Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Joshua D. Farrington (review)

Joshua Farrington's intriguing new book Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP chronicles the political activism of African Americans in the Republican Party between the New Deal and the 1970s. Although Farrington overstates the historiographical void of this topic (perhaps due to a wave of very recent scholarship), Black Republicans makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of African American political life by offering a broader analysis that captures the "full ideological range of black Republicanism in the twentieth century" (p. 5). This is an important point because, as Farrington observes, black Republicans during most of the twentieth century did not always have the "tenuous relationship with other African American leaders" that they do in the present (p. 2). In other words, the GOP was not always antithetical to the NAACP.

Farrington opens with a discussion of black political actors who remained loyal to the GOP during the 1930s and 1940s when millions of African Americans supported the Democratic Party's New Deal. Of the South, however, Farrington wisely observes that the relatively small number of black political leaders in formal roles remained loyal to the GOP because of segregated white supremacist state Democratic Party leadership. These black Republicans, as Farrington argues, established early leadership roles within the GOP, advocating for civil rights and using their influence to help expand organizations such as the NAACP in the urban South. Farrington could extend this point even further by more fully discussing the community organizing efforts of these very same leaders, but the point is well-taken that Southern black institutional growth during the interwar years was often led by African American Republicans.

Black influence in the GOP reached its zenith in the 1950s. The Eisenhower Administration has received all types of criticism of its role, or lack thereof, in the school desegregation crises of the 1950s. But Farrington appropriately repositions our perspectives about the national Republican Party from the position of racial morality to political reality by highlighting how black Republican political actors operated through existing roles in the party to influence the GOP from within. This lead to a number of "high-ranking federal appointments and influential positions" for black Republicans and helped push the GOP toward a moderate approach toward desegregation and civil rights that was far more attractive than the racist anti-black hysteria embodied by Southern Democrats (p. 38). Farrington is onto something here. Some observers might be quick to cite the limitations of Eisenhower's civil rights policies or the low amount of support he received among black voters during the 1952 election. But the 1950s was indeed the most rapid era of racial desegregation to that point in American history. And Eisenhower's support among African Americans essentially doubled in just one election cycle. Farrington's focus allows him to reveal the importance of black Republicans, the very same people who stayed loyal to the party during the New Deal, for influencing policies that shaped that trend. This particular point is the strength of this book.

The remainder of Farrington's study covers a familiar story of African Americans and the Republican Party, describing the effects of the black vote on the 1960 Presidential Election and the ending of significant black support for the GOP in 1964. The rest of Farrington's book examines the small numbers of black Republicans who remained active in the party.

Black Republicans is an interesting examination of black actors in the national GOP. It would be useful for this book to have engaged more fully with changing black demographics, especially considering that millions of black people gained the right to vote either by migration or by federal law. Nonetheless, Farrington's well-researched and compelling book will be useful to anyone studying the history of black politics and is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature of African Americans and the Republican Party.