scovel Richardson as chairman of the Board of Parole. Robert Church, Jr.’s daughter, Roberta Church, became the highest ranking black woman in the federal government, given a policy-making position in the Department of Labor. Washington also helped secure a sub-cabinet post for J. Ernest Wilkins as assistant secretary of labor, one of the highest positions ever offered to an African American.¹⁶

To assist Washington’s efforts in securing federal jobs for African Americans, Eisenhower created the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy. He named Archibald Carey as vice-chairman, and by 1957 Carey had been promoted to chairman, making him the first African American head of a President’s Committee. Through his efforts, the number of blacks employed in white-collar federal jobs nearly doubled, to more than 9,000 by 1960. Segregated offices in Atlanta and other southern cities were eliminated. In New Orleans, the number of black federal employees increased by almost 600 percent. Though some agencies in the Deep South still did not have any black employees, and many offices just hired tokens, Carey was proud of personally overseeing “a manifest rise” in thousands of jobs directed to African Americans.¹⁷

Eisenhower’s most important appointment, however, was also one of his most bungled. Though Sherman Adams had promised E. Frederic Morrow a position in the new administration, Morrow approached Val Washington months after the inauguration without a job. Washington “probed and probed” the administration on its failure to appoint the outspoken Morrow, and the two deduced that an unnamed “someone of great prominence and power had blocked the appointment.” According to Morrow, Washington launched a “relentless job campaign” that succeeded in “embarrassing the administration into looking for a job for me.” He was eventually given a position in the Department of Commerce, and in 1955 was promoted to administrative officer for special projects on the president’s staff, making him the first African American to have an office inside the White House. Though his office provided access to close confidants of the president, Morrow’s official duties focused on the mundane, replying to letters to the president relating to issues of civil rights, and overseeing office and parking assignments.¹⁸

In addition to black appointments, Eisenhower amassed a positive record in other areas as well. In his first State of the Union address, he pledged to rid Washington, D.C., of segregation, a change that had long been a goal of black activists outraged by blatant discrimination in the nation’s capital. Weeks earlier, Mary Church Terrell, a lifelong Republican, first president of the National Association of Colored Women, founding member of the NAACP, and sister of Robert Church, Jr., had led a series of boycotts, pickets, and sit-ins targeting D.C. businesses that refused to serve African Americans. Attorney General Herbert Brownell assisted Terrell in the legal campaign against the city’s segregation laws, and argued alongside black lawyers when the case reached the Supreme Court in 1953. The court sided with the administration, and the city was ordered to immediately desegregate places of public accommodation.¹⁹

Figure 3. E. Frederic Morrow is congratulated following his swearing-in ceremony at the White House as administrative officer for special projects. Left to right: Bernard Shanley, Val Washington, Morrow, and New Jersey Representative William Widnall, July 11, 1955. National Park Service photo, 72-1447-3, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

The president also fulfilled his campaign promise to rid vestiges of segregation from the armed forces. Though Truman had issued an executive order, segregated facilities still existed in much of the South. In his first year in office, Eisenhower enlisted Maxwell Rabb, a white aide sympathetic to African Americans, to ensure the desegregation of mess halls, lavatories, and drinking fountains in Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina. Additionally, he ordered forty-seven Veterans Administration hospitals to integrate their facilities, and directed schools on southern military bases to open their doors to black students. By the fall of 1954, the Department of Defense formally announced that the military’s last segregated unit had been eliminated.²⁰

Eisenhower’s judicial appointments were his most lasting contribution to civil rights. Of particular importance were appointees to southern judicial circuits who later ensured that civil rights laws were enforced in the 1960s. Eisenhower’s tendency to take Attorney General Brownell’s advice regarding court nominees led to a steady stream of liberal appointments that included Elbert Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom, Frank M. Johnson, and other southern Republicans who had previously allied with Black-and-Tans. During his first year on the Fifth Circuit, Johnson made national headlines by ordering the desegregation of Montgomery’s public buses after the successful black boycott. Even more important were Eisenhower’s Supreme Court appointments, particularly Earl Warren, John Marshall Harlan II, and William Brennan, who played an active role in the court’s progressive decisions of the 1950s and 1960s.²¹

The first major decision of Chief Justice Warren was Brown v. Board of Education, a case that Eisenhower’s Justice Department had been involved with since his inauguration. Early in 1953, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall met several times with Brownell, who submitted an amicus brief that called for the overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson, the legal backbone of Jim Crow, and the integration of public schools. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the NAACP and the Justice Department, paving the way for the legal dismantling of segregation. After the decision, Eisenhower told Walter White, “we had passed, in this year, a milestone of social advance in the U.S.,” and claimed in his memoir that “there can be no question that the judgment of the Court was right.” On the other hand, Eisenhower as president never publicly endorsed Brown, a failure that perhaps emboldened opponents of the decision. White House speechwriter Arthur Larson alleged that the president privately said, “I personally think the decision was wrong,” and Earl Warren claimed the president told him that white southerners had legitimate concerns about their daughters attending school with “big overgrown Negroes.”²²

Regardless of Eisenhower’s private beliefs, the RNC and black Republicans immediately attached the victory to his administration. Richard Tobin, a public relations specialist with the national committee, encouraged Republicans to tout their relationship with Warren, arguing that “in the context of the Supreme Court decisions under a Chief Justice appointed by President Eisenhower, decisions as historic as the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln, we have a wonderful story to tell.” The Minorities Division issued a press release stating, “This administration can take pride in having thrown its full weight behind the vigorous presentation of this case to the Supreme Court by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr.” E. Frederic Morrow similarly declared before a Philadelphia audience that the case was “typical of the healthy climate-of-equality that prevails in the Eisenhower Administration.”²³

Because of his early administrative actions in the field of civil rights, by 1955 Eisenhower had received the most distinguished prize given by black journalists, the Russwurm Award, and the Chicago Defender’s Robert F. Abbott Memorial Award, given to the person who “did the most to extend democracy at home and abroad.” Even the NAACP’s Walter White and Roy Wilkins, whom black Republicans had criticized as Democratic partisans in 1952, praised Eisenhower’s first years in office. In his 1954 “Report of the Executive Secretary,” White argued, “we owe a debt of gratitude to President Eisenhower for his firm stand against racial segregation,” and separately, Wilkins praised the president’s “personal leadership where the executive can act.” Iowa’s largest black newspaper declared, “no president in our lifetime has struck such a blow against segregation.”²⁴

Seeing these gains, African Americans began to warm to the GOP in the 1950s, with 63 percent of blacks approving Eisenhower’s overall performance by 1955. Polls conducted from 1952 to 1960 found that self-identified Republicans increased from approximately 10 percent of African Americans polled in 1952 to around 21 percent by 1960. Support for the Republican Party remained strong in southern cities with active Black-and-Tan organizations, especially Atlanta and Memphis. During the decade, the Republican leadership of the nominally bipartisan Atlanta Negro Voters League organized thousands of new black voters inside GOP ranks, and George W. Lee’s Lincoln League added nearly fifty thousand African Americans to Memphis voting rolls.²⁵

Republican support among black voters was also high in the border states of Maryland and Kentucky, both of which had a history of competition between moderate Republicans and southern-leaning Democrats. In Baltimore, 44 percent of black voters were registered Republican in 1957, and over 55 percent of that year’s newly registered voters registered with the GOP. The city’s Republican mayor during World War II, Theodore McKeldin, served as governor from 1951 to 1959, and his electoral coalition relied on black voters, whom he won by frequenting black churches and embracing civil rights. In Louisville, Kentucky, 64 percent of registered black voters were Republicans in 1952. They played a significant role in securing the U.S. Senate victory of John Sherman Cooper, who ran to the left of his Democratic opponent on issues of labor, economic relief for the poor, and civil rights.²⁶

The GOP also remained popular within the black middle class. Polls taken during the 1950s found that 30 percent of northern middle-class African Americans were registered Republicans, with numbers potentially higher in under-analyzed rural and southern black communities. Of those who provided their political affiliation in the 1950 edition of Who’s Who in Colored America, a volume that represented a cross section of over two thousand black professionals, approximately 45 percent self-identified as Democrats, 35 percent as Republican, and 20 percent as independent/other. In the mid-1950s, the NAACP’s Henry Lee Moon described “the increasing economic stratification within the Negro community with the development of a more stable and substantial middle class with Republican leanings.” Similarly, E. Frederic Morrow wrote in 1956 that there was a distinct “cleavage of class” in black communities, and that those from the professional classes “have been pre-dominantly Republican.” After a meeting with the National Negro Insurance Association, Val Washington reported high levels of Republican support from the organization’s leaders, who supported Eisenhower’s civil rights stance and were not moved by “the depression psychology which is being spread by the Democrats.”²⁷

Support for the Republican Party was particularly strong in black fraternal organizations, most of which drew their membership from middle-class ministers, lawyers, physicians, and businessmen. Atlanta Republican leader John Wesley Dobbs, for example, was also the longstanding Grand Master of Georgia’s black Masons. The national president of Phi Beta Sigma, one of the largest black college fraternities, was a devout Republican who actively campaigned on behalf of GOP candidates. In Baltimore in 1951, members of the Knights of Pythias formed the State Allied Republican Club, which convened in local lodges and lobbied for civil rights and state patronage for black Republicans.²⁸

The group with the strongest ties to the GOP was the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World (IBPOEW). Known for their purple fezzes and ubiquitous lodges that spanned the country from the Deep South to the urban North and far West, the IBPOEW, often referred to as the “black Elks,” was the country’s largest black fraternal organization, having a peak membership of eight hundred thousand by the late 1950s. The black Elks had practically been an extension of the Republican Party since the 1920s, and their national leadership was composed of some of the biggest Republican names of the era, including Black-and-Tans Perry Howard and Henry Lincoln Johnson. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Grand Exalted Ruler J. Finley Wilson, a follower of Robert Church, Jr., rallied members behind the GOP. In the early 1950s, Wilson was replaced by Robert H. Johnson, a veteran of the Philadelphia Republican machine and past chairman of the Negro Division of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee. As Grand Exalted Ruler, he toured on behalf of the Republican ticket in 1954, and on his watch Republicans continued to dominate IBPOEW leadership. His second in command was a friend from Philadelphia GOP circles, Hobson Reynolds, who succeeded him as Grand Exalted Ruler in 1960.²⁹

Republicans interested in appealing to black voters recognized the black Elks as an important base. RNC Chairman Hugh Scott was the keynote speaker at the 1948 Grand Lodge Session, and black entertainer Lionel Hampton used California Elk lodges as concert venues that doubled as GOP voter registration centers in the mid-1940s. Perry Howard claimed at a meeting of the RNC Executive Session in 1950 that the Elk “political machine … is about 90 per cent Republican,” and inside the White House, E. Frederic Morrow told an IBPOEW official, “I stand ready at all times to be of whatever assistance I possibly can and certainly will continue to work to have all Elkdom embrace the Republican Party.”³⁰

Like other black Republicans, IBPOEW leadership was committed to promoting racial equality and prodding party leaders to endorse civil rights. During the debate over fair employment laws in the 1940s and early 1950s, the Elks petitioned for state and national legislation, and provided their Baltimore lodges as headquarters for the National Negro Congress’s fair employment lobbying campaign. As a delegate to the 1948 Republican National Convention, Hobson Reynolds publicly protested its weak civil rights platform, and Elk representatives frequently appeared before congressional committees on behalf of a federal FEPC and military desegregation. In 1956, Reynolds traveled to Alabama to present an IBPOEW financial contribution to the Montgomery Improvement Association to help sustain their bus boycott. That same year at the Elks’ national convention, Grand Exalted Ruler Johnson told members from Louisiana and Alabama, states where the NAACP had been outlawed, that they could meet in Elk lodges so that the NAACP could “carry on its work … under the banner of the Elks.” The IBPOEW also heavily promoted black higher education. Memphis Black-and-Tan leader George W. Lee served as Grand Commissioner of Education of national Elks throughout the 1950s, and dramatically intensified their college scholarship program. Using his fundraising network in middle-class and Republican circles, Lee doled out over four million dollars in Elk scholarships during his tenure, many of them given to future civil rights leaders.³¹

Figure 4. George W. Lee, in IBPOEW regalia, with New York Senator Kenneth Keating and A. Philip Randolph, circa 1950s. Photograph by Maurice Sorrell. Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

Throughout the 1950s, black Republicans continued to earn ranking positions within local parties and state governments. In 1952, Roberta Church of Tennessee became the first black woman elected to a southern party’s state executive committee. By the middle of the decade, Julius Adams secured one of the most powerful spots in New York Republican politics, serving on the executive committee of the New York Republican Committee. William O. Walker headed the Ohio Republican Council and served on the Republican State Central and Executive Committee. In Pennsylvania, E. Washington Rhodes served on the state parole board, and in Illinois Joseph D. Bibb headed the Department of Public Safety, which had jurisdiction over the state police. Arthur Fletcher, the first black player for professional football’s Baltimore Colts, served as a vice chairman of the Kansas State Republican Central Committee, alongside another African American, Prentice Townsend. In 1954, he became vice campaign chairman to progressive Republican gubernatorial candidate Fred Hall. Emphasizing Hall’s support for a state fair-employment law, Fletcher spearheaded registration drives that added ten thousand blacks to voting rolls, and convinced African Americans to join his crusade to oust the party’s conservative Republican machine. Following Hall’s upset victories in both the primary and general elections, in which black voters played a pivotal role, Fletcher was named deputy state highway commissioner, an important position in a decade of extensive interstate highway expansion.³²

Republicans in the 1950s also experimented with slating African American Congressional candidates in mixed-race, Democratic-leaning districts, hoping to draw black votes away from white incumbents. In 1952, Lawrence O. Payne won the endorsement of the GOP in his campaign against Robert Crosser in Ohio’s twenty-first district. Though Payne did significantly better than previous Republicans, Crosser, bolstered by strong ties to unions, easily won the race with biracial working-class support. In 1958, Republicans in Los Angeles nominated Crispus A. Wright to challenge Franklin Roosevelt’s oldest son, Congressman James Roosevelt. An active member in the California civil rights movement of the 1940s, Wright actively promoted the Los Angeles Sentinel’s “Don’t Spend Your Money Where You Can’t Work” campaign and prepared briefs in the NAACP’s successful case before the U.S. Supreme Court that prohibited restrictive covenants. On election day, Wright lost not only the election, but also the majority of black voters. The name Roosevelt was particularly powerful among the black working class, and Wright, himself one of Los Angeles’s wealthiest African Americans, could not shake the perception of the Republican Party as elitist. The Los Angeles Tribune summed up Wright’s difficulty, and the difficulty of many black Republican candidates in the 1950s, noting that while he was “intelligent … well educated … personal, respectable, [and] militant … Wright is also, and regrettably, a Republican.” That even black Republicans with militant civil rights agendas could not garner a majority of black votes against white candidates again pointed to the priority working-class African Americans placed on Democratic economic policies.³³

This preference among the black working class was also borne out in Chicago. With Windy City residents Archibald Carey, Jr., and Val Washington in positions of national prominence, one of the central targets of black Republicans in the 1950s was the city’s black Democratic Congressman, William Dawson. As a cog in the city’s Democratic machine, Dawson had unfettered access to power and organizational resources. In return for his unwavering support, Illinois Democrats provided him with immense patronage power and leadership positions inside the party. Though this ensured that government jobs and benefits flowed to black Chicagoans, it also came a price: his silence on controversial issues that might embarrass Democrats, especially civil rights. By the 1950s, black activists had grown weary of Dawson’s refusal to criticize southern Democrats or embrace civil rights; he even joined the majority of Congressional Democrats in voting against a school-integration bill. Even the solidly Democratic Chicago Defender criticized his “evasive” civil rights stance, concluding, “Bill Dawson is, by all odds, ultra-conservative.”³⁴

In 1950, the local and state Republican party endorsed Carey as their congressional candidate. Val Washington’s Minorities Division dedicated six weeks exclusively to the campaign, which centered on a platform that contrasted Carey’s civil rights militancy to Dawson’s accommodationist role within the Democratic Party. According to Carey, Dawson was incapable of challenging his party to reject its southern wing, but Carey already had enough clout within GOP circles to join liberal Republicans in pressuring conservatives and businessmen to back civil rights. Regardless of his respected stature within Chicago’s black community, and solid civil rights record, Carey lost handily to Dawson. Throughout the rest of the decade, Washington continued his “buck Dawson” crusade, sponsoring numerous progressive candidates, including Edgar G. Brown of the National Negro Council. As part of his failed congressional campaign, Brown led a hundredminister delegation to Washington to demand that the Senate investigate the fatal bombing of Florida activist Harry Moore. Like Carey, he lost in a landslide.³⁵

In 1958, black Republicans nominated one of the best-known activists in the country, T. R. M. Howard to run against Dawson. Howard had previously headed Mound Bayou, Mississippi’s NAACP, and founded one of the most important organizations in the state’s civil rights movement, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. He joined Charles Evers in attempting to register black voters in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and made national headlines with his vocal criticisms of the state following the lynching of Emmett Till. In the field of civil rights, there was no comparison between the aggressive, bombastic Howard and the ever cautious Dawson, who remained characteristically quiet after Till’s murder. In 1956, Dawson was greeted with boos and forced to leave the stage, speech unfinished, at a meeting of six-hundred ministers in Chicago after he discouraged them from sending church contributions to help southern black protest movements, arguing that change in the South was best handled by politicians. Howard tackled Dawson’s civil rights reticence head on with slogans like “‘Uncle Tom’ leadership has got to go.” However, like Dawson’s opponents before him, Howard received less than 30 percent of the vote, even with a campaign appearance by President Eisenhower on his behalf. Of three hundred and fifty precincts, Howard won only five, which were located in the district’s wealthiest areas.³⁶

Black Republican congressional candidates like Carey, Brown, and Howard epitomized the Republican Party’s central problem in connecting with the black working class. While they had stronger civil rights records than their Democratic opponent, they lacked the organizational resources of political machines and labor unions. Most importantly, the economic record of Democrats proved far more vital to securing mass black support. While middle-class African Americans could potentially be swung by an emphasis on civil rights, the failure of black Republicans to systematically address issues of economics and poverty lay at the center of their congressional defeats. A particularly revealing 1957 survey of African Americans nationwide found that a majority of those polled selected the Republican Party when asked which party was best for them on the issue of civil rights. When asked “the best party for jobs,” however, the same respondents chose Democrats by a margin of almost four to one. There certainly was sympathy towards eradicating southern Jim Crow, but the harsh economic realities that plagued black communities in northern cities provided little incentive for most workers to leave a party they perceived as on the side of unions, workers, and the poor. In the words of a black Democrat from Philadelphia, “It does not matter very much to colored people here what is going on in the South. The colored man votes according to what will affect his pocket-book, and he knows that the Democrats are the party of the poor man.” On the other hand, to many black Republicans, the civil rights of black southerners took precedence over the bread-and-butter economic issues of northern workers.³⁷

Nevertheless, black Republicans did find electoral success at the state level. In Chicago, each legislative district elected three representatives to the Illinois General Assembly. In the voting booth, one could select three different candidates or cast all three votes for the same candidate. A number of Republicans found success in this ballot-sharing method. In 1957, for example, three Republicans were among the ten African Americans in the Illinois legislature. The most prominent of these legislators was William H. Robinson, who served from 1954 to 1964. A social worker and militant advocate for racial equality, Robinson was a vocal critic of William Dawson’s stranglehold over the district. To him, Dawson was the “king of Uncle Toms in this country,” whose cautious approach to civil rights and kowtowing to the Democratic machine were a “disgrace.” As a Republican, Robinson argued that he truly represented the interests of Chicago’s black citizens because he was free to speak out against Democrats without repercussions. His outspoken rhetoric earned him the support of the city’s most radical black activists, including communist labor organizer Frank Lumpkin. In the Illinois House, Robinson became one of the leading supporters of open housing legislation and laws that required equal rent for white and black tenants.³⁸

Black Republicans also had electoral success in state races elsewhere. In 1950, Charles Stokes became Seattle’s first African American state legislator, and represented the city’s black voters in Olympia until 1958. Like many black Republican politicians, he had a long record of both GOP and civil rights activism. He had previously served as vice chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, and, as president of the Seattle NAACP, he was the chief lobbyist for Washington’s Fair Employment Practice Act of 1949. Likewise, Harry A. Cole became Maryland’s first black state senator in 1954. Prior to his victory, Cole had served as an assistant attorney general, where he focused his attention on increasing and protecting the state’s black voters. He furthered his civil rights agenda in Annapolis, sponsoring numerous bills to eliminate the state’s remaining racial barriers.³⁹

As demonstrated by their political candidates, black Republicans in the 1950s were strong advocates and intraparty lobbyists for civil rights. Throughout the decade, Archibald Carey remained active in the Congress of Racial Equality, National Urban League, and Chicago NAACP. During the Montgomery bus boycott, he organized a prayer meeting at the Chicago Coliseum attended by 7,000 people, which raised thousands of dollars for the Montgomery Improvement Association. He was subsequently invited by his friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak at an association rally in Montgomery. At King’s request, Carey also chaired a committee that pressured the Chicago-based National City Lines, Inc. to desegregate their buses in Montgomery. In 1957, he joined Adam Clayton Powell in Detroit to protest discrimination in labor unions, and to promote local black candidates for city council.⁴⁰

Similarly, prominent New York Republican Francis E. Rivers was elected to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund board of directors in the 1950s, and by the 1960s had become its president. In addition to Art Fletcher’s Republican activism in Kansas, he also joined the Topeka NAACP in raising money for the local case that evolved into Brown, a case argued by several black Republican lawyers before the Supreme Court. John H. Calhoun, a GOP organizer from Atlanta, also headed the city NAACP in the 1950s, and initiated lawsuits to desegregate the city parks and golf courses. In 1960, Calhoun, John Wesley Dobbs, and other black Republican leaders joined Martin Luther King, Jr., in direct action protests against segregated downtown businesses. His successor as head of the city NAACP was another Republican, C. Clayton Powell. Similarly, Clayton Yates, a member of the Georgia Republican Party Executive Committee, also served on the advisory committee of the National Urban League. These were far from marginal figures in their communities.⁴¹

Despite their partisan differences, Roy Wilkins, who became NAACP executive director in 1955, told Archibald Carey, “When all angles are considered we really are not too far apart,” and expressed his hope that the GOP would “be wise enough” to follow Carey’s advice. Indeed, black Republicans during the 1950s were essential agents of the civil rights movement, serving as leaders in local NAACP branches, as financiers of civil rights campaigns, and as legislators that sponsored state-level civil rights measures. Moreover, they also served as an inner-party voice that continually demanded that the GOP live up to its campaign promises to support racial equality. As one political scientist noted in the early 1950s, “The Negroes who remained with the Republicans demanded more of the party than ever before: more liberal reforms, more jobs for more people, more consideration in the party council, while organizing more resistance to the undemocratic practices of the South.” To most black Republicans, the GOP represented a legitimate, practical, means to achieve the same objectives as the NAACP, Martin Luther King, and other activists in eliminating state-sanctioned discrimination.⁴²

Early in 1956, the Christian Science Monitor speculated on “The Negro Defection,” asking, “are the Negroes going to desert the Democrats in this year’s elections?” Acting on a potential increase in black support, Attorney General Brownell convinced a skeptical Eisenhower to support a new civil rights law. Brownell worked closely with the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell in writing a moderate bill that strengthened the federal government’s ability to protect southern black voters. By the end of May, the Civil Rights Act of 1956 had sailed through the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives by a vote of 279-126 (of that figure, the Republican vote was 168-24). In the Senate, however, the legislation never even made it to the floor, as it was stalled in the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Mississippi’s third-term Democratic senator James Eastland. It remained in the committee, and under the threat of a southern Democratic filibuster, until it died when the session ended. And because of the way seniority worked in the Senate, as long as Democrats controlled Congress, Eastland and other southern Democrats would continue to chair the chamber’s most powerful committees.⁴³

At the 1956 national convention, the GOP touted Eisenhower’s civil rights bill, but carefully avoided endorsing Brown v. Board of Education in its platform, which instead “accepted” the court’s decision and concurred that it should be implemented with “all deliberate speed.” The rest of the platform was short on specific pledges, but provided a thorough list of Eisenhower’s modest civil rights accomplishments. E. Frederic Morrow made it his personal mission to include a black woman “who would appear on a television screen as a Negro, rather than some fair-skinned person who might be mistaken for white,” in a prime-time speaking slot. He selected Dr. Helen Edmonds, a history professor at North Carolina College, who has been described by contemporary scholar Pero Dagbovie as “arguably the most widely known black woman historian before the post-civil rights era.” Although North Carolina’s Lily-White Republican leadership warned that a television appearance by Edmonds would hurt them back home, RNC chairman Leonard Hall sided with Morrow, and agreed to give Edmonds one of the eight coveted slots to second Eisenhower’s nomination. While her boilerplate speech was not as stirring as Carey’s four years prior, her appearance as the first black woman to second the nomination of a presidential candidate had the symbolic resonance desired by Morrow and Hall.⁴⁴

Though hosting an unremarkable convention, the Republicans managed to outshine Democrats on civil rights. Thirty-six black delegates attended the Republican convention, compared to twenty-four at the Democratic convention. Adlai Stevenson again received the party’s nomination, and he again selected a moderate southerner, Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver, as his running mate. Though the Republican civil rights plank was meticulously restrained regarding Brown, the Democratic plank avoided even a pledge to follow the court’s orders, simply stating that the decision had “consequences of vast importance.” Roy Wilkins criticized both platforms, but noted that the GOP’s was “a thin shade stronger than the Democratic platform.” The NAACP’s chief lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, declared, “the liberals in the Democratic party sold us out.”⁴⁵

Vice President Richard Nixon stood out among the two parties’ tickets as the most vocal advocate of civil rights during the campaign. Simeon Booker, the Washington bureau chief of Jet magazine, later described the vice president as the GOP’s “civil-rights workhorse” and “Mr. Civil Rights during the Eisenhower Administration.” Nixon gained respect and publicity in black communities through his work as the head of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC), Eisenhower’s alternative to a national FEPC. The committee was created by a 1953 executive order, and was tasked with ensuring fair employment in businesses that held federal contracts. Its first noteworthy success occurred in Washington, D.C., when, as a direct result of private meetings between Nixon and city leaders, the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company desegregated its business offices and hired its first black clerical and switchboard workers. The Capital Transit Company soon followed and employed its first black bus and trolley drivers. Among other limited successes, the committee was responsible for four hundred black workers being hired at a South Carolina power plant, and for the first African Americans hired at an Esso refinery in Louisiana.⁴⁶

Though the PCGC offered imperfect solutions to systemic employment discrimination, many credited Nixon with its piecemeal success. E. Frederic Morrow was “impressed” by “Nixon’s keenness of mind, deep perception of a centuries-old problem, and his apparent sincerity of purpose.” The NAACP’s Henry Lee Moon privately remarked, “If the election were held today and I had to choose between Stevenson and Nixon, I’d vote for Nixon.” However, many southern whites criticized the vice president’s newfound interest in civil rights. One journalist wrote, “generally speaking, the south does not go along with a lot of his views,” and Eisenhower’s personal friend, South Carolina Governor James Byrnes, complained bitterly of Nixon’s position on the committee. Even press secretary James Hagerty admitted that Nixon was becoming increasingly unpopular in the South because he was “connected in Southerners’ minds with the Negro difficulty.”⁴⁷

Nixon embraced his role as the administration’s “civil rights workhorse” in the 1956 campaign. At a Lincoln Day speech in New York, he linked the GOP directly to Brown, proclaiming that “a great Republican Chief Justice, Earl Warren, ordered an end to racial segregation in the nation’s schools.” On April 22, he appeared before and after Commencement, a made-for-television movie about racial discrimination that aired on the NBC network. In his prime time remarks, Nixon called for an end to discrimination 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, Eisenhower won the majority of black voters in ten northern cities and thirteen southern ones.⁵⁵

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