Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP
By Joshua D. Farrington, University of Pennsylvania Press, 328 pages, $45
Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans
By Corey D. Fields, University of California Press, 296 pages, $30
“The African-Americans love me,” Donald Trump said back in January. Nine months later, evidence of that love is exceedingly rare. Polls put Trump’s black support in the low single digits, smaller in several samples than the margin of error. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act in the summer and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the Klan in autumn, received 6 per cent. Ronald Reagan received 12 and then 9 per cent. Even John McCain, running against Barack Obama, received 4.
Whether because of those numbers or despite them, the academic study of black Republicans is booming. Last year, Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Harvard, published “The Loneliness of the Black Republican”, a spirited study of conservatism, politics and race. Now we have Joshua D. Farrington’s “Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP” and Corey D. Fields’s “Black Elephants in the Room”. Other books have been published, and more are on the way. We may soon have more books on black Republicans than actual black Republican voters.
To understand the decline since the 1960s does not require an advanced degree. Richard Nixon followed Goldwater. As vice-president, he had been strong on civil rights and in his first term as president he worked with movement veterans, including Black Power advocates, to promote “black capitalism”. His appointments included Arthur Fletcher, “the father of affirmative action”. Alas, by the end of his first term Nixon had decided that the “real majority”, North as well as South, was, as two journalists put it, “unyoung, unpoor and unblack”, and long before that he had contributed mightily to making the words “law and order” code for “black crime”. Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign championing states’ rights in the Mississippi county where the civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964, and regaled audiences with stories of “strapping young bucks” and “welfare queens”. George H.W. Bush accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on black rapists.
Before Goldwater, the choice was not so clear, and Farrington, who teaches history at the University of Kentucky, starts by reminding us that the great migration from the “party of Lincoln” did not happen all at once — or once and for all. A significant minority of African-Americans resisted the appeal of the New Deal, and many of those who embraced Franklin Roosevelt continued to vote Republican in down-ballot races. National politics provide Farrington with a sturdy frame, but what makes his book special is his painstaking recreation of scores of little-known state and local activists and a lost world of two-party competition.
Black people had many good reasons for sticking with the Republicans. In the South, the few who voted and the many who aspired to had no choice. The Democratic Party, which by terror and state law had overthrown Reconstruction and then annulled the 14th and 15th Amendments, was for whites only. Only through alliances with the national Republican Party could black Southerners and (what racists labelled) their “tan” allies participate in politics at all. In the North, the Democrats’ emphasis on bread-and-butter issues drew enormous numbers of new black voters, but many middle-class blacks remained sceptical of the big-city political machines.
Others had objections to the New Deal itself. Black conservatives feared its programmes would stifle initiative and contribute to dependency. Many liberal blacks considered it a Raw Deal because many relief programmes discriminated against black people or excluded them altogether. Then, too, in the middle decades of the century, Republicans such as Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits and Margaret Chase Smith were dependable allies in the cause of civil rights while many Democrats, including some of the most powerful men in Congress, were massive resisters. In the 1940s, for example, the Republican Party pushed hard for a federal fair employment law. They failed, but 11 states subsequently passed their own versions. Eight of those states were governed by Republicans. Twenty years later, Republican support for the Civil Rights Act prevented a Democratic filibuster from killing it.
Whatever their reasons or political differences, virtually all black Republicans agreed that the struggle against disfranchisement, segregation and discrimination (a struggle they believed the federal government had a legitimate role in) came first. And they agreed that black Americans would do best when both parties were competing for their votes. For evidence, they pointed to the 1948 presidential race, when the Republicans nominated two liberals, Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren, who (way ahead in the polls) took the black vote for granted. President Truman, meanwhile, integrated the armed forces and supported fair employment and anti-lynching laws. Black votes contributed enormously to Truman’s upset victory.
Corey D. Fields, a sociologist at Stanford, knows the history, but his subject is the political experience of black Republicans today. He wants to understand how their sense of themselves as black people and their ideas about black people shape their politics and how their politics shape their identity and ideas. Fields makes great use of interviews, observation and survey data to argue that a majority of black Republicans are race-conscious, seeing their positions on social and economic issues in racial terms. If that seems surprising, it is because white Republicans prefer colourblind black conservatives — Fields opens with Ben Carson — and are much likelier to grant them power and authority. Or as Fields puts it, with characteristic economy and wit, explaining why he chose to focus on rank-and-file Republicans: “Once black Republicans become famous, they all start to look alike.”
Fields finds that the conflict among the colourblind and colour-conscious black Republicans and between black Republicans and white Republicans impedes outreach and political action. And though we tend to think about the ways in which race (and myriad other forms of identity) shape politics, Fields shows that the current runs both ways. Black people who want to make it in the Republican Party have to conceal their sense of themselves as black. Here — and Fields suspects elsewhere — politics shape the public expression of identity, narrowing and flattening vital debates. I could not help wondering if among Democrats it is the less colour-conscious who do the concealing.
It is no fault of the authors, both of whom are terrific writers, that these books make painful reading. In Farrington’s book, we encounter one black person after another who believes in both Republican principles and racial equality. Consider George W. Lee, a Republican leader in Tennessee since the 1920s. “I am afraid of Ronald Reagan,” he wrote shortly before his death in 1976. “He represents the extreme ideas of conservatism.” Yet Lee urged blacks to infiltrate the Republican Party and fight from within for “a free society, a sound fiscal policy and civil rights”. In Fields’s account, we meet black Republicans struggling today, in a party far to Reagan’s right, to convince other black people that they are black and other (white) Republicans that they are Republicans. The whites say they want black support, but only on their terms, which include agreeing that pathology is the primary cause of black poverty, mass incarceration and racial inequality.
“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan liked to say “the party left me”. In truth, Reagan moved right long before the Democratic Party moved left. But the Republican Party did leave African-Americans, and this year especially it is hard to imagine when and how it will come back.
–New York Times News Service
James Goodman, a professor of history and creative writing at Rutgers University, Newark, is the author of “Stories of Scottsboro”, “Blackout” and “But Where Is the Lamb?”
