Who was the last Republican to win the black vote?

[All Along The Watchtower]

I think that should remind people that Black voters abandoned the GOP LONG before any perceived REAL courting of the South by the GOP

Under FDR, black civil rights got a big boost relative to what came before (especially with Eleanor's pressure), and Northern Democrats and many liberals in both parties started to seriously stand up for black civil rights in a serious manner - far more serious than any such stand taken by white politicians in the major parties since Reconstruction (note that the Southern Populists at their most radical in the 1880s and 1890s were very much invested in creating biracial coalitions, and with some success too).  

You have to understand, the first three decades of the 20th century were basically the nadir of black civil rights post-Emancipation, with both the Democrats and the Republicans becoming more indifferent to black people's rights (if not outright hostile - which they were in many cases). This was the Golden Age of Lynchings, so to speak (ugh). Woodrow Wilson - amazingly and darkly, obviously - actually got some significant support from black voters in 1912! (only to completely betray them once in office, of course). And post-WWI, while Warren Harding , to his credit, spoke out against lynching, I don't think the 1924 presidential election had any candidates who were serious about strongly supporting civil rights for black people (certainly not the 1924 Democratic nominee, who was enthusiastically endorsed by the Klan!).

Meanwhile, the "Lily White" faction of the Republican Party in the South had by the 1920s been becoming more powerful than the "Black-and-Tans" (the biracial/pro-civil rights part of the Southern GOP), which naturally pushed the Southern GOP in a more conservative direction. While Southern Republicans obviously were useless for winning elections in this period (duh), they could and did indeed have influence on the Republican platform at the National Convention. And since Southern Republicans in this period were, again, trying to expand by courting Dixiecrats (which was basically necessary if they wanted to not just break up the Dixiecrats' hegemony among white voters, but get any significant number of votes, period - remember, blacks basically couldn't vote in the South at this point, certainly not in practice...)...well, you can imagine what followed from there. Furthermore, Herbert Hoover did surprisingly well in the South in 1928, where the Klan campaigned for him against the Papist Democrat from New York, so the potential for the Solid South being cracked open by at the very least, a protest vote against national Democrats was indeed established in 1928.

All of this is important in understanding why the Republican hold on black voters was already increasingly fragile by the time FDR was elected. And New Deal policies, as well as FDR's steps (modest as they were, especially in retrospect) toward helping black people (in spite of the notorious restrictions and even exclusions of agricultural and domestic workers from many of the New Deal's provisions - thanks, Dixiecrat-controlled Congressional Committees!), in combination with the Republican Party - which at this point was still entirely non-Southern, certainly in terms of elected officials) throwing their lot in with segregationist Dixiecrats (especially the extremely conservative - reactionary, in fact - Southern Democrats who chaired most Congressional Committees) in Congress as part of what became known as the "Conservative Coalition" in opposition to (much of) the New Deal and to "Northern liberalism" in general (which was certainly present among Northerners in BOTH parties, but increasingly more so in the Democrats as the 1930s and 1940s went on - not a good omen for the Democratic Party's national unity!) only accelerated that process.

Yes, black voters going from very reliable Republicans to very reliable Democrats is a very complex and long-term historical phenomenon indeed, but the changing roles in which race and civil rights (both support of and opposition to) played in the US two-party system (and the one-party system in the South), in conjunction with the related (and similarly complex) origin story of what we now widely define and recognize as political "liberalism" and political "conservatism" and that story's intersections with both the New Deal and its legacy as well as the aforementioned trends re: race relations and black civil rights - all of these are essential to understanding this topic.

/effortpost

[All Along The Watchtower]

One should keep in mind that both parties were "big tents" at times in their history. For example, Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater were both Republicans at the same time while Hubert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond were both Democrats at the same time.

I mean, that is an indisputable fact.  However, I think people use that "fact" to fit their agendas, and they end up saying something like Nelson Rockefeller was more liberal than Robert Byrd because of civil rights alone, which is absurd.

At the same time though, race and racial attitudes define and divide American politics in such a deep way that if you are going to neglect them, you might as well try analyzing UK politics without talking about class.

To put it more bluntly: The rise of modern American "movement" conservatism and its consolidation within the Republican Party is perhaps the key development in recent US political history, and this form of conservatism is implicitly (and increasingly, explicitly) based heavily - though not exclusively - on hostility to the expansion and enforcement of civil rights (and more recently, anything to do with "diversity" ie. immigration, multiculturalism, along with whites losing their majority status, and so on). Fact.