Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
Republicans were more active on the campaign trail in 1956 than they had been in years. The Minorities Division printed ninety thousand copies of “Abe and Ike, In Deed Alike,” a booklet that documented Eisenhower’s civil rights accomplishments and profiled high-ranking black appointees. Thalia Thomas, the division’s ranking woman, conducted a cross-country speaking tour of an estimated hundred thousand miles. Helen Edmonds was given her own tour after a black Republican field agent in Ohio reported favorable responses to her speech at the national convention. By the end of the campaign, she had delivered approximately fifty speeches across the Midwest and the East coast, and was interviewed on numerous television and radio broadcasts. Archibald Carey similarly spoke on the GOP’s behalf across the country, served as cochair of the Friends for Ike organization, and wrote a widely distributed campaign pamphlet. On the grassroots level, George W. Lee spent $15,000 to expand the Lincoln League in Memphis; by the end of the election he had amassed nearly seven hundred and fifty ward and precinct workers, distributed eighty-nine thousand pieces of literature, and sponsored almost forty rallies.52
Eisenhower’s most renowned black supporter was also one of the most surprising: Harlem’s Democratic representative, Adam Clayton Powell. Given limited access to President Truman, Powell had been cultivating a relationship with Eisenhower since the inauguration. In February 1954, he told a union rally that Eisenhower did more “to restore the Negro to the status of first class citizenship than any President since Abraham Lincoln.” In an October 1954 essay published in Reader’s Digest, Powell wrote, “In less than two years in the White House President Eisenhower, without political trumpeting, has quietly started a revolution which, I firmly believe, means an era of greater promise for Negro citizens.” In an early October 1956 meeting at the White House attended by Eisenhower, Val Washington, and others, Powell announced that he was “prepared to lead an independent movement for the President on a nationwide basis and take an active part in the balance of the campaign.” On October 19, he officially launched “Independent Democrats for Eisenhower,” and was given a $50,000 budget from the GOP for a national tour. His rhetoric closely mirrored that of black Republicans, praising Eisenhower’s “silent revolution” and arguing that Stevenson “has to be either a hypocrite, a liar, a double-talker, or a double-dealer” for accepting the endorsements of both Eleanor Roosevelt and James Eastland.53
Although Eisenhower gladly accepted the active role of black supporters on the campaign trail, civil rights remained relatively absent from his rhetoric. One of the major reasons Eisenhower could generally avoid this issue was Adlai Stevenson’s silence. Following the president’s endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1956, the NAACP condemned Stevenson for having “not even given lip service” to the proposed bill. Two days after a white mob drove Autherine Lucy out of the University of Alabama, Stevenson, engaged in a tight February primary race against Kefauver, told a black audience that “gradualism” was the key to successful integration of southern schools. Throughout the fall, he continued to assure the South that he would not rock the boat on civil rights, peppering his speeches with phrases that were becoming increasingly unacceptable to black voters: “We must proceed gradually”; “We cannot by the stroke of a pen reverse customs and traditions that are older than the Republic”; “We will not improve the present condition [of southern blacks] … by coercive Federal action.” While Stevenson finally endorsed Brown before a Harlem audience late in the campaign, it appeared to many as pandering, particularly as he still refused to support the use of federal troops to enforce the decision. Failing to spark much enthusiasm among African Americans, Stevenson secured the endorsement of only one of the nation’s ten largest black newspapers.54
After the votes were counted on election day, it was evident that not only had Eisenhower won in a landslide (Stevenson won only the Deep South and Missouri), but that he had made gains among black voters. Pollster George Gallup reported in January 1957 that “of all the major groups of the nation’s population, the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket last November was the Negro voter.” He estimated that the national black vote for Eisenhower was approximately 38 percent, an increase of 18 percentage points from 1952. A 1957 report by the NAACP came to a similar conclusion after a study of predominantly black areas in sixty-three cities, estimating that Eisenhower received 36.8 percent of the black vote. Of the cities examined, Eisenhower won the majority of black voters in ten northern cities and thirteen southern ones.55
Eisenhower made his most substantial gains among southern blacks, prompting the New York Times to declare, “if you look South, the Negro voter has returned to the Republican party.” Moreover, while black turnout decreased in the North, the same was not true of the South, where turnout increased in many of the South’s largest cities, including Atlanta, Norfolk, Charlotte, Chattanooga, and Tampa. Though many southern blacks remained disenfranchised, those who could vote overwhelmingly supported Eisenhower. Black voters in Jefferson County (Birmingham), Alabama, cast an estimated 75 percent of their ballots for Eisenhower, and upwards of 90 percent of black voters in Macon County (Tuskegee) supported him. In Montgomery, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy joined approximately 59 percent of the city’s black voters in casting ballots for the president. King later remarked that “I do not recall a single person telling me he voted for Stevenson.” African Americans in Atlanta, who had cast 74 percent of their votes for Stevenson in 1952, gave Eisenhower 86 percent of their votes in 1956. Similarly dramatic increases were reported in New Orleans and in Columbia, Darlington, and Charleston, South Carolina. In North Carolina, Eisenhower received over 60 percent of the vote in predominantly black precincts in Durham, Raleigh, and Greensboro.56
Southern black voters also helped secure Eisenhower victories in Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. A 1957 report by the RNC Research Division concluded that Eisenhower’s slim six-thousand-vote plurality in Tennessee “can be accounted for by the increased Republican vote among Negroes of the city of Memphis alone.” Due in large part to George W. Lee’s organizing, the Republicans won twenty-three of the city’s thirty-eight majority-black precincts, giving Eisenhower 54 percent of the city’s African American vote. Likewise, the majority of black voters in Virginia supported a Republican presidential candidate for the first time since the New Deal. While Eisenhower had won just over 25 percent of the black vote in Richmond in 1952, he received almost 75 percent in 1956. His support among black voters in Norfolk soared from 16 to 77 percent.57
Though support for Eisenhower among northern blacks was far less impressive than his showings in the South, he made modest inroads in many black districts. He even won the majority of black votes in cities like Baltimore, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Columbus, Ohio. The vote for Eisenhower increased in Harlem from 20.8 percent in 1952 to 33.7 percent in 1956. In Chicago’s black districts, the vote for the president rose from under 30 to 37 percent, and his support in seven majority-black wards in Cleveland rose from 31 to 48 percent. In Boston’s majority-black Ward Nine, support for Eisenhower grew from 28.1 to 48.9 percent, and his support in thirty-nine of Gary, Indiana’s, majority-black precincts grew from 26 to 41 percent. In only a handful of cities did Eisenhower’s black support remain stagnant.58
In their post-election analysis, black leaders were careful to point out that support for the GOP was just as much a vote against the Democratic Party as it was an endorsement of Eisenhower. Roy Wilkins attributed Republican victory to “the growing resentment against the pernicious role of southern Democrats in hamstringing all civil rights legislation and especially in slowing down school desegregation.” Black Republican P. B. Young argued that in his state of Virginia, “the shift was in large part an expression of protest. Negroes resented the insults, and smears hurled at them by angry state officials, legislators and newspapers, because of the Supreme Court decision.” A postelection study conducted by the RNC suggested that black voters in Maryland supported the GOP largely in response to the southern leanings of the state’s Democratic leadership. Overall, the report found that Republican gains were “moderate” in cities where local Democrats “give recognition to Negroes,” but “the big switch” toward Republicans occurred in areas where “Negroes enjoy no status in the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders oppose civil rights.”59
Other factors also explain Eisenhower’s strong showing. Louisiana Weekly, a black