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Introduction

In 1986, the Republican Party of Memphis, Tennessee, sent a form letter to residents of the city’s African American neighborhoods promising to bring “economic growth” through tax cuts. Included among the recipients was Roberta Church, who once served on Tennessee’s Republican State Executive Committee, held influential positions in the administrations of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and was the daughter of Robert Church, one of the most powerful black Republicans of the twentieth century. Scrawling her response on the back of the envelope, the third generation black Republican found it “very ironic” that the Republican Party of Memphis—a party that her father had single-handedly built decades earlier—had become a lily-white haven whose only effort to reach out to African Americans came via a generic letter tone-deaf to the needs of her community. She then lamented that “since the passing of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, and Nelson Rockefeller who tried to have the party live up to its founding principles,” the party had become home to the conservative “Goldwater wing,” advocating policies that had little room for moderates like herself.¹

Most black Republican activists who joined Roberta Church inside the Grand Old Party (GOP) would no doubt have echoed her reply. These men and women spent decades of their lives fighting from within the Republican Party for civil rights and “first-class citizenship.” During these transformative decades of the mid-twentieth century, black Republicans forged an alliance with white liberals and moderates in their party, and were constant lobbyists for a proactive civil rights agenda at the national, state, and municipal levels. They were spokesmen for their communities, untiring advocates for civil rights, and voices of conscience inside the party. While the GOP’s relationship with African Americans changed dramatically from the New Deal to the 1970s, the many black Republicans who remained inside the party actively engaged in the struggle for civil rights in areas such as fair employment, housing, voting, and desegregation of schools and public accommodations. This book tells their story.

A 1973 survey of black Republican leaders in Chicago offers a particularly illuminating picture. The study found a “high incidence of participation in the civil rights movement,” including “active involvement in protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins.” One of the Republicans sampled, Genoa Washington, was a current state representative and had previously served as president of the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).² He was a powerbroker not only in the state capitol, but within the states’ black establishment. Black Republicans like Washington were a constant voice for black equality inside the party’s infrastructure, while also playing influential roles in civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Unlike contemporary black Republicans of the twenty-first century, many of whom have a tenuous relationship with other African American leaders, black Republicans of the mid-twentieth century were recognized by their peers—including Democrats—for their contributions to the black freedom struggle. L. K. Jackson, whom Martin Luther King, Sr., called “the Daddy of the militant civil rights movement,” was not only the leader of numerous direct action protests in Gary, Indiana, but was also one of the city’s loudest supporters of the Republican Party. Benjamin Hooks, who headed the national NAACP from 1977 to 1992, often referenced his years as a Republican civil rights activist in Memphis, and claimed that his black Republican mentors spent their lives “beating the drum for equality.” Two of the most well known black Republicans of the civil rights era, Edward W. Brooke and Jackie Robinson, joined Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and other civil rights leaders in receiving the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. The NAACP officially praised Samuel C. Jackson, one of the most powerful African Americans in the Nixon administration, for carrying “the cause of civil rights into the high echelons of the GOP.” The Congressional Black Caucus recognized his colleague in the Nixon White House, Arthur Fletcher, in 2005 as “a true pioneer in the movement for racial and socioeconomic equality.” These men, and many others, worked within their party to promote the aims of the civil rights movement.³

One would be hard pressed, however, to find substantive analysis of black Republicans in the historical literature on black politics, which has tended to portray the Democratic Party as the exclusive home of African Americans since the 1940s. Countless authors have written with an underlying assumption that black voters bid farewell to “the party of Lincoln” during the New Deal era and never looked back. Typically ignored altogether, when mentioned black Republicans have too often been dismissed as accommodationists without community support or elderly partisans clutching to hallowed memories of Abraham Lincoln. As historian Richard Walter Thomas writes, black Republicans since the 1930s have been “relegated to the dust bin of black political history.”⁴

Though this narrative of black partisanship remains popular in the accounts of many scholars and journalists, a number of recent studies point towards significant partisan fluidity among black voters in the midcentury U.S., and demonstrate that near monolithic black identification with the Democratic Party did not fully solidify until the 1960s.⁵ Black voters from the 1930s through 1960s practiced a high degree of ticket splitting, with many casting their vote for Democratic presidents but Republican gubernatorial, senate, congressional, and municipal candidates. Indeed, it was on the local level, even in communities that voted reliably Democratic in presidential elections, where black and white Republican candidates repeatedly secured electoral victories in the mid-twentieth century’s fluid political landscape. For this reason, this study takes a wide-angled view, examining Republican politics on the national, state, and local levels. As often as black Republicans may have been marginalized within the national establishment, they found powerful white allies on the state and local levels.

Deeming the political arena as the best avenue to achieve civil rights victories, black Republicans stressed that African Americans should actively work inside both parties, forcing each side to compete for the African American vote. This argument for bipartisanship (accompanied by nonpartisan independence) was well received by many within the middle class leadership of the civil rights establishment. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and other black leaders shied away from committing their allegiance to a Democratic Party still dominated by race-baiting southerners devoted to preserving white supremacy. Indeed, the Democratic Party’s primary advantage over Republicans prior to the early 1960s was its connection to the New Deal’s labor and welfare state provisions, not a stronger commitment than the GOP to civil rights. Both Republicans and Democrats had relatively equal records on civil rights, and strategies promoting black participation in both parties were commonplace throughout the civil rights era. Martin Luther King and the NAACP’s strategic stances of partisan independence would have been less effective had black voters not been willing to support state and local Republican candidates who embraced civil rights. This two-party strategy was a unifying force, connecting black Republicans to a larger network of nonpartisan activists. To black Republicans and their independent allies, the GOP offered African Americans an additional vehicle to pursue an active civil rights agenda, and provided them access to the power necessary to achieve political reform.

Their value to midcentury politics notwithstanding, black Republicans make few appearances in the plethora of books on the modern Republican Party, even those focused on issues of race. Some of these works give a great deal of attention to liberal and moderate Republican opposition to the rising tide of conservatism within the party, but the people they discuss are almost exclusively white elites.⁶ In the few instances where black Republicans are mentioned, they are treated as victims caught off guard by a party turned racist, or are defined by extremists who fell far to the right of the black Republican mainstream.⁷

Black Republican activism in the South is particularly understudied.⁸ So-called “Black-and-Tan” organizations, the name given by Democrats to integrated southern Republican parties with black leadership, play a prominent role in this book. African Americans held positions of power and harnessed black voters in Memphis, Louisville, Atlanta, and other cities across the South. Their activism, however, has been overlooked in contemporary studies of southern Republicanism.⁹ Even scholars who mention the presence of southern black Republicans tend to write them off as marginal figures stuck in Reconstruction era politics.¹⁰ Additional depictions of a Democratic “Solid South” devoid of Republicans similarly ignore Black-and-Tan organizations, and popular narratives of the “rise” of southern conservative Republicans implicitly ignore a parallel form of “Black-and-Tan” southern Republicanism characterized by its biracial leadership’s commitment to black advancement. Though mostly confined to the major cities of the urban South, Black-and-Tan leaders like Robert Church of Memphis were important figures in southern black politics, wielding power and influence in both their communities and the national GOP.

Though African Americans have largely been left out of party narratives, there have been a number of biographies of individual black Republicans that emphasize their contributions to the civil rights movement.¹¹ Overreliance on biographies, though valuable sources, runs the risk of cordoning off black Republicans from a larger network of fellow black partisans. Additionally, a number of recent works have examined persistent strains of black social, cultural, and religious conservatism. These studies play an important role in expanding our knowledge of black political thought; however, they may serve to further obscure popular perceptions of black Republicans by focusing exclusively on the Right.¹² Rather than placing mainstream black Republicans of the mid-twentieth century within a middle class consensus that existed among most African Americans of the same socioeconomic status, many writers have incorrectly used the terms “black conservative” and “black Republican” interchangeably.¹³ This book, on the other hand, examines the full ideological range of black Republicanism in the twentieth century, emphasizing their moderate and liberal stances on issues of social justice.

Paying particular attention to the voices and actions of black Republicans—most of whom openly objected to the ideals and strategies of the post-World War II conservative movement—this book treats them as savvy political operators who used their partisan affiliation to advance the goals of the civil rights movement. Rather than viewing black Republicans as pawns of a hopelessly lily-white party, or as out-of-touch relics, it argues that they were pragmatists who saw the potential benefits in two-party competition throughout the mid-twentieth century. From the presidential nominations of Wendell Willkie in 1940 to Richard Nixon in 1960, the Eastern Establishment dominated the party at the national level, running on platforms that rivaled or surpassed their Democratic counterparts in the field of civil rights. To black Republicans, this moderate establishment offered a viable alternative for black voters, and a means to pressure both parties to support civil rights legislation.

Even after the Right had assumed control of the Republican infrastructure by 1964, moderates and liberals remained an important voice in party affairs for more than a decade afterward. Although conservatives undeniably played a significant role in the Republican Party of the 1960s and 1970s, there existed an unresolved intraparty “political and ideological tug-of-war,” where powerful liberals and moderates like Nelson Rockefeller, Hugh Scott, and John Sherman Cooper maintained a sizeable base—in which African Americans were a key constituency—and refused to concede to the conservative groundswell.¹⁴ And though conservatives undeniably emerged as the dominant force within the party, their triumph was far from inevitable.¹⁵ It was in this ideological contest for the future of the GOP that black Republicans in the civil rights era operated and maneuvered in their quest to form a feasible alternative to the Democratic Party.

Though important figures within the civil rights movement, most black Republicans possessed a distinctly middle- and upper-class brand of politics. In contrast to the New Deal-inflected activism of other African Americans, black Republicans were not drawn to the labor and welfare oriented policies that were bread and butter to the Democratic base. Though a number of black Republican leaders did not oppose collective bargaining, there was never a strong tie between them and the labor movement, which was one of the strongest forces in the Democratic coalition. While this lack of ties to organized labor provided black Republicans more leeway to address union discrimination, the organizational and grassroots edge that unions, in their ability to reach millions of black voters, gave to Democrats was a perpetual obstacle for Republicans by the 1930s.

Secure in their own economic status, black Republicans also did not seek government welfare relief, nor view it as essential to the uplift of their communities. Rather, their conception of civil rights was dominated by a desire to promote economic advancement through black businesses and equal employment opportunities, and to achieve sociopolitical equality by ending de jure segregation. Thus, while they often diverged from black Democrats on economic policy, black Republicans converged with the black mainstream on pivotal civil rights issues, including fair employment, fair housing, equality in the voting booth, and the complete dismantling of Jim Crow. Their vision for black advancement was not just distinct from that of many black Democrats, whose political impulses also lent support for Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, but was also a vision much closer to the actual achievements of the civil rights movement. Prior to the passage of the major federal civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the differences between black Republicans and Democrats were masked by their shared desire to rid the nation of the scourge of legalized discrimination. By 1968, however, as the civil rights movement shifted to issues of economic inequality, the stark class-based ideological differences between black Republicans and Democrats were manifest in their conflicting views of economic progress.

William T. Coleman, Jr., typifies midcentury black Republican activism and ideology. An integral member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (where he would later serve as president), Coleman helped dismantle Jim Crow through his work on Brown v. Board of Education and other major civil rights cases. His objective was the eradication of “state-sanctioned racial discrimination,” and the creation of “a fully integrated society.” Once the legal impediments against African Americans were torn down, they could then “apply their God-given talents to reach their potential.” While this goal was shared by many black leaders, Coleman departed from his contemporaries in criticizing “well-intended but ill-conceived” government welfare programs. He condemned Democrats for creating “a huge government-dependent constituency,” believing that the Democrats’ New Deal and War on Poverty amplified “dependence on the federal largess, deterring minorities from competing in the economic mainstream.” Instead, Coleman advocated policies such as affirmative action and skills training that would lead to independence and self-sufficiency. It was not until the legal barriers of Jim Crow were torn down in the 1960s, however, that Coleman’s economic ideas came to the fore.¹⁶ Though his positions on welfare differed from those of many African Americans, Coleman was a major actor in the legal dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1940s through 1960s, and one of the GOP’s loudest proponents of affirmative action from the 1970s onward. Like other black Republicans, Coleman was not a marginal figure, or an anomaly, in the African American freedom struggle.

Written chronologically, this book explores how black Republicans navigated the shifting currents of GOP politics from the 1930s through the 1970s. It begins with the historic relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party, and explores the continued presence of African Americans inside the party during the New Deal era. Drawn largely from the ranks of the black middle and upper classes, black Republicans were not attracted to the government relief provided by the Roosevelt administration, but instead intensified their protests for civil rights. Far from being an aberration in black communities during the 1930s and 1940s, black Republicans remained deeply entrenched in the political landscape. They led southern Black-and-Tan Republican organizations, ran competitive campaigns in municipal and state elections in the North, and agitated for fair employment, military desegregation, and civil rights legislation.

With the return of the party to the presidency under Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, black Republicans were the beneficiaries of high-ranking federal appointments and influential positions within the party, which remained a viable political alternative for many African Americans. From these relative positions of power, black Republicans continued to advocate their civil rights agenda. Despite their vocal criticisms of the administration, many black Republicans in the late 1950s remained loyal to the party they believed could surpass the Democrats in advancing the cause of racial equality. The political victories of Nelson Rockefeller and other liberals sustained this hope.

The 1960 election proved to be a decisive turning point in the GOP’s relationship with black voters. As Richard Nixon’s campaign unfolded, he reached out to both African Americans and racially conservative southerners. Black Republicans, like most African Americans, criticized this paradoxical strategy, and warned against an alliance with the burgeoning conservative movement. Following Nixon’s defeat, Barry Goldwater and fellow conservatives launched a revolution inside the GOP and assumed control of much of the party’s infrastructure. Though many black Republicans deserted the party during this period, those who remained persisted in an increasingly uphill battle to encourage the party to embrace civil rights and make sincere efforts to court black voters. As participants in the civil rights movement, black Republicans also continued to fight for black equality as community leaders and politicians. Like other Republican liberals, they found success in state and local elections in places like Pennsylvania, New York, and Kentucky, but found themselves on the outside of the national party’s leadership. As the GOP moved toward the right, black Republicans shifted their focus from recruiting African Americans to preventing their party from being taken over by conservatives who were antagonistic to their vision of civil rights.

After Goldwater’s crushing defeat, conservatives, liberals, and moderates contested the future direction of their disoriented party. Like other factions, black Republicans sought to exploit this state of instability, and launched an organized and aggressive effort to defeat the party’s expanding conservatism. Additionally, as liberal and moderate Republicans remained active inside their party, politicians like Winthrop Rockefeller and George Romney continued to offer African Americans hope for the party’s future.

As the civil rights movement achieved its major legislative victories by the late 1960s, it turned to economic and structural issues left unchanged by the dismantling of Jim Crow. It was in these areas where black Republicans diverged from other civil rights leaders, but found allies among young black nationalists drawn to their ideas of self-help and self-determination. As President Nixon sought to court these black nationalists in place of traditional civil rights leaders, a new generation of black Republicans were drawn to the GOP. Floyd McKissick of CORE and others found an ally in the president, who offered black nationalists a “piece of the action” through his black capitalism initiatives. The Nixon era was both an exciting and trying time for black Republicans. Black businessmen enjoyed massive federal support, but many longstanding black Republicans who had previously allied with the Eastern Establishment found themselves outside Nixon’s circle, unable to stop the administration from approaching civil rights with “benign neglect.” Just as the civil rights movement had become fractured and decentralized by the 1970s, so had black Republicanism splintered along ideological and strategic lines, as multiple leaders and organizations competed for the attention of their party’s leadership.

This book, then, is the story not just of black Republicans, but of the Republican Party itself. Black Republicans were actors in a larger drama of a party seeking to find its way in the wake of the seismic political shift unleashed by the New Deal. The mid-twentieth-century battles for the future of the Republican Party between liberals, moderates, and conservatives not only provided an opportunity for black Republicans to forge alliances in their quest for civil rights, but also gave them a platform from which they could serve as the conscience of their party as they urged it to not forget its historic ties to African Americans.

Though they do not fit neatly into the traditional narratives of either the civil rights movement or Republican Party, black Republicans deserve overdue historical recognition. To exclude them is to deny them the place they rightfully earned in their decades’ long fight to compel their nation—and their party—to address civil rights. As George W. Lee, who served as a powerful force inside the Tennessee Republican Party from the 1920s through 1960s, declared towards the end of his career, “long before the country paid any attention to legalized civil rights movements, before there was any civil rights laws, I was fighting for Negro freedom and first class citizenship.”¹⁷ Lee’s fight, like the fight of black Republicans across the country in the mid-twentieth century, was against not only Jim Crow, but also for the future of his own party.