African Americans were one group of Texans who consistently supported the Republican Party in Texas in those early years. In fact, during Reconstruction, African Americans made up about 90% of the Republican Party’s membership, and 44 African Americans served in the Texas legislature as Republicans.
It was through the hard work of a few dedicated African American men and women that the first foundations of the Republican Party of Texas were laid. The first-ever state Republican convention, which convened in Houston on July 4, 1867, was predominantly African American, with about 150 African American Texans and 20 Anglo Americans in attendance.
The second chairman of the state Republican Party, Norris Wright Cooney, an African American from Galveston who led the Republican Party from 1883 to 1897, held “the most important political office given to blacks in the South in the nineteenth century,” according to state historians.
The edge of collapse
Despite strong support from groups such as African Americans and Germans, the Reconstruction period was at best an unpleasant one for the fledgling Republican Party. Edmund J. Davis, a Unionist and Republican, became governor in 1870, and his four years in office were marked by bitter controversy. Despite a major defeat in 1874, Davis refused to leave office. He barricaded himself in the state capital and was driven out by force of arms. It would be 104 years before another Republican was elected governor of Texas.
Despite such embarrassing episodes as Davis’s, Republicans managed to gradually make gains in Texas in the late 19th century. In 1876, nearly one-third of the statewide vote went to Republicans. Several Republican candidates, including several African Americans, won elections to the state legislature. But starting in 1905, with the passage of the Terrell Election Act, which required Texans to pay a poll tax, the number of Republican voters in the state declined because many poor Texans could not afford to pay.
Fifty years after Reconstruction and Edmund J. Davis, the first Republican primary election in the state was held in 1926, with only 15,239 voters participating. Over the next thirty-four years, only two more primary elections would be attempted. In the same year, 821,234 voters participated in the Democratic primary, and Democrat Ma Ferguson was elected to a second term as governor of Texas.