Why Black Voters Left the Party of Lincoln for the New Deal, in Questions

Ask most Americans when Black voters left the Republican Party, and you will hear 1964. It is a neat answer, with a villain and a date. It is also wrong by about thirty years. The break came in the 1930s, in the middle of the worst economic collapse in the nation's history, and it came for reasons that Republicans ought to understand better than most of us do. Some of those reasons are uncomfortable. They are also our history, and a party that knows where it lost people is the only kind that can win them back.

So here are the questions people actually ask, with plain answers. I have kept them in order, and I have tried to be fair to everybody in the story, including the Republicans who fell short and the Democrats who built a coalition that was far from perfect itself.

The short answer

For roughly seventy years after the Civil War, Black Americans who could vote voted overwhelmingly Republican, because Republicans had ended slavery, written the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and sent troops to protect Black citizens in the South. Then, in the early 1930s, the Great Depression hit Black families harder than almost anyone, the Republican administration seemed to offer them little, and the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt offered them relief, jobs and a seat at the table, even though its programs and its Southern wing had serious flaws. Over the 1934 and 1936 elections, a majority of Black voters moved to the Democrats. The details are below.

Why the loyalty ran so deep

Why were Black Americans so loyal to the Republican Party for so long?

Because the Republican Party was the reason they were free and the reason they could vote. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, the 14th Amendment in 1868 guaranteeing citizenship and equal protection and the 15th Amendment in 1870 barring race discrimination in voting were all Republican work. You can read how those amendments fit together in Citizenship, Equal Protection and the Ballot in the 14th and 15th Amendments.

In the other column was the Democratic Party of the South, which after Reconstruction became the party of segregation and of laws that kept Black citizens from the polls. A voter who looked at the two parties in 1890 or 1910 did not have a hard choice. During Reconstruction, Black Republicans held real office: Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi served in the U.S. Senate, and Joseph Rainey of South Carolina and others served in the House. See A timeline of the Black Republicans who sat in Congress after the Civil War.

Did the party stay faithful to that loyalty?

Partly. The record is mixed, and honest history includes both halves. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, stayed with the party for the rest of his life while pressing it to do more. Republican presidents gave him federal appointments: Rutherford Hayes made him U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia, James Garfield named him Recorder of Deeds, and Benjamin Harrison appointed him Minister to Haiti. Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, a gesture that outraged much of the white South.

But the party also let its voters down. The Lodge bill to protect federal elections failed in 1891, as you can see in The 1890 Lodge Force Bill and the Elections Law Republicans Could Not Pass, and the Southern states then wrote Black citizens out of politics. In 1906 Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 Black soldiers after a shooting in Brownsville, Texas, without a trial, in a decision that outraged Black leaders and was overturned decades later. After the failure of Reconstruction, the party became more concerned about winning white votes in the border states than about enforcing the 15th Amendment in the Deep South.

What about the 1920s?

Mixed again. President Harding went to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921 and told a segregated crowd that Black Americans should have political equality, while rejecting social equality, a speech that was both bold for its place and limited in what it promised. In January 1922 the House, with strong Republican support, passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, sponsored by Representative Leonidas Dyer, a Republican from Missouri. The bill then died in the Senate, where Southern Democrats filibustered it. Lynching continued, and no federal law against it passed. The Republican majority could not break the filibuster. That lesson, about how Senate rules protect minorities and sometimes block justice, is relevant to Republicans Delivered the Votes That Broke the 1964 Filibuster.

How the loyalty frayed

What was the "lily-white" movement?

In the South, the Republican Party was small, and it depended on federal patronage and on its Black voters and officeholders. Within the party, a faction of white Southern Republicans, called "lily-whites," wanted to push Black members out of party leadership in order to attract white voters. The rival faction, with Black leaders in it, was nicknamed "black and tan." The fight over who counted as the real Republican organization in each Southern state went on for decades, and national Republican leaders increasingly took the lily-white side.

Herbert Hoover's campaign in 1928 leaned toward it. He was running against Al Smith, a Catholic Democrat from New York, and Hoover carried several Southern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Texas. It was a historic breakthrough for the party in the South. It was also a signal to Black Republicans that the party's future in the region lay with white voters.

What was the Parker fight?

In 1930 Hoover nominated Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina to the Supreme Court. The NAACP, led by Walter White, and organized labor mobilized against the nomination. Parker, during a campaign for governor of North Carolina in 1920, had said that Black participation in politics was a source of evil, a statement that his critics quoted back at him. Labor objected to a ruling of his on labor contracts. The Senate rejected Parker by a narrow margin in May 1930.

Black voters watched Hoover stay with the nomination to the end, and they noticed which Republican senators voted which way. It was one of the first major national victories for the NAACP, and it showed Black Republicans that their party's leader would not listen. In fairness to Parker, his later record as a federal appeals court judge included rulings in favor of equal pay for Black teachers, and he served as an alternate judge at the Nuremberg trials. People are more than their worst year. But the Black press and the NAACP judged the nomination by what they had at the time.

What did the Depression have to do with it?

Everything. After the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s, which had taken hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners north to cities like Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, Black families were concentrated in urban industrial jobs when the economy collapsed. Black workers were often the last hired and the first fired. Relief offices, charities and local governments often gave Black families less help than white families. A man or woman in that position did not ask which party had freed the grandparents. They asked who would help them eat.

Hoover's response to the Depression, which stressed voluntary cooperation and local relief and worried about the federal budget, struck many voters of all races as inadequate. Whatever you think of his reasoning, which had principled conservative elements, voters judged the results, and the results were unemployment and hunger.

The break

Did Black voters leave in 1932?

Not mostly. This is the part that surprises people. In 1932 the majority of Black voters, according to most historians who have studied it, still voted for Hoover. Some prominent Black leaders did switch, and one of them, Robert Vann, the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, urged Black readers to turn Lincoln's picture to the wall, meaning that the debt owed to the Republican Party had been repaid. But the loyalty held in 1932, even with Hoover as the nominee. The great shift came after Roosevelt's programs began to reach people.

Could Black Southerners even vote in these elections?

Mostly not, and that is the key to the whole story. In the 1930s, the great majority of Black Americans still lived in the South, where poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation and the all-white Democratic primary kept most of them away from the ballot. In a one-party South, the Democratic primary was the real election, and Black citizens were barred from it. The Supreme Court did not strike down the white primary until Smith v. Allwright in 1944. So the political shift of the 1930s happened where Black citizens could vote: in the cities of the North and the border states, where the Great Migration had taken them. That is also why it was the Northern wing of the Democratic coalition, the big-city machines and the labor unions, that courted them, while the Southern wing of the same party kept the old order in place at home.

What changed in 1934 and 1936?

In the 1934 midterms, in Chicago, Oscar De Priest, a Republican and the first Black member of Congress in the twentieth century (elected in 1928), lost his seat to Arthur Mitchell, a Black Democrat. Mitchell had himself been a Republican earlier and had switched. Mitchell later brought a case against railroad segregation that he won at the Supreme Court in 1941, so the shift was not meaningless symbolism. In 1936 most Black voters supported Roosevelt for reelection, and the shift was visible across the Northern cities. Relief jobs through the Works Progress Administration, public housing and a Black "kitchen cabinet" of advisers, including Mary McLeod Bethune, who ran a division of the National Youth Administration, made a difference.

Was the New Deal actually good for Black Americans?

The answer is yes and no, and both halves matter. It provided relief and jobs that reached millions of Black families who had been getting nothing. But the New Deal's programs had real flaws. The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which left out a large share of Black workers, particularly in the South. Agricultural payments often went to landowners and pushed sharecroppers and tenant farmers off the land. The Civilian Conservation Corps ran segregated camps. President Roosevelt, who needed Southern Democrats in Congress, did not push anti-lynching legislation. It took the threat of a march on Washington by A. Philip Randolph in 1941 before Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense industries.

So Black voters did not choose a perfect party. They chose a party that offered help over a party that seemed not to, and they pushed that party for more over the following decades. If you want the larger picture of Roosevelt's coalition and what it meant for Republicans, read The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness.

What Republicans did next

Did Republicans try to win them back?

Yes, and some of the efforts were significant. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice, and the Warren Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal civil rights law since Reconstruction, and sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce a court order to integrate Central High School. That story is in Little Rock in 1957 and the Republican President Who Sent in the 101st Airborne. Republicans in Congress supplied key votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois was instrumental in ending the filibuster against it. President Nixon's Philadelphia Plan of 1969 required federal contractors to set goals for hiring minority workers. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, elected in 1966, became the first Black person popularly elected to the U.S. Senate.

Then what happened in 1964?

In 1964 the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, voted against the Civil Rights Act, on constitutional grounds, arguing that parts of it exceeded federal power. Whatever his reasons, which he explained at length, Black voters heard the vote and not the footnote. Black support for the Democratic candidate that year was overwhelming and has stayed overwhelming since. For that campaign, see The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future.

Is it true that the parties just switched places?

It is too simple. The coalitions did change, and Southern white voters did move toward the Republican Party over several decades, but the movement came in stages and for many reasons, and it did not happen all at once in 1964. Our piece The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows goes through the evidence.

What to take from it

What should Republicans learn?

Three things, in my view. First, loyalty is not a permanent deed. It is a relationship that has to be earned in each generation, and voters judge a party by whether it showed up when they were in trouble. Second, a party that tries to win one group by sidelining another may win the election and lose the long game. Third, history is a resource, not a weapon. The Republican record on civil rights is a real one and worth knowing, but telling it as a slogan will not persuade anyone who remembers the Parker fight or the Dyer bill's defeat.

The bottom line

• Black Americans were loyal Republicans for about seventy years because the party ended slavery and wrote the Reconstruction amendments. The break came in 1934 and 1936, during the Depression, not in 1964.
• The causes were concrete: Republican retreat from enforcing voting rights, the lily-white strategy in the South, the Parker nomination, and above all a Depression in which Roosevelt's relief reached families that Hoover's did not.
• The New Deal was flawed, and Black voters knew it. They chose the party that offered help and kept pressing it for more. A fair history says that.
• Republicans have a real record to be proud of, from Reconstruction through Eisenhower and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a real record to be honest about. Know both before you talk to a neighbor.
• If you want to earn votes, start by showing up in the places that have not seen your party in years, and talk about jobs, schools and safety, not slogans.