Skeptics might rationalize that Mitt Romney received a scant 6
percent of the black vote in 2012 only because African Americans
would naturally favor one of their own. But since 1964, no
Republican presidential candidate has attracted more than 15
percent of the black electorate, and few GOP candidates for other
offices have fared much better. No segment of the American
electorate is more reliably Democratic than African Americans. The
GOP, meanwhile, remains nearly an all-white party.
In this path-breaking book, historian Timothy Thurber
illuminates the deep roots of this gulf by exploring the
contentious, and sometimes surprising, relationship between African
Americans and the Republican Party from the end of World War II
through Richard Nixon's presidency. The GOP, he shows, shaped the
modern civil rights movement, but the struggle for racial equality
also transformed the GOP.
Thurber challenges conventional wisdom that the "party of
Lincoln" disappeared in the mid-1960s. Prior to 1964, the GOP was
indifferent or hostile to many of the demands from civil rights
activists. During the height of the civil rights revolution,
Republicans were essential to enacting federal policies that made
American society more egalitarian. The GOP helped defend, and
sometimes expanded, those reforms in the early 1970s. Conservatives
were not as dominant after 1964 as scholars and pundits often
portray.
Yet throughout these three decades the rift between African
Americans and the GOP remained substantial. They disagreed, often
sharply, over the role of the federal government, particularly
regarding economic matters and the integration of schools and
neighborhoods. They had different views about race and American
society. They also clashed in the political arena, where
Republicans wrote off the black vote as unwinnable, irrelevant, or
counterproductive to their drive to supplant the Democrats as the
nation's majority party. The GOP preferred to court whites
nationwide, sometimes by appealing to their racial animosities.
That strategy often yielded electoral success, but the legacy of
the past looms large in the early twenty-first century. With its
depth of research and insight, "Republicans and Race" will stand as
a definitive study as the GOP ponders the composition of its base
in future elections.
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