“A Party for the White Man”
Civil rights parade at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler. [Library of Congress]
When an April 1964 Gallup poll asked Republicans whom they would most like to see nominated as president, only 15% named Barry Goldwater; 52% named Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., George Romney, or William W. Scranton, all liberals on civil rights with support among African Americans. Outraged by Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Pennsylvania Governor Scranton stepped into the race and launched a “stop-Goldwater” bid with Rockefeller’s endorsement just five weeks before the national convention. Though too late to win any primaries, he hoped that his campaign could sway delegates who agreed with him that Goldwater’s extremism represented “a weird parody of Republicanism.”
Conservatives, however, had a three-year head start packing state delegations with Goldwater supporters. Eliminating Black-and-Tan remnants from Southern delegations was essential to this strategy. South Carolina’s state party, which had been open to black inclusion in the 1950s, issued a report in the early 1960s boasting that “not a single Negro showed any interest” in the party, which “was welcomed by new Party leaders as victory in the South at any level could never be achieved by a Negro dominated party.” Georgia’s Republican Party continued to welcome black participation through the early 1960s, and an African American served as vice chairman of the state party. One white official bragged that the GOP was one of only two “integrated public organization[s] in the state.” At the 1963 state party convention, the Fulton County Republican Committee proposed a platform endorsing black equality. Not only was the statement rejected, but the delegation from Atlanta was not prepared for the onslaught of conservatives who had only recently become interested in the mechanics of party gatherings. Whereas previous state conventions had averaged fewer than 400 participants, conservatives, including many former Democrats, filled the convention with more than 1,500 delegates. By the final day, they had removed every single black leader from power, including John H. Calhoun, the man who delivered Atlanta’s black vote to Nixon in 1960. For the first time in 40 years, Georgia’s delegation to the Republican National Convention was entirely white. One of the party’s new officials proclaimed, “The Negro has been read out of the Republican Party of Georgia here today,” and members celebrated with an all-white banquet.
Finally in control of the party’s most powerful committees and inspired by the GOP’s first staunchly conservative presidential nominee in decades, Goldwater delegates sought to humiliate their establishment enemies at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Conservatives intentionally delayed proceedings so that Nelson Rockefeller could not deliver his convention address until midnight, or 3:00 am on the East Coast. When the New York governor finally stepped on stage, a steady stream of boos interrupted him for a solid three minutes. Black delegates faced similar disrespectful treatment from members of their own party. The vice chairman of the DC Republican Committee, Elaine Jenkins, recalled, “There was no inclusion of black Republicans as a group at the convention. White staffers treated the few of us present as truly non-existent or invisible.” On one occasion, Goldwater’s “Junior Sergeant at Arms” blocked four black men from entering the convention floor, including Edward Brooke, one of the most powerful public officials in Massachusetts. it was not until a Nixon associate, John Ehrlichman, intervened on their behalf that they were granted entry.
African Americans in attendance also faced verbal and physical abuse. Memphis Black-and-Tan leader George W. Lee had to be escorted from Scranton headquarters to an undisclosed motel after receiving death threats during his contest against Memphis conservatives. When Clarence Townes, the only African American in Virginia’s delegation, cast his vote for Rockefeller, he “was forced to flee from the convention hall in company with television newscasters to escape angry conservatives.” In one of the most shocking events of the convention, William P. Young, Pennsylvania secretary of labor and industry, noticed smoke coming from his clothes after a heated exchange with a group of Goldwater delegates. After burning his hand to extinguish the flames, he discovered four holes burned into his suit jacket from a lit cigar placed in his pocket by an unknown assailant. The event was witnessed live by television cameras and reporters on scene. Shortly thereafter, one Southern entrepreneur began selling “Goldwater Cigars,” which included a card that read, “These cigars can be used in many ways … Some Republican People at the San Francisco Convention Slipped a Lighted Cigar into a Negro Delegate’s Pocket! They Say He Seemed to Get the Idea That He Wasn’t Wanted. And He Left the Room in a Hurry!”
The events at Cow Palace confirmed many black Republicans’ worst fears about their party. Edward Brooke described the convention as “an exercise in manipulation by a zealous organization which operated with a militancy, a lack of toleration, at times a ruthlessness totally alien to Republican practices.” In a convention hall filled with Confederate flags waved by southern delegations, one African American remarked, “it’s clear to me … that this taking over of our party is based on resentment of civil rights advances.” Sandy Ray of New York lamented that his party had become home to “extremists, racists, crackpots, and rightists. What we experienced at the convention television onlookers could not believe.” Jackie Robinson declared, “as I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
Scranton’s last-ditch campaign failed, and Goldwater easily secured the GOP nomination. Although a July poll of registered Republicans found that 60% favored Scranton, conventions are not democratic proceedings. Southern delegations cast over 97% of their votes for Goldwater under their newfound all-white leadership. By refusing to slate African Americans as delegates even from diverse states like California and replacing black leaders in Georgia and Tennessee with conservative whites, Goldwater’s forces had reduced black representation at the national convention to its lowest numbers in over 50 years. Especially disconcerting to moderates was that 7% of the convention’s 1,300 convention delegates were members of the anti-civil rights John Birch Society, while only 1%, or 14 individuals, were African American. Conversely, the 1964 Democratic Convention featured a record 65 black delegates.
In his acceptance speech, Goldwater rejected another opportunity to reconcile with moderates and liberals. Although civil rights had been the nation’s most pressing domestic issue for the past four years, the nominee did not make a single reference to the movement. He identified communism and an ever-expanding federal government as the primary threats to American “liberty,” but conspicuously left Jim Crow off the list. He used the words “free” and “freedom” 26 times, though none referred to the ongoing struggle for black equality that raged in the South. The same summer as Goldwater delivered his convention speech, four civil rights activists had been murdered, 80 had been beaten, and 67 black churches, homes, and businesses had been burned or bombed in Mississippi alone. Goldwater was silent on this wave of violence in the South in his convention speech, and yet railed against violence in the “streets” of Northern cities. He also expressed his disdain for moderate Republicans, who had so often dismissed him as an extremist, and famously proclaimed, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! and … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
Despite efforts to alienate African Americans at the convention, they refused to withdraw quietly without a fight. According to Jet, black Republicans “poured out in numbers” to attend an anti-Goldwater rally led by Jackie Robinson and the Congress of Racial Equality. The rally, whose participants also included Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, George Romney, Jacob Javits, and Kenneth Keating, culminated in a 40,000-person march from Market Street to Cow Palace. On July 15, African Americans assembled at the Fairmont Hotel to discuss protest strategies. Temporarily naming themselves the Negro Republican Organization (NRO), the group issued a statement read by William Young to the press. “We have no confidence” in Goldwater’s “ability to enforce” the civil rights bill, they announced, and pledged to “defeat that minority segment” of the GOP, “which appears determined to establish a lily-white Republican Party.” Jackie Robinson called for a coordinated NRO walkout from the convention floor, but George Parker of Washington, DC, cautioned that because of their small numbers, “it would look as if they were just going out to lunch.” They ultimately agreed to stage a “walk around” instead of a walkout, hoping that television cameras would broadcast their protest. The demonstration occurred as the convention began counting verbal votes for the presidential nominee. A counter-protest soon eclipsed the demonstration, and journalists found it difficult to see the marchers amid “a tunnel of Goldwater banners, signs, pennants, streamers, and flying hats.”
To the black delegates who formed the NRO, leaving the party was not an option. The hostile national convention provided motivation to continue their fight against an uncompromising conservative movement. As Sandy Ray declared after the convention, “if we sit quietly and allow this band of racists to take over the party, we not only signal the end of the party of freedom, we also help to bring about the total destruction of America through racism.” When asked in 1968 if he had ever considered leaving the GOP, George W. Lee somberly replied, “during my Goldwater fight in San Francisco … I was a lone individual down there,” but he never thought of ever leaving the GOP, because “somebody had to stay there in the Republican Party and fight, and fight, and fight with the hope that the Republican Party wouldn’t be made a party of ultra-conservatism and further than that, a party for the white man.”
Adapted excerpt reprinted with permission from Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP, by Joshua D. Farrington, now available in paperback. © 2016 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
