Blackness and Right-Wing Multiculturalism: The Loneliness of the Black Republican by Leah Wright Rigueur

This week we read Leah Wright Rigueur’s book The Loneliness of the Black Republican, to help examine the topic “Blackness and Right-Wing Multiculturalism.”  Rigueur’s work connects well to this theme, examining the contributions African Americans have made to conservativism as well as the instances when conservative philosophy has neglected African Americans.

Rigueur notes in her introduction that popular perceptions of black Republicans often frame them as anomalous outliers or dupes of party elites, but she argues this analysis is problematic and instead accepts the agency of this important group of African Americans (for notes, see here).  By choosing to examine black Republicans on their own terms, Rigueur’s approach reminded me of our first reading, as both historians made efforts to challenge popular misconceptions about specific groups by looking at what those groups actually thought and did. To capture these perspectives, Rigueur uses sources from government agencies, social and political organizations, presidential libraries, and personal papers that allow her to meet her ambitious goal of examining black Republicans at all levels of government.

Rigueur finds that while African Americans are often associated with the Democratic party today, this is the result of a long historical process since many elements of the Republican agenda could appeal to black voters. Rigueur examines black Republicans between 1936 and 1980, describing a series of waves that both brought African Americans towards the party and pushed them away from it.  Rigueur notes that over these years many African Americans, particularly middle-class men, did connect with conservative values including anti-communism, the virtues of self-help and personal responsibility, the benefits of limited government action, and free market economics; what often separated them from white Republicans was their belief that racial egalitarianism was also a core principle of the party and that the government had a responsibility to intervene and protect it.

Rigueur begins her study in 1936, when African Americans began leaving the Republican party in large numbers after it failed to provide solutions to the Great Depression.  However, Rigueur also notes that this departure was not evidence of an ideological commitment to the Democratic party since it was often associated with support for (or its inability to renounce) segregation in the south, and that for several decades African Americans would switch votes between the two parties.  African Americans’ support for the Democratic party became more pronounced during the 1960s, particularly when Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee for President and stressed his opposition to the Civil Rights Act was part of his conservative principles.  During the 1970s, Richard Nixon’s efforts to reach out to African Americans were generally overshadowed by his dissolution of the Minorities Division of the Republican National Committee, cuts to anti-poverty programs, opposition to the Voting Rights Act, and appointment of conservative judges who upheld segregation in various forms. Following Gerald Ford’s disastrous showing among African American voters, the national party worked to reach out to African Americans and did win greater support from black voters in 1980, though the party still continued to make coded appeals for “states rights” and demonstrate an ongoing preference for winning ethnic and working-class white Americans.

In spite of these setbacks, Rigueur finds that African Americans continued to support elements of the Republican platform.  During the 1960s, black Republicans such as Edward Brooke of Massachusetts played an important role shaping the party’s moderate wing.  Brooke argued that the federal government had a responsibility to enforce civil rights across the country, yet he also rejected the idea that he was no different from Democrats and criticized President Johnson’s Great Society agenda for trying to replace the values of self-help and hard work.  While Richard Nixon’s policies were designed to win the support of white ethnic groups that felt marginalized by liberal programs of the 1960s, many African Americans were attracted to his efforts to support “black capitalism” by using the federal government to provide grants to minority entrepreneurs.  After Ford’s disastrous showing in the 1976 election, Republican activists worked to win support by running more black candidates, and some black Republicans developed a new rhetoric stressing that most African-American families did not live in poverty and felt that racism was not a major barrier to their own personal advancement made possible by their own persistent hard work.  While this approach often overlooked larger, systemic inequalities that made it nearly impossible for other African Americans to pull themselves out of poverty, it did have a limited appeal to certain voters. Although a small part of the Republican coalition, Rigueur finds black Republicans have had an important impact in shaping American politics, as popular federal programs to support African-American businesses through grants and other measures of indirect wealth redistribution through the market economy had their roots in their  policy proposals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Rigueur’s work also demonstrates the importance of studying differing levels of government, as African Americans often declined to support Republican candidates in Presidential elections while supporting Republicans at other levels of government.  Riguer observes that even during the 1964 presidential campaign Republicans running for Congress including George H.W. Bush worked to distance themselves from Goldwater’s segregationist brand of conservativism and outperformed the party’s presidential nominee among African-American voters.  Rigueur finds that local politics were often more personal and intimate, and this made it easier for African Americans to support Republican candidates they felt a connection with in these local elections.

After finishing the book, I wondered how the book might look if it continued its analysis to the present.  In a Republican party shaped by Donald Trump, it seems that black Republicans might be in a position similar to the 1960s and 1970s.  Prominent black Republicans such as Tim Scott have criticized President Trump for his handling of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, essentially arguing that the federal government does have a responsibility to defend civil rights.  Although Scott argued for more a more inclusive vision for conservativism, Trump’s campaign message and victory seems to reinforce the party’s connections to longer trends in Republican politics that have ignored black voters’ needs in the hopes of winning greater support among white voters.  While some commentators have been impressed that Trump won a greater percentage of African American voters than Mitt Romney did four years earlier, his performance demands historical context; Trump won only eight percent of black voters or roughly the same percentage as Gerald Ford in his roundly criticized 1976 campaign that resulted in dramatic rethinking of the party’s appeal to minority voters. Trump’s success and criticism suggests that debate within the Republican party continues – can the party craft a vision of conservativism that includes the perspectives of minority voices, or will it once again frame minorities in opposition to the party’s guiding philosophy?