By Frances Rice
If you would
understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
- Aristotle
As we celebrate Black History Month, there is a need to
recognize that there exists a conundrum regarding black Americans and history.
This challenge exists because among us are those who
profess there is no need to address civil rights history. Instead, they advise,
the focus should be solely on black achievements and the need for economic
improvements in black communities.
However, Democrats have run black communities for over 60
years and the economic devastation in those communities was created by Democratic
Party failed socialist policies.
Yet, black Americans continue voting for Democrats and
refuse to vote for Republicans whose free enterprise polices would bring about
economic revitalization.
The question becomes why do black Americans continue
voting for Democrats who have destroyed their communities?
The answer lies in the fact that, as sure as the sun
rises and sets, every election cycle, Democrats play the race card and accuse
Republicans of being racists who want to take away the civil rights of black
people.
It’s utter nonsense.
Democrats get away with this ludicrous assertion because,
with the complicity of the mainstream media and liberal educators who run our
school system, Democrats have rewritten civil rights history and put their racist
past on the backs of Republicans.
If the past has been
an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest
emancipation.
- Lord Acton
The quest of the National Black Republican Association is
to help set the civil rights record straight and return black Americans to their
Republican Party roots.
Below is an article which sheds light on civil rights history.
See also the following items that are posted on the National Black Republican
Association Blogsite.
________________________________
The Party of Civil Rights
By Kevin D. Williamson
From
the May 28, 2012, issue of National Review.
This magazine has long specialized in debunking
pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating
catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the
outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee
for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major
U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the
rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with
the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon.
1964:George Romney, Republican civil rights activist.
That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this
mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them
get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a
pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick
Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative
ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century.
Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to
rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the
Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of
civil-rights legislation for a century.
Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads
among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish
this myth nonetheless.
Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened
suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing
explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment
over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an
implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old
Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there.
That is because those southerners who defected from the
Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that
was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era,
and had been for a century.
There is no radical break in the Republicans’
civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching
laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of
1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that
is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects
the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition
to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts
of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John
Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Supporting
civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans
in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.
The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights
reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated.
In the House, he did not represent a particularly
segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely
segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely
anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically
antebellum in his views.
Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress,
Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect
black Americans from lynching.
As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to
cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it,
he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement
provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower.
Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless
went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that
point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill.
The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the
deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a
record-setting filibuster.
In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the
northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s
passage while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken
the teeth out of the legislation.
Johnson would later explain his thinking thus:
“These Negroes,
they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since
they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up
their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give
them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a
difference.”
Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex
nihilo.
Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth
Amendment.
Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth
Amendment.
Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Dwight Eisenhower as a general began the process of
desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main
reason either had to act was that President Woodrow Wilson, the personification
of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal
facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought
to correct it,” he declared.)
Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black
held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose
the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White
House.
Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at
civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change
Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.
President Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew
something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The
Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time
as they were picking up votes from northern blacks.
The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed
produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades,
but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the
country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the House
to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was a
conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove New Deal
critics to the Republican Party.
Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in
American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at
what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would
become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson
committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam).
The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began
to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of
1937.
Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938
election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with
the acquisition of its first Republican.
Kentucky elected a
Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first
Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican Party, though marginal, began to
take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first
Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower.
At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry
spell on civil-rights progress.
Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been
more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to
ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and that
the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic
states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and
organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation
between North and South.
As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the
elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and
education, as well as of equal rights under law.”
The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that
the South was backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was
backward.
And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was
that Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites
— the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race.
Instead, it was among the emerging southern middle class.
This fact was recently documented by professors Byron
Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race,
and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Which is to say: The Republican rise in the South was
contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important political
question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic
considerations and anti-Communism.
The South had been in effect a Third World country within
the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom.
As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South
transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy,
giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.
This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party
that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites,
however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black
populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats.
This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole
turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you
believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly
trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a
civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican
support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.
That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon
campaign.
But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial
resentment, direct or indirect.
The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of
Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been strongly identified
with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the
1964 act and its extension of federal power.
Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but
believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional,
based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork.
But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern
segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative,
William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights
legislation in the 1950s.
The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for
Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the
“just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his
refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed,
particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro
citizens.”
Other planks in the platform included: “improvements of
civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional
administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for
whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to
discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.”
And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform
demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and
opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog
whistle.
Of course there were racists in the Republican Party.
There were racists in the Democratic Party.
The case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had
his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians
(“Don’t have their heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”),
and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty
bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not
once”).
But the legislative record, the evolution of the
electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a
party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights.
Neither does the history of the black vote.
While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the
South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the
North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular.
By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of
black votes in the North.
This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who
crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for
the benefit of the Democratic Party.
Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had
the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and
enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society
was pure politics.
Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when
poverty had been declining for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened
when the unemployment rate was less than 5 percent.
Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to
assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover
all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent
demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth.
Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and
Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end
“dependency” among the elderly and the poor, but the programs were
transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from private and local
sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his
political heirs.
In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s
unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks
and more like an attempt to make clients of them.
If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on
civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the
years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue.
Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators
who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties.
Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected
these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20
continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats.
It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before
those seats went Republican.
If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a
civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late
1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but
not that slow.
Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats,
and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters
in favor of civil-rights Republicans.
One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the
House was Texas’s John Dowdy.
Dowdy was a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964
reforms.
He declared the reforms “would set up a despot in the
attorney general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his
will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as
Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people.
Dowdy went on: “I would say this — I believe this would
be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the
first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political
rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?)
Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican
with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the
name of George H. W. Bush.
It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped
midcentury partisan politics.
Eisenhower warned the country against the
“military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had represented the
decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican Party over
what remained of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency.
The Republican Party had long been staunchly
anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and
looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and
its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the
“creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded.
By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the
liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic
anti-Communism — especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international
socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to
go but the Democratic Party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the
Democratic Party was not his alone.
The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set
the stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics:
Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last
stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states.
Republican Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the
1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states
(North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he
carried.
Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe
plus Texas.
Mindful of the long-term realignment already under way in
the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964
act that “those states may be lost anyway.”
Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won
a 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate
election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would
more or less occupy the South like Sherman.
Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states
in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern
South, notably Virginia and Florida.
The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with several
factors:
The rise of the southern middle class,
The increasingly trenchant conservative critique of
Communism and the welfare state,
The Vietnam controversy,
The rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns
rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late
1980s, and
The incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic
party.
Individual events, especially the freak show that was the
1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the
Republican Party.
Democrats might argue that some of these concerns —
especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism.
However, this criticism is shallow in light of the
evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all
backgrounds and both parties for decades.
Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for
black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are
engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson
was practicing.
Johnson informed skeptical southern governors that his
plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the
next two hundred years.”
Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of
the past, but his strategy endures.
—
Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review and the
author of The Dependency Agenda, which will be published by Encounter Books on
May 29. This article appears in the May 28, 2012, issue of National Review.
