Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
a commission to investigate claims. Within a year after its passage, rail companies eliminated “colored only” sections on trains, unions eradicated white-only clauses, and many businesses hired their first black employees. Within two years, the number of black women employed in clerical and sales jobs more than quadrupled.50
Many black voters were drawn to pro-FEPC Republicans on the state level, and leading up to the 1946 midterm elections the RAC focused on promoting candidates who supported fair employment. The elections bore fruit: black voters played an essential role in the victories of liberal Republican senators and congressmen in Missouri, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago. In Kentucky, Senator John Sherman Cooper and Congressman Thruston Morton received an estimated 90 percent of the black vote, and black Republican Dennis Henderson was elected to the General Assembly. The passage of FEPC laws under Republican governors and state legislatures, coupled with the 1945 death of Roosevelt and continued disillusionment with the prominent role of white southerners in the Democratic Party, had reversed the trend of black Democratic support that had begun ten years earlier. While some black Democrats simply chose to remain at home, an estimated 15 percent nationwide switched their support to the Republican Party, which assumed control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932.51
The 1946 elections also launched the political careers of two of the mid-century’s most important black Republicans: Grant Reynolds and Archibald Carey, Jr. As an army chaplain during World War II, Reynolds was honorably discharged after his commanding officers grew tired of his complaints against racial discrimination. His continued activism after returning home to New York drew him into activist circles, and he listed Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins among his friends. He was also an ally of Thomas Dewey, who helped pay for his education at Columbia Law School and appointed him state commissioner of corrections after he delivered a fiery 1944 campaign speech on the governor’s behalf in Madison Square Garden. In 1946, Reynolds ran against Harlem’s venerable Democratic congressman Adam Clayton Powell, campaigning on a liberal platform that called for a substantial rise in the national minimum wage, anti-poll tax legislation, a national FEPC, low-rent public housing, and an end to segregation in the military. Attacking “Parttime Powell’s” notorious absentee record, he earned the support of some of Harlem’s most recognized citizens, with boxer Joe Louis, author Zora Neale Hurston, singer-actress Etta Moten, and A. Philip Randolph’s wife working in his campaign headquarters. His supporters argued that it was important for Harlem to be represented by a Republican who would work alongside liberals in the GOP to break the stranglehold of the Democratic South on civil rights legislation.52
As Powell did in all his elections, he ran in the Republican primary, and his loss to Reynolds that spring was the only electoral defeat of his entire career. Fearing another, more catastrophic upset, Democratic stars, including Eleanor Roosevelt, rallied to Powell’s side, providing important financial support and campaign appearances. Though Harlem media advertised the race as “giant versus giant,” and Reynolds pulled some of the strongest numbers of any Republican congressional candidate in Harlem before or since, the wildly popular Powell cruised to victory on election day. The relative strength of Reynolds’s campaign, however, demonstrated to both parties the full emergence of black Republicans who were willing to challenge both parties to confront the existing racial status quo.53
Though Reynolds could not overcome the Powell juggernaut, militant black Republicans scored a major victory in Chicago with the election of Archibald Carey, Jr., to the Board of Aldermen. Fair-skinned, red-haired, and freckled, Carey came from an elite family entrenched in GOP politics, with his father serving as postmaster in Athens, Georgia, prior to becoming an advisor to Chicago mayor William Thompson. Carey, Jr., continued in his father’s partisan footsteps, believing that southern Democrats would always hold back their party when it came to civil rights. As the pastor of Chicago’s influential Woodlawn AME Church, he was also one of the country’s leading black ministers. Through Carey’s financial and institutional support, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement, was formed inside Woodlawn AME, with his personal office becoming its first headquarters. The church served as the host location of CORE’s first national convention in 1943, and the organization’s cofounder, James Farmer, described Carey as “CORE’s patron saint.” In his 1946 campaign, Carey challenged incumbent Old Guard Republican Oscar DePriest, who was elected alderman of Chicago’s Third Ward in 1943. Running on a platform that emphasized his civil rights militancy, Carey won the Republican primary and the subsequent general election against venerable Democrat Roy Washington.54
Carey also served stints as vice president of the Chicago NAACP during his nine-year tenure on the Board of Aldermen, where he established himself as one of the city’s most radical elected officials. He sponsored measures that expanded public housing, established the Chicago Council on Human Relations, and created a Division of Human Relations in the police department that offered courses “to teach police to protect minorities.” In 1948, he sponsored an ordinance that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing and provided housing to residents displaced by “slum clearance” programs. The “Carey Ordinance” was met with a fury of opposition by the city’s Democratic machine, with Mayor Martin Kennelly taking the floor in a board meeting for the only time of his entire term to voice opposition. Though the open housing law fell to defeat, Carey emerged, in the words of a subsequent profile in the New Republic, as one of the nation’s “most vigorous fighters” for progressive urban reform.55
Following his defeat by Adam Clayton Powell, Grant Reynolds set his sights on military desegregation, forming the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training with A. Philip Randolph. On March 22, 1948, Randolph and Reynolds met with President Harry Truman, and warned that African Americans would no longer settle for a segregated military. The duo appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee the following week, and threatened to encourage African Americans to boycott the draft unless the military banned discrimination. Using his ties to Governor Dewey, Reynolds courted Republicans to join his crusade, and led efforts to include a platform plank at the Republican National Convention in June that called for an end to military segregation. Congressional Republicans followed suit. Even the conservative Senator Robert Taft allied with liberal Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in sponsoring anti-discrimination amendments to the 1948 draft bill. In the House, Speaker Joseph Martin and Jacob Javits joined black Democrats Adam Clayton Powell and William Dawson in offering similar amendments. Having secured Republican support, Reynolds and Randolph wrote a letter to Truman informing him that he must act, since there was now “a bipartisan mandate to end military segregation.” On July 26, 1948, Truman yielded and issued an executive order integrating the armed forces.56
While Republicans in Congress embraced the opportunity to embarrass Truman on the issue of military desegregation, they were far less willing to fulfill their own promises from the 1946 campaign to pass a federal fair employment law, despite controlling Congress. Conservative Republicans joined with southern Democrats in opposing FEPC legislation, and in a rare moment of candor, Speaker of the House Joseph Martin, who had publicly endorsed the party’s fair employment plank in 1944, told a group of black Republicans in 1947, “I’ll be frank with you. We are not going to pass a FEPC bill,” as the party’s corporate donors “would stop their contributions if we passed a law.” While he assured them with a vague promise that “we intend to do a lot for the Negroes,” the damage had already been done in the party’s refusal to actively pursue a permanent federal FEPC. Though liberal Republican congressmen like Irving Ives of New York and James Fulton of Pennsylvania sponsored legislation in 1947 and 1948, it quickly fizzled without significant support from either party’s leadership.57
Recalling his endorsements of the GOP in 1944 and 1946, Edgar G. Brown of the National Negro Council described the Republican-controlled Congress as the “cruelest disillusionment” since Reconstruction. In October 1947, the Republican American Committee issued a statement claiming they were “deeply disturbed and justifiably apprehensive over the failure of the first Republican-controlled Congress in sixteen (16) years,” and warned party leaders “of the dangers which lie ahead if it continues its policy of inaction.” Signed by some of the country’s leading black Republicans, including Robert Church, Lawrence O. Payne, Charles W. Anderson,