I have posted this before from my website CorporisPublica, but might be a useful history lesson recap:
On December 5, 1946 Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9808, which established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). The committee was instructed to investigate the status of civil rights in the country and propose measures to strengthen and protect them. The committee submitted its report, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, in October 1947. The 178-page report proposed strengthening existing civil rights laws. More specifically, it aimed to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission, a Joint Congressional Committee on Civil Rights, and a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, to develop federal protection from lynching, to create a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), to abolish poll taxes, among other measures.[2]
On July 26, 1948, President Truman advanced the recommendations of the report by signing executive orders 9980, ordered the desegregation of the federal work force, and 9981 which the desegregated the armed services. He also sent a special message to Congress on February 2, 1948 to implement the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights.
These highly visible moves were met with outrage in the South and at the Democratic National Convention later that year, the party adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals led by Hubert Humphrey calling for bold action on civil rights leading 35 southern delegates to walk out. The move was on to remove Truman’s name from the ballot in the South. This required a new party, which the Southern defectors chose to name the States’ Rights Democratic Party, with its own nominee: Governor of South Carolina and future Republican icon Strom Thurmond. The Dixiecrats held their convention at the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, Governor of Mississippi, for vice president. They later adopted a platform in Oklahoma City, on August 14, 1948, that centered on racial segregation.
The Dixiecrats did not expect to win the presidency outright; rather, they thought that if they could win enough Southern states then they would have a good chance of forcing the election into the House of Representatives, where they believed Southern bargaining power could determine the winner. To this end Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the official Democratic ticket in Southern states. They succeeded in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket.
On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes. The split in the Democratic Party in the 1948 election had been expected to produce a victory by GOP nominee Dewey, but Truman defeated GOP candidate Thomas Dewey in an upset victory.
The moves by Truman, the shedding of the most overtly racist elements within the Southern Democratic party, and 1948 election marks the first time that a majority of blacks reported that they thought of themselves as Democrats.
Even after that, Republican nominees continued to get a healthy percentage of the black vote for several elections with war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower getting 39 percent in 1956, and his Vice-President Richard Nixon got 32 percent in his narrow loss to John Kennedy in 1960.
First Eisenhower’s actions in sending in Federal Troops to desegregate schools in Arkansas, and the Kennedy’s to protect the Freedom Riders after violent clashes while to work on sweeping Civil Rights legislation continued the political shifts within the parties over civil rights.
This seismic shift between the parties became inevitable when, after the Kennedy assassination, then President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing segregation in public places) and his eventual Republican opponent in that year’s election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, publicly opposed it. He famously saying upon signing it, that “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” (some versions of that quote have him saying “we just lost the South for a generation”). Johnson went on to get 94 percent of the black vote that November, still a record for any presidential election until 2008 when Barack Obama garnered a single percentage point more than Johnson had 44 years earlier.
The following year Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act and no Republican presidential candidate has gotten more than 15 percent of the black vote since.
With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched parties in 1964 over the issue of civil rights, Richard Nixon ran his 1968 ‘Southern Strategy’ campaign pandering to Southern whites on “states’ rights” and “law and order.”
The independent candidacy of George Wallace, former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated the Southern Strategy. With a much more explicit attack on integration and black civil rights, While Wallace won all of Goldwater’s states (except South Carolina), as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina’s electoral votes, Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, leaving Texas as Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey’s only southern state.
During the Nixon administration, state level issues, particularly in the northeast and industrial upper midwest, saw a continued realignment over desegregation issues such as school bussing. In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance. While the Swann decision addressed de jure segregation in the South, it failed to address de facto segregation which persisted elsewhere in the country. In Georgia, then Governor Jimmy Carter saw that Swann was “clearly a one-sided decision; the Court is still talking about the South, the North is still going free”.
In the 1972 election, Nixon won every state in the Union except Massachusetts, winning more than 70 percent of the popular vote in most of the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina) and 61% of the national vote. He won over 65 percent of the votes in the other states of the former Confederacy. Nixon won 18% of the black vote nationwide. Despite his appeal to Southern whites, Nixon parlayed a wide perception as a moderate into wins in other states. He was able to appear moderate to most Americans because the Southern strategy referred to integration obliquely through references to “states’ rights” and “busing”. This tactic was later described by David Greenberg in Slate as “dog-whistle politics.”
In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could be bused across district lines only when evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed. This lead to many school districts, under federal court supervision, implementing mandatory busing plans within their district. A few of these plans are still in use today. This lead to instances of stiff resistance to desegregation busing, such as the “Restore Our Alienated Rights” (ROAR) movement in Boston.
ROAR’s purpose was to fight off U.S. Federal court orders requiring the city of Boston to implement desegregation busing — an order intended to eliminate de facto racial segregation in its public schools. To supporters, ROAR’s purpose was to ‘protect’ the “vanishing rights” of white citizens. To its many opponents, however, ROAR was a symbol of mass racism coalesced into a single organization as a backlash to the advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s.
ROAR began to be broken apart by when it was at its political height in 1975. Notably, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) organized a coordinated, action against ROAR when ROAR attempted to disrupt PLP’s 1975 May Day march with massive resistance. PLP members also protested ROAR rallies, functions, and even used direct action to short-circuit racist attacks against black people by ROAR supporters. Assaults between the groups continued for the rest of the summer. When schools reopened in September 1975, ROAR did lead successful demonstrations in Charlestown, Massachusetts that were reminiscent of the Little Rock Nine, but ROAR was noticeably unable to draw another mass rally, as it had that May and in the months before.
By the end of 1975 ROAR saw continued decline. Its activists continued to be infamous for spotty racist vigilante actions against nonwhite citizens of Boston after 1975, but none of those ever approached the massive scale and influence of earlier that year. Slowly, even these vigilante actions were more and more successfully disrupted by anti-racists working in the area (and led largely by PLP) meaning that ROAR and its influence soon disintegrated.
This coincided with the economic impacts of the oil-shocks of the early 1970s heralded the start of the decline upper mid-west industrial base which fueled tensions between whites and racial minorities and a further erosion of the Democratic party’s former ‘base’ both in the north south.
In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan’s first Southern campaign stop was was a move to build upon Nixon’s Southern strategy. Reagan launched his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, Mississippi, the county where the three civil rights workers were murdered during 1964’s Freedom Summer. At this event he made subtle attempts to exploit simmering racial tensions by proclaiming “I believe in states’ rights” at his to undermine support from the south Jimmy Carter had enjoyed in 1976. Attacks by Reagan using ‘dog whistle’ tropes of inner city “welfare queens” combined with both the continuing erosion of the industrial base in the north, as well as the very public ‘humiliation’ of the Iranian hostage crisis lead to Carter’s defeat and the media adopting the term “Reagan Democrats”.
In a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, political consultant and strategist to the Republican Party and advisor of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush discussed politics in the South:
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
The Willie Horton commercials used by supporters of George H. W. Bush against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the election of 1988 implying that Dukakis was a “soft on crime” liberal, The ads and stump speeches used black Willie Horton, a convicted felon who, while serving a life sentence for murder (without the possibility of parole), was the beneficiary of a Massachusetts weekend furlough program. He did not return from his furlough, and ultimately he committed assault, armed robbery and rape. On May 25, 1988, Republican consultants met in Paramus, New Jersey, holding a focus group of Democrats who had voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. These focus groups convinced Atwater and the other Republican consultants that they should ‘go negative’ against Dukakis and that playing up the subliminal racists tropes of blacks are criminal thugs and Dukakis cared more about black criminals than white law abiding citizens moved voters into the GOP camp. That election led to one of the most lopsided electoral routes in United States presidential elections.
Republicans, particularly in the south continued to exploit racist dog-whistle politics. The 1990 re-election campaign of Jesse Helms attacked his opponent’s alleged support of “racial quotas,” most notably through an ad in which a white person’s hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin.
In the mid-1990s, the Republican Party made major attempts to court African-American voters, believing that the strength of religious values within the African-American community and the growing number of affluent and middle-class African Americans would lead this group to increasingly support Republican candidates. An early example of this shift showed during the 1996 Presidential election, when Republican Presidential nominee Bob Dole chose Jack Kemp, a New York Congressman who long advocated for urban revitalization projects, as his running mate and General Colin Powell, an African American who gained national recognition for his role in Operation Desert Storm’s success, announced he was a registered Republican.
Though the Republican Party had managed to rekindle the interests of African-American voters, the group still remained loyal to the Democratic Party. During his time in office, Bill Clinton connected greatly with the Africans Americans. Born into a poor, Southern working-class family, Clinton’s social-economic status growing up resembled that of many African-Americans. Since his youth, Clinton had befriended many African Americans and was very public about it since his time as Governor of Arkansas. In addition to his background, Clinton’s policies and decisions to appoint numerous African-Americans in his cabinet helped him cement his status among African Americans. By the time he left office, polls showed that Clinton’s popularity in the African American community surpassed that of Colin Powell and longtime African American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and African American loyalty to the Democratic Party was further ensured.
Few African Americans voted for George W. Bush and other Republicans in the 2004 elections, although it was a higher percentage than any GOP candidate in decades. Following Bush’s re-election, Ken Mehlman, Bush’s campaign manager and Chairman of the RNC, held several large meetings with African-American business, community, and religious leaders. In his speeches, he apologized for his party’s use of the Southern Strategy in the past. When asked about the strategy of using race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once-Democratic South, Mehlman replied, “Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions,” and, “by the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the NAACP for ignoring the black vote. However, two days after his address to the NAACP he characterized this as the party’s general strategy, not particularly Southern stating: “It always interests me when people say it was a Southern strategy. The fact is that folks in the North, the South, the East and the West sometimes did this.”
