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Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors:
Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
BLACK REPUBLICANS
AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GOP
Joshua D. Farrington
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-4852-4
To Dad
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Farewell to the Party of Lincoln? Black Republicans in the New Deal Era
Chapter 2. Flirting with Republicans: Black Voters in the 1950s
Chapter 3. Bit by Bit: Civil Rights and the Eisenhower Administration
Chapter 4. Ye Cannot Serve Both God and Mammon: The 1960 Presidential Election
Chapter 5. Somebody Had to Stay and Fight: Black Republicans and the Rise of the Right
Chapter 6. Fighting the Enemy Within: Black Republicans in the Wake of Goldwater
Chapter 7. A Piece of the Action: Black Capitalism and the Nixon Administration
Chapter 8. Not a Silent Minority: Black Republicans in the 1970s
Archival Sources and Abbreviations
We Negro-Americans, sing with all Americans …
Let freedom ring—From every mountain side, let
freedom ring! Not only from the Green Mountains
and White Mountains of Vermont and 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!”
—Archibald Carey, Jr., Floor Speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention
BLACK REPUBLICANS
AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GOP
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
