Fairmont Conference

The Black Alternatives Conference, often called the “Fairmont Conference,” was a symposium on African American conservative thought held at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel in December 1980. It was organized by the economist Thomas Sowell and the activist Henry Lucas and was financed by the Institute for Contemporary Studies (a think tank founded by Edwin Meese, who became Ronald Reagan’s attorney general). The conference helped make Black conservatism more visible to the public (even if it never achieved mainstream status) and served as a springboard for some African Americans to find work within the Reagan administration.

From the antebellum era through the 1930s, African Americans had generally associated themselves with the Republican Party when they participated in politics. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign marked a major shift when about 76 percent of Black voters supported the Democratic incumbent, and that affiliation solidified in the decades that followed. The organizers of the 1980 conference hoped to reclaim some of those voters for the Republican Party.

Some 125 people attended the two-day conference, most of them Black professionals of diverse fields: academics, economists, politicians, journalists, businessmen, and activists. The Washington Post described them as “men in their 30s, 40s and early 50s, dressed in dark blue pin-suits as befits the members of an emerging black professional class.” Although their political views varied, the majority were conservatives, and the speeches and panels were almost entirely oriented toward conservative viewpoints.

The conference’s goals were made clear from the start. Lucas stated that the overarching purpose of the event was to “provide a forum for exchange of ideas” and to make it known to the incoming Reagan administration and to businesses that there were African Americans “who are talented, who think differently,” and who thought that traditional strategies for improving the lives of African Americans had “not worked.”

Clarence Thomas, then a staffer for Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, attended the conference at Sowell’s invitation. Reflecting several years later in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, Thomas recalled Sowell’s hope that the conference would mark “the beginning of an alternative group—an alternative to the consistently leftist thinking of the civil rights and the black leadership.” Thomas added, “To my knowledge, it was not intended that this group be an antagonist to anyone, but rather that it bring pluralism to the thinking and to the leadership of black Americans.”

Sowell, in his major speech at the conference, argued that policies such as affirmative action, rent control, and minimum wage, though borne of “noble intentions,” often caused more harm than good. Black conservatives had been making similar claims for decades, historian Leah Wright Rigueur notes, but “what was new here,” she has written, “was the public’s scrutiny of those ideas and a Republican president’s willingness to publicize black party members’ proposals as part of his platform.” Underscoring the administration’s interest, Meese, who was one of Reagan’s closest advisers, spent an entire day at the conference, attending workshops—though he was extraordinarily busy planning the presidential transition.

The conference was also successful in helping some attendees gain employment with the new administration. J.A. Parker, who was on one of Reagan’s recruiting teams, later told the Baltimore Sun that the event effectively doubled as a kind of job fair.

Thomas later described the convention as a landmark moment in his political life. “For those of us who had wandered in the desert of political and ideological alienation, we had found a home, we had found each other,” he said. It also brought him to a new level of public exposure. For instance, The Washington Post featured him in a story on the event, which discussed his conservative viewpoints and opposition to controversial issues such as affirmative action. Two years later Reagan appointed him as the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Many Black intellectuals, including some within Republican circles, criticized the conference in the months and years that followed. J. Clay Smith, Jr., for instance, who described himself as a “Lincoln Republican,” argued in 1985 that Sowell and Thomas’s perspectives were classist and stated, “Whatever Black Republicans are doing, we’d better take stock of the future and guide our party and our president back towards a middle ground or lose our voice to the pied pipers, who have no recognizable following in the Black community.” However, some members of the Black middle class responded favorably, and the gathering helped inspire subsequent conferences, documentaries, and organizations.

According to Rigueur, the primary legacy of the conference was the bonds that it helped forge between Black conservatives and the Republican Party. For decades, Black Republicans had been disregarded or misunderstood by both Republicans and other African Americans. “As they moved into the 1980s,” Rigueur says, “the question was no longer are Black Republicans relevant but what roles would they play in the party, and how would they influence American politics.”