Afi Scruggs

Special to USA TODAY

In 1955, E. Frederic Morrow joined President Dwight D. Eisenhower‘s White House as its administrative officer for special projects. His job was to reach out to African-American voters who were leaving the Republican party that they’d once supported wholeheartedly.

Morrow, a black Republican, quickly found himself on an island. African Americans wanted a stronger stance on civil rights, especially as battles over integration became more heated. Eisenhower was a gradualist, who was concerned that a strong stance for racial equality would alienate the party’s Southern wing.

Morrow found himself constantly juggling his racial and political concerns.

“I am an appointee, who feels loyalty to the administration, but I am also a Negro who feels very keenly ills that afflict my race in its efforts to secure all the privileges of citizenship that have been denied for three centuries,” Morrow wrote in his diary.

Sixty-five years later, African American Republicans still find themselves on an island. But it is even smaller than Morrow’s, says Leah Wright Rigueur, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is the author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican.”

Wright Rigueur says black Republicans are caught in a double bind: “Their real struggle is what do you do when you’re a political minority within your racial group, and a racial minority within your political group?” Wright Rigueur says.

Uncle Toms or outliers?

White Republicans like Pat Buchanan have applauded black Republicans for “leaving the plantation politics” of the Democratic Party.” “This line of thinking stems from the simplistic belief that African Americans have been brainwashed into voting for the Democratic party,” Wright Rigueur says.

African Americans critics, however, label black Republicans as accommodationist at best, and some stop just short of calling them “Uncle Toms.” Wright Rigueur quotes a 1992 article in the Pittsburgh Courier that called black Republicans “a bogeyman dressed … to cajole blacks into believing … the Republican Party … is a trumpet-tongued angel … playing the jazz of economic salvation and social harmony.”

Stereotypes aside, scholars say contemporary black Republicans are a diverse group.

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“Some of them ...have an ideological affinity to conservatism and evangelical Christianity,” says Musa Al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia University. “Ben Carson is pretty authentically… conservative ideologically.”

But others, like Herman Cain, are drawn to the party’s support for business and entrepreneurship. “You have others who support this other wing of conservatism (that is) about hard work and free market. “

Republicans like Cain and Carson aren’t outliers when it comes to social and economic conservatism. For example, a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Centers found that 49 percent of Blacks oppose same-sex marriage compared to 32 percent of Whites. Last November, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies think tank polled 1,200 African Americans on their concerns going into the 2020 elections. It found a majority of respondents believe most people can get ahead if they work hard — a statement often repeated by Republicans opposed to social programs. In a similar survey of Democratic primary voters, a majority of respondents said hard work is no guarantee of success.

Republicans have been able to capitalize on shared positions. During the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush got 16 percent of the African American vote in Ohio. Much of that support came from African American pastors, who urged parishioners to vote for a state constutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that was also on the ballot.

Republican Kenneth Blackwell was Ohio secretary of state during that time. He says he helped put the amendment on the ballot. Appealing to African Americans’ social conservatism was an important strategy that ultimately benefited Bush.

“We would go into churches, black and white, and advocate for passage of this constitutional amendment ...The Apostolic and Pentecostal churches that normally sat out elections, with that issue being on the ballot came out and voted for the candidate that was for the motion," he says.

And Blackwell, who is campaigning for Donald Trump’s re-election, predicts 12 percent of African American voters will help put the president back in office. Trump received 8 percent of the African American vote in 2016.

“The black community is not homogenous. There is diversity of political thought. I think that where (Trump) is making advances is with young black males. I think the work we’ve been doing for years on criminal justice reform… that means something. Tapping into the entrepreneurial spirit means something.”

Votes don't tell the whole story

However, claiming 12 percent of Black votes wouldn’t necessarily indicate African Americans are becoming more sympathetic to the GOP. Wright Rigueur says Republicans routinely win 8% to 15% of African American votes. That’s a far cry from 1956, when 39% of black voters backed Eisenhower.

She agrees with Blackwell that African Americans espouse conservative social values. When it comes to political support, though, they look for something else.

“At the end of the day, black voters are constantly seeking to understand whether or not a political individual is working in the best interests of the community,” Wright Rigueur says.

That insistence was why African Americans pledged allegiance to Republicans during the first half of the 20th century, and abandoned it during the latter half.

For decades African Americans faithfully voted Republican. Some of the loyalty came from the party’s association with Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. During Reconstruction after the Civil War, state and federal office holders like U.S. Sens. Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce. both of Mississippi, were Republicans.

When Jim Crow all but eliminated the right of blacks to vote in the South, Northern blacks especially clung to the Republican party.

“The Republican Party was the party of Lincoln. It was the party that emancipated the slaves,” Al-Gharbi says. “From Lincoln through the mid-20th century, the Republican Party was the more reliable party for civil rights and civil liberties.”

But African Americans began to drift away during the Depression. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, got 71 percent of black votes. That was a major migration for voters who saw the party as the stronghold of segregationists who oppressed them.

Wright Rigueur writes Northern blacks benefited from New Deal programs such as the Work Progress Administration and Federal Emergency Relief Assistance. In addition, Eleanor Roosevelt’s activism for civil rights convinced black voters to switch parties.

But the shift didn’t mean blacks had completely left the Republican Party; instead voters weighed each group carefully. In 1956, Eisenhower got black support because of Southern Democrats opposition to the Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling in 1954, which said that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

“Eisenhower was able to get a strong number of the black votes because black voters are predominantly Northern voters and they are punishing the Democratic Party for allowing racist to remain within their mix.,” Wright Rigueur says.

She says black voters flowed between both parties until the early 1960s, when the parties begin to forge identities around civil rights and economics. When black voters saw parties converging on civil rights, they looked to the parties’ stances on economics.

“By 1961, most black voters are saying the same thing as white voters, which is the Democratic Party is the party of the working man,” she says.

A shift in the '60s

But the 1964 presidential race that shaped the modern-day Republican Party also sent African Americans to Democrats.

Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the Senate. He lost the election, but his support for states’ rights - the term was a rallying cry for segregationists opposed to federal intervention - and anti-communism helped the party break the Democratic stranglehold on the South.

In 1968 - with an eye on George Wallace’s third party run - Nixon added a racial component to his message — against the wishes of liberal Republican stalwarts like former Michigan governor George Romney and former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller — and won the election.

As the Republican Party became more conservative, the differences between it and the Democrats became more stark.

“Today, there’s almost no muddiness whatsoever, when it comes to questions of economics, and questions of race. Black folks are very, very clear about how they view the Democratic Party and how they view the Republican Party,” says Wright Rigueur.

But that doesn’t mean another shift couldn’t occur, she says. Securing African American loyalty will require more than appeals to fight racism.

“That is no longer enough,” says Wright Rigueur. “Black voters have always been sophisticated and nuanced. They’ve always been multi-issue voters."

Which means it’s the multi-issue candidate, Republican or Democrat, who has the better chance with blacks come Election Day.

Afi Scruggs is an award-winning multi-platform freelancer based in Cleveland.