Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP - Joshua D. Farrington Politics and Culture in Modern America

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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

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      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

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