BLACK REPUBLICANS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GOP
Joshua D Farrington
University of Pennsylvania Press
311 pages; $45
BLACK ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM
The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans
Corey D Fields
University of California Press
282 pages; $29.95
"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. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act in the summer and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the Klan, received six per cent. Ronald Reagan received 12 and nine per cent. Even John McCain received four per cent.
Whether because of those numbers or despite them, the academic study of black Republicans is booming. 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. We may soon have more books on black Republicans than actual black Republican voters.
Before Goldwater, the choice was not so clear, and Mr 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. 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. National politics provide Mr Farrington a sturdy frame, but what makes his book special is his painstaking re-creation of scores of 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 skeptical 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 like Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits and Margaret Chase Smith were dependable allies in the cause of civil rights.
Virtually all black Republicans agreed that the struggle against disfranchisement, segregation and discrimination 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 took the black vote for granted. President Truman, meanwhile, integrated the armed forces, supported fair employment and anti-lynching laws. Black votes contributed enormously to Truman's victory.
Mr 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. Mr Fields argues 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 - Mr Fields opens with Ben Carson - and are much likelier to grant them power and authority. Or as Mr 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."
Mr 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 shape politics, Mr 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.
It is no fault of the authors that these books make painful reading. In Mr Farrington's book, we encounter one black person after another who believes in both Republican principles and racial equality. In Mr 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 how it will come back.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
