Leah Wright Rigueur.The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power.

Abstract

“Why,” asks Leah Wright Rigueur, “would an African American join the Republican Party?” (2). It is a question to which she can find no adequate answer, as she repeatedly demonstrates that the GOP bears no relation to the party of Abraham Lincoln, and has spent decades either oblivious or willfully neglectful of its black members. Indeed, the title of this book could have been “the hopelessness of the black Republican” given their shabby treatment by the party. Rigueur charts the efforts of black Republicans to find some kind of role within the GOP and their attempts to steer it away from the forces of reaction, while adhering to traditional conservative economic (and often social) values. She notes that a black Republican is often characterized as a “Benedict Arnold in blackface” (1), but their philosophical forbears are African American thinkers such as Booker T. Washington. Conservatism and civil rights are not, for black Republicans, inimical. Moreover, black conservatism is flexible and enduring, if marginal and heterogeneous, and distinct from its white counterpart. As late as 1936 most African Americans still identified as Republicans, but Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign of 1964 proved the catalyst for their final exodus from the party.