GetWiki

{{Short description|19th century Republican anti-African-American movement}} {{Segregation}}{{African American topics sidebar}}The Lily-White Movement was an anti-black political movement within the Republican Party in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a response to the political and socioeconomic gains made by African-Americans following the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which eliminated slavery and involuntary servitude ("except as punishment for a crime").WEB, U.S. Constitution – Thirteenth Amendment {{!, Resources {{!}} Constitution Annotated {{!}} Congress.gov {{!}} Library of Congress |url=https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ |website=constitution.congress.gov |access-date=2 February 2022 |language=en}}During Reconstruction, Black leaders in the South gained influence in the Republican Party by organizing Black people as an important voting bloc via Union Leagues and the biracial black-and-tan faction of the Republicans. Conservative whites attempted to eliminate this influence and recover white voters who had defected to the Democratic Party. The Lily-White Movement proved successful throughout the South and was a key factor in the growth of the Republican Party in the region.JOURNAL, Heersink, Boris, Jenkins, Jeffery A., April 2020, Whiteness and the Emergence of the Republican Party in the Early Twentieth-Century South,weblink Studies in American Political Development, en, 34, 1, 71–90, 10.1017/S0898588X19000208, 213551748, 0898-588X,

Terminology

The term Lily-White Movement was coined by Black Texas Republican leader Norris Wright Cuney, who used the term in an 1888 state Republican convention to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust Black people from positions of Texas Republican party leadership and incite riots to divide the party.WEB, TSHA {{!, Lily-White Movement|url=https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/lily-white-movement|access-date=2021-11-18|website=www.tshaonline.org}}The term came to be used nationally to describe this ongoing movement as it further developed in the early 20th century.NEWS, 17 February 1903, Negroes Lose Fight in North Carolina; Pritchard's "Lilly Whites" Recognized by the President. Politicians in Washington Are Puzzled by Contradictory Aspects of Mr. Roosevelt's Policy in the South., New York Times,weblink {{void|Fabrickator|comment|for some reason, specifying "/page/n1" causes page 2 to be displayed}}{{cbignore}}

Background

Immediately following the war all of the Southern states enacted "Black Codes," laws intended specifically to curtail the rights of the newly freed African Americans. Many Northern states enacted their own "Black Codes" restricting or barring black immigration.WEB, African American History, 10 October 2009, MSN Encarta,weblinkweblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20091028064825weblink">weblink 28 October 2009, dead, The Civil Rights Act of 1866, however, nullified most of these laws, and the federal Freedman's Bureau was able to regulate many of the affairs of Southern black men, who were granted the right to vote in 1867. Groups such as the Union League and the Radical Republicans sought total equality and complete integration of Black People into American society. The Republican Party itself held significant power in the South during Reconstruction because of the federal government's role.Brady (2008), p. 154During Reconstruction, Union Leagues were formed across the South after 1867 as all-black working auxiliaries of the Republican Party. They were secret organizations that mobilized freedmen to register to vote and to vote Republican. They discussed political issues, promoted civic projects, and mobilized workers opposed to certain employers. Most branches were segregated, but a few were integrated. The leaders of the all-black units were mostly urban Black People from the North who had never been enslaved. Historian Eric Foner reports:BOOK, Leon F. Litwack and August Meier, Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century,weblink 1991, 221, University of Illinois Press, 978-0252062131, {{blockquote|By the end of 1867 it seemed that virtually every black voter in the south had enrolled in the Union League, the Loyal League, or some equivalent local political organization. Meetings were generally held in a black church or school.|Eric Foner | Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century}}During the 19th century, a small number of African Americans were elected to the United States Congress; all were members of the Republican Party. In the South, the party was a voting coalition of Freedmen (freed slaves), Carpetbaggers (derogatory term used by southern whites for recent arrivals from the north), and Scalawags (derogatory term describing those southern whites who had been loyal to the US during the Civil War). In the South, the Republican Party gradually came to be known as "the party of the Negro."JOURNAL, The Future of the Negro, Macmillan and Company, Macmillan's Magazine, 449, Masson, David, Masson, George, Morley, John, Morris, Mowbray Walter, 1900,weblink In Texas, Black People comprised 90% of the party members during the 1880s.{{Handbook of Texas | title=AFRICAN AMERICANS AND POLITICS | id=wmafr}}The Democratic Party increasingly came to be seen by many in the white community as the party of respectability. The first Ku Klux Klan targeted violence against black Republican leaders and seriously undercut the Union League.Steven Hahn, A nation under our feet: Black political struggles in the rural South, from slavery to the great migration (2003). pp 165–205

Republican factionalism

Black Republicans increasingly demanded more and more offices at the expense of the Scalawags. The more numerous Black-and-tan element typically won the factional battles; many Scalawags joined the opposing lily-whites or switched to the Democrats.Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865–1881 (University of Alabama Press, 1977).Frank J. Wetta, The Louisiana Scalawags: Politics, Race, and Terrorism during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012)Following the death of Texas Republican leader Edmund J. Davis in 1883, black civil rights leader Norris Wright Cuney rose to the Republican chairmanship in Texas, becoming a national committeeman in 1889.{{Handbook of Texas | title=LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TEXAS | id=npl01}} While black Americans were a minority overall in Texas, Cuney's rise to this position caused a backlash among white conservative Republicans in other areas, leading to the Lily-whites becoming a more organized, nationwide effort. Cuney himself coined the term "Lily-White Movement" to describe rapidly intensifying organized efforts by white conservatives to oust black Republicans from positions of party leadership and incite riots to divide the party.BOOK, Myrdal, Gunnar, Bok, Sissela, An American dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy, 1944, 478, Transaction Publishers,weblink 978-1412815109, Some authors contend that the effort was coordinated with Democrats as part of a larger movement toward disenfranchisement of Black people in the South by increasing restrictions in voter registration rules.BOOK, Republicans and the Black Vote, Fauntroy, Michael K., Michael K. Fauntroy, 2007, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 43,weblink ... lily whites worked with Democrats to disenfranchise African Americans., 978-1588264701, {{-}}

Downfall of black Republicans

By 1890, with a few brief exceptions, the Democratic Party had gained control of all state legislatures in the South. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states accomplished disenfranchisement of Black people and—in some states—many poor whites.Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (2001)During the first three decades of the 20th century, no Black people served in the U.S. Congress due to their disenfranchisement across the South.WEB, The Negroes' Temporary Farewell: Jim Crow and the Exclusion of African Americans from Congress, 1887–1929, Black Americans in Congress (House of Representatives), 9 October 2009,weblinkweblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20091104001335weblink">weblink 4 November 2009, dead, Black leaders were barred in 1922 from the Virginia Republican Congressional Convention; the state had imposed racial segregation in public places and disenfranchised most Black people by this time.WEB, Virginia Party Politics, 9 October 2009, Virginia Center for Digital History (University of Virginia),weblink NEWS, Negroes Again Barred From G.O.P. Convention, Daily Progress, July 23, 1922, At the national level, the Republican Party made some attempts to respond to black interests.Lewis L. Gould, The Republicans: A History of the Grand Old Party (2014)Vincent P. De Santis, Republicans face the southern question: The new departure years, 1877–1897 (1959). In 1920, Republicans made opposition to lynching part of their platform at the Republican National Convention. Lynchings of black women and men in the Southweblink had increased in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. Leonidas C. Dyer, a white Republican Representative from St. Louis, Missouri, worked with the NAACP to introduce an anti-lynching bill into the House, where he gained strong passage in 1922.George C. Rable, "The South and the Politics of Antilynching Legislation, 1920–1940." Journal of Southern History 51.2 (1985): 201–220. in JSTOR One of the black-and-tan partisans who continued to hold appointed office was Walter L. Cohen of New Orleans, the customs inspector and later comptroller of customs. He gained appointments from four Republican presidents and continued in office through the Calvin Coolidge administration.WEB,weblink Louisiana Historical Association, Louisiana Historical Association, A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, lahistory.org, December 21, 2010,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20171019202524weblink">weblink October 19, 2017, dead, During the NAACP national convention in 1926, the delegates expressed their disappointment with the party:BOOK, Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007, Wasniewski, Matthew, Office of History, Preservation House, Government Printing Office, 2008,weblink 183, 978-0160801945, {{blockquote|Our political salvation and our social survival lie in our absolute independence of party allegiance in politics and the casting of our vote for our friends and against our enemies whoever they may be and whatever party labels they carry.|NAACP | 1926 Convention}}

Aftermath

Lily-white/black-and-tan factionalism flared up in 1928,BOOK, Lisio, Donald J., Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies,weblink 2012, U North Carolina Press, 37ff, 978-0807874219, when Herbert Hoover tried to appeal to upper-class southern whites; and again in 1932 as the New Deal coalition built by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the pro-civil rights voice of Eleanor Roosevelt began to attract African-American voters to the Democratic Party.BOOK, Marty Cohen, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform,weblink 2009, 118, University of Chicago Press, etal, 978-0226112381, Due to Harry Truman's proposal for comprehensive civil rights legislation and his anti-segregationist policies, and for support for the civil rights movement and Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under Lyndon Johnson, the shift of African Americans toward Democratic candidates accelerated.BOOK, Robert David Johnson, All the Way with LBJ: The 1964 Presidential Election,weblink 2009, 84, Cambridge University Press, 978-0521737524, According to author and professor Michael K. Fauntroy, the Lily-White Movement is one of the darkest and most "under-examined [eras] of American Republicanism".NEWS, Republicans and the Black Vote, The Huffington Post, Michael K. Fauntroy, Michael K. Fauntroy, 4 January 2007,weblink BOOK, Republicans and the Black Vote, Michael K. Fauntroy, Michael K. Fauntroy, 2007, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 164,weblink 978-1588264701,

Important figures

Lily-white leaders:

• James P. Newcomb, Republican Secretary of State of Texas between 1870 and 1874, journalist, and longtime influential Texas party leader.Hales (2003), p. 40
• Jeter C. Pritchard, Republican U.S. Senator from western North Carolina between 1895 and 1903.Spragens (1988), pp. 196–198
• William Howard Taft, Republican President between 1909 and 1913, who sought to expand Republican appeal in the South by eliminating black involvement.BOOK, Myrdal, Gunnar,weblink An American dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy, Bok, Sissela, Transaction Publishers, 1944, 978-1560008569,
• Herbert Hoover, Republican President between 1929 and 1933. He had alliances with black leaders, but broke with them in 1928 to gain Lily-white support in the South.Donald J. Lisio, Hoover, Blacks, & Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies (1985)

Leading opponents:

• Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; he had close ties to leading Republicans and was a force in black politics.Kevern J. Verney, The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881–1925 (2013).

Further reading

• Abbott, Richard H. The Republican Party and the South, 1855–1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 1986),
• BOOK, Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007 (House Document No. 108-224), Brady, Robert A., 2008, U.S. Government Printing Office,weblink
• Casdorph, Paul D. Republicans, Negroes, and Progressives in the South, 1912–1916 (University of Alabama Press, 1981). online
• BOOK, Republicans and the Black vote, Fauntroy, Michael K., Michael K. Fauntroy, 2007, Lynne Rienner Publishers,weblink 978-1588264701,
• BOOK, Hales, Douglas, A southern family in white & Black: the Cuneys of Texas, Texas A&M University Press, 2003, 3: Political Education, 1869–83,weblinkweblink 978-1585442003,
• Heersink, Boris, and Jeffery A. Jenkins. "Southern Delegates and Republican National Convention Politics, 1880–1928." Studies in American Political Development 291 (2015): 68–88. online {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160410232246weblink |date=2016-04-10 }}
• Hume, Richard L. and Jerry B. Gough. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (LSU Press, 2008); statistical classification of delegates.
• Jenkins, Jeffery A., and Boris Heersink. "Republican Party Politics and the American South: From Reconstruction to Redemption, 1865–1880." (2016 paper t the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association); weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20170525214102weblink">online.
• {{Handbook of Texas | title=Lily-White Movement | id=wfl01}}
• Lisio, Donald J. Hoover, Blacks, & Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies (1985) online
• BOOK, Myrdal, Gunnar, Bok, Sissela, An American dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy, Transaction Publishers, 1944,weblink 978-1560008569,
• BOOK, Spragen, William C., Popular images of American presidents, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1988, 8: Theodore Roosevelt,weblinkweblink 978-0313228995,
• Trelease, Allen W. "Who were the Scalawags?." Journal of Southern History 29.4 (1963): 445–468. in JSTOR
• Valelly, Richard M. The two reconstructions: The struggle for black enfranchisement (U of Chicago Press, 2009).
• Walton, Hanes. Black Republicans: The politics of the black and tans (Scarecrow Press, 1975).
• Ward, Judson C. "The Republican Party in Bourbon Georgia, 1872–1890." Journal of Southern History 9.2 (1943): 196–209. in JSTOR
• Watts, Eugene J. "Black Political Progress in Atlanta: 1868–1895," Journal of Negro History (1974) 593 pp. 268–286 in JSTOR
• Wetta, Frank J. The Louisiana Scalawags: Politics, Race, and Terrorism during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012) online review{{dead link|date=May 2021|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}
• Wiggins, Sarah Woolfolk. The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865–1881 (U of Alabama Press, 1977).

Primary sources

• Link, Arthur S. "Correspondence Relating to the Progressive Party's 'Lily White' Policy in 1912." Journal of Southern History 10.4 (1944): 480–490. in JSTOR

See also

• Black-and-tan faction
• Black suffrage in the United States
• Civil rights movement (1896–1954)
• Dixiecrat
• Nadir of American race relations
• Norris Wright Cuney
• Southern strategy

References

{{Reflist}}

Further reading

• Raffel, Jeffrey. Historical dictionary of school segregation and desegregation: The American experience (Bloomsbury, 1998) online

{{Civil rights movement}}{{African American topics}}{{United States topics}}