The Truth About Republican Racism and the “Southern Strategy”
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Whenever
the topic of racism gets
brought up between Democrats and Republicans, there are two facts
you’ll almost always hear conservatives use to counter the belief that
their party is full of racism:- President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican
- The KKK was largely organized, and populated by, Democrats
And both are facts.
But
when someone uses these two items as their defense that the Republican
party isn’t loaded with racism, they’re only showing their ignorance
about the reality of racism within their party.
It’s true,
Southern Democrats were extremely racist. At the same time, Northern
“liberal” Democrats and Republicans had already been working together to
end discrimination and pushed for ending segregation.
See, in
1948, President Harry Truman made one of the boldest public moves by a
Democrat towards Civil Rights for African Americans by creating the
President’s Committee on Civil Rights, and
ending discrimination in the military. At the Democratic National
Convention in 1948 a call was made for civil rights—prompting at least
35 Southern delegates to walk out.
These
movements towards civil rights for African Americans spurred a
short-lived political party — the States Rights Democratic Party, also
known as the “Dixiecrats.” The people who comprised this movement
adamantly defended segregation of the
races. It was an attempt to keep the “tyrannical Northern liberals”
from “destroying the freedom of states’ rights in the South.”
Luckily,
this political party only lasted one election. But what this movement
really did was recognize the shift of Democrats embracing equality for
African Americans and Southern whites strongly opposing any mention of
civil rights.
The moves by President Truman sparked the spread
of equality in the South and left Southern white Democrats with a
feeling that their party was abandoning their racist — and oppressive —
system of beliefs.
Over the next decade, more and more
Democrats began to embrace equality, passing the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And while more African
Americans began to vote for Democrats, in the late-1960′s a new
Republican strategy was put into place—the “Southern strategy.”
This was a plan was
that was first popularized by Richard Nixon.
What the
“Southern strategy” essentially does is it identified the fact that
African Americans were voting for Democrats, therefore Republicans
decided they would make white voters more aware of this fact in hopes of
driving the “white vote” towards the Republican party.
Doubt me? Let’s look at a comment from a 1970′s interview in the New York Times with Richard Nixon’s political strategist:
“From
now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20
percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that…but
Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the
Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the
South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and
become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding
from the blacks, the whites will backslide into
their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
Essentially
it was the Republican party saying, “Look, blacks are voting for
Democrats so you white people need to vote for Republicans—the party
that will represent whites and oppose the blacks.”
With
this strategy, you saw the official shift of the Republican party from
the “party of Lincoln” to the party which embraced white racism towards
African Americans to solidify the white vote in the South.
So,
yeah, it’s easy to say Lincoln was a
Republican and the KKK was largely built by Democrats, but by doing so
you only prove your own ignorance of history. You’re ignoring the fact
that as Democrats evolved to embrace equality for African Americans,
Southern racists were left looking for a new political party — and they
found one that not only embraced their racism and bigotry, it sought it out.
And that party they found was the Republican party.
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