The loneliness of the black conservative: Black Republicans and the Grand Old Party, 1964-1980

"The Loneliness of the Black Conservative: Black Republicans and the Grand Old Party, 1964--1980," proposes a new understanding of the interactions between African American politics and the American conservative movement. Traditionally, the scholarship on civil rights has assumed that the movement existed solely within the boundaries of liberalism; however, this project argues that black Republicans also attempted to promote a genuine agenda of racial equality, civil rights, and black uplift through the conservative movement and the Republican apparatus. Despite the seeming contradiction of African Americans working for civil rights in a party that appeared increasingly hostile to that very idea, many black Republicans did see themselves as part of the movement. In many ways this story is a comparative project about the vision for black equality and advancement. Emphasizing self-reliance, black autonomy, and two-party competition, black Republicans insisted that the GOP was uniquely suited to meet the needs of the African American community; in doing so, they proposed an alternative social, economic, and political civil rights movement.;And yet, as stressed in the dissertation, the pursuit of such an agenda also reveals the many challenges of promoting racial equality within a conservative framework. Black party members occupied an ostensibly irreconcilable position in that they were simultaneously shunned by the black community and subordinated by the Republican Party. Nonetheless, after contrasting this research with contemporary interpretations of the modern conservative moment, it appears that the period was underscored by the coexistence of a moderate and liberal Republican tradition amidst administrations that were hostile or indifferent to issues of black concern. A fundamental aim of this dissertation is to highlight the diversity of both African American political thought and of modern political movements; as such, this project expands the historiography of both the black freedom struggle and the American conservative movement by uncovering a neglected, but significant, black political tradition.