Timothy N. Thurber offers an original and welcome insight into the Republican party's role during a “distinct era” (2) in the battle for black equality. Thurber's text, belonging to a flourishing field of scholarly work on the post-World War II Republican Party, moves beyond outmoded partisan narratives. One traditional discourse posits that the Grand Old Party (GOP) abandoned its “Party of Lincoln” mantle in the mid-1960s and early 1970s to court southern whites at the expense of black voters. The conservative counternarrative claims that Republicans never changed, instead arguing that the Democratic Party continually bought black voters with misguided welfare policies that were harmful to African American advancement. Thurber's work, impressively researched and eloquently written, reveals such narratives to be overly simplistic.

The book is divided into three sections and Thurber first cites the importance of the Republican reluctance to endorse a compulsory Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) – the key goal of African American leaders in the immediate postwar era. Furthermore, Republicans in Congress often allied with southern Democrats to dilute the necessary federal power required for change at the same time as Dwight Eisenhower's administration was struggling to come to terms with a burgeoning civil rights movement. While Thurber does not directly criticize Ike's racial views, the scholar argues that the “important story of the 1950s was the chasm between the president and African Americans” (95). According to Thurber, civil rights leaders were not helped in their efforts to bridge this divide by the fact that Republicans did not believe – correctly, in the author's analysis – that the black vote was as crucial to an electoral majority as rights activists suggested.

The heart of Republicans and Race focusses on developments in the 1960s. Thurber casts the GOP, save for a few committed advocates, as reluctant heroes in the struggles for the 1964, 1965, and 1968 civil rights bills. A theme that emerges from these chapters is the Congressional GOP's attempts to weaken or kill civil rights bills during floor debate, before voting in favour during final passage. Accordingly, GOP voting patterns – Republicans backed the civil rights acts in higher percentages than Democrats – only tell half of the story. African Americans, already offended by Senator Barry Goldwater's nomination after his “nay” vote for the Civil Rights Act, appeared wise to this GOP tactic and continued to abandon the party in droves.

The remaining chapters consider the racial legacy of Richard Nixon and his administration. Offering an even portrait of “Tricky Dick,” Thurber credits his administration with continuing school integration in the South and for briefly pursuing programmes such as the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) and advocating for “black capitalism.” Thurber notes that Nixon gave many southerners rhetorical comfort, observing too the thirty-seventh President's failed attempts to appoint Supreme Court justices with questionable racial pasts. Yet Thurber contests that, in his quest to build a new Republican coalition, Nixon was primarily committed to the suburbs rather than to the South. Nixon therefore downplayed southern exceptionalism due to a keen awareness of the large number of George Wallace voters present north of the Mason–Dixon Line.

Thurber's work nudges into the open a correlation between Republican policies and the majority of non-southern white public opinion. This opinion moved from ambivalence towards racial issues in the immediate postwar era to grudging acceptance of the need for change in the mid-1960s. From 1966 onwards this shifted to fear of busing and racial quotas, coupled with distaste of government programmes perceived as helping black ghetto dwellers who were tarred with negative stereotypes of crime and rioting. As Thurber shows, in most cases, Republican politicians reflected these sentiments.

Thurber concludes, “The United States was a more egalitarian society when Richard Nixon left office than at the end of World War II. The GOP had helped make that possible” (375). The “Party of Lincoln,” however, as revealed by Thurber's book, lived up to its heritage only if one remembers that Lincoln was a gradualist in advocating slavery's abolition. Beyond civil rights, African Americans and most Republicans have long disagreed fundamentally, and continue to disagree, on issues of poverty, housing, health care, and the size and scope of the federal government. Republicans, either viewing the black vote as impenetrable or seeing it as inconsequential, are unlikely to overextend themselves to mend fences for electoral gain. The acrimony of Barack Obama's presidency, coupled with the rising Republican interest in capturing the growing Hispanic vote, suggests that the “frayed relationship” so masterfully outlined by Thurber is poised to continue.