By Larry Elder, Apr. 11, 2014
As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted
Republican in that year's presidential election. After the Civil War, Abe
Lincoln's Republican Party easily carried the black vote -- where blacks were
allowed to vote. Unwelcome in the Democratic Party, most blacks voted
Republican and continued to do so through the early part of the 20th century.
It wasn't until 1948, when 77 percent of the black vote went to Harry Truman,
who had desegregated the military, that a majority of blacks identified
themselves as Democrats.
Yet, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans voted
for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats. For his key
role breaking the Democrats' filibuster and getting the act to pass the stalled
Senate, Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, a conservative from Illinois, landed
on the cover of Time magazine. President Lyndon Johnson called Dirksen
"the hero of the nation." The Chicago Defender, then the country's
largest black daily newspaper, applauded Dirksen's "generalship" for
helping to successfully push through the bill.
Older black voters sometimes explain they're opposed to
Republicans because of the "racist" Southern strategy. But Richard
Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchannan, credited with inventing the "Southern
strategy," considered the Democratic Party the party of the racists.
Buchanan said: "We would build our Republican Party on a foundation of
states' rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense,
and leave it to the 'party of [Democratic Georgia Gov. Lester] Maddox, [1966
Democratic challenger against Spiro Agnew for Maryland governor George] Mahoney
and [Democratic Alabama Gov. George] Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of
political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.'"
But before that, another pivotal event occurred that helped
the GOP-as-racist meme. In 1960, during the presidential campaign, Martin
Luther King Jr. was arrested following a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter
in Atlanta. Hundreds of other protestors were released, but King was jailed on
a trumped-up probation violation for failing to have a Georgia driver's license.
King's aides reached out to then-Vice President and
Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon. They also reached out to the
Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy called the Atlanta judge
handling the case. Shortly after that call, the judge released King. Nixon,
according to Harry Belafonte, a King supporter, "did nothing." Is
that true?
Nixon, it turns out, had a much closer relationship with
King than did Kennedy. In the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda,
Calif., records show considerable handwritten notes and correspondence between
Nixon and King. This includes a 1957 letter from King acknowledging their
previous meetings, which thanked Nixon for his "assiduous labor and
dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality," and
praised him for his "devotion to the highest mandates of the moral
law."
But in 1960, on the eve of the election, Nixon was in a
tough spot. Nixon's public silence might be misconstrued as acceptance of
King's arrest. On the other hand, as a candidate for his boss's job, Nixon
worried about the political costs of appearing ungrateful if he chastised
President Dwight Eisenhower for not taking stronger action. Eisenhower,
however, was content to let the Justice Department handle the matter.
According to historian and presidential biographer Stephen
Ambrose, while Nixon made no public comments, he telephoned Attorney General
William Rogers to find out if King's constitutional rights were being
infringed, thus opening the door for federal involvement. Nixon, a lawyer, was
concerned about the ethics of calling a judge to get him to release someone.
Nixon, writes Ambrose, told his press secretary: "I
think Dr. King is getting a bum rap. But despite my strong feelings in this
respect, it would be completely improper for me or any other lawyer to call the
judge. And Robert Kennedy should have known better than to do so." That
Bobby Kennedy, also a lawyer, nevertheless made a phone call to the judge did
not alter the issue of whether it was appropriate. In retrospect, an easy call,
but not at the time.
Two million pamphlets titled, "'No Comment' Nixon
Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy," were distributed in
black churches. Never mind that in 1956 Nixon revealed he was an honorary
member of the NAACP. Or that Nixon pushed for passage of the '57 civil rights
bill in the Senate. Or that Time magazine wrote that Nixon's support for civil
rights incurred the wrath of one of his segregationist opponents, Sen. Richard
Russell, D-Ga., who sarcastically called Nixon the NAACP's "most
distinguished member."
But the GOP-is-racist meme can be heard nightly on MSNB-Hee
Haw and in political science and history classes all over the country. Actor
Morgan Freeman calls the tea party racist. Democratic National Committee Chair
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., tells us that the GOP wants to
"literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws."
Keeping blacks ignorant of history remains crucial to this
caricature of the Republican Party -- and to the monolithic Democratic black
vote. Not so black and white, is it?
THE SWITCH:
ReplyDeleteWe often hear how the racists in the south moved from the Democratic party to the GOP, after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. I tried to test that. I have no sample, with associated data for regular citizens, but I do have an effective sample in the voting members of the House an Senate, whose voice was heard in passage of the Act. I took all those who voted "Nay" for the Act, or who did not vote. I placed this in a spreadsheet, then I examined the biography of each of these politicians in Wikipedia. I found only two persons out of the 91 House members and 20 Senate members (Democrats voting Nay or not voting) who appear to have changed parties due to passage of the act. It also should be noted that GOP from the South, at this time tended to vote against the Act. Overall voting percentages are EXACTLY as you say. The GOP more strongly voted FOR, than the Dem did.
WHO SWITCHED?
Senator Strom Thurmond changed to GOP in 1964, so, let's assume he changed for this reason. Congressman Albert Watson, of South Carolina resigned as a Democrat and ran in the Special Election to fill the vacancy, but as GOP. He won election and thus effected his change of party. Watson was known to be close to Thurmond. These TWO appear to be the only persons out of out of these 111 persons to have switched parties at this time. All the others remained LIFELONG Democrats. One other appears to have changed parties much later, likely in order to get elected.
There simply does not seem to be any real support for this likely completely fabricated idea that the racism simply moved from one party to another. People and generations change. Those voting in this matter tended to be older persons. Their biographies often mention fighting in WW I. That's back in 1916 to 1918. They tended to die in either the 1960's or 1970's. By the time in the 1980's and 1990's when the South solidified as conservative GOP, it no longer had the same people. Entirely new generations and great migrations had changed the make up of the South.