by Keith Boykin
Finally, in 1935, after decades of Republican domination, Arthur Wergs Mitchell of Illinois became the first African American to serve in Congress as a Democrat. The floodgates opened, and African Americans left the Republican Party in droves. Franklin Roosevelt received 71 percent of African American votes in the 1936 election, the first time in history a Democratic presidential candidate won the Black vote. His successor, Harry Truman, won an even higher percentage of Black voters in his 1948 campaign. But the Black vote remained competitive, and Dwight Eisenhower, the only Republican to serve between Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon, earned a respectable 24 percent of the Black vote in 1952 and then increased his share to an impressive 39 percent in 1956.
As president, Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to integrate Central High School, but he also appeared to discourage the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. At a dinner with Chief Justice Earl Warren during the time the court was still considering the famous integration case, Eisenhower reportedly defended white segregationists: “These are not bad people,” he told the chief justice. “All they are concerned about is that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school beside some big, overgrown Negroes.”
At the dawn of the 1960s, both Democrats and Republicans had given Black voters decades of disappointment and broken promises. “I must make it palpably clear that the dearth of positive leadership from Washington is not confined to one political party,” Dr. King announced in a September 1960 speech to the National Urban League. “The fact is that both major parties have been hypocritical on the question of civil rights. Each of them has been willing to follow the long pattern of using the Negro as a political football.”
A month later, not long before the presidential election, King was sitting in a Georgia jail cell, after being arrested for participating in a civil rights protest. While his pregnant wife, Coretta, worried about her husband’s well-being, the two major presidential nominees—John Kennedy and Richard Nixon—struggled to develop a response to the news. Neither wanted to offend white Southerners by speaking out publicly in King’s defense, but Kennedy was persuaded to place a quick private phone call to Mrs. King to convey his concern. After that call, Dr. King’s influential preacher father, Martin Luther King Sr., announced his support for the Democratic candidate, and Kennedy narrowly won one of the closest races in American presidential history with 68 percent of the Black vote, improving on the 61 percent won by the party’s 1956 nominee, Adlai Stevenson.
Eight months after Kennedy’s assassination, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with bipartisan support in the House and Senate. For many white Southern Democrats, it would be seen as a betrayal of the party’s white supremacist roots. As a Texas Democrat who had voted against civil rights bills early in his career and was widely known to use offensive racial slurs, LBJ was an unlikely champion for African Americans. Yet, with the stroke of a pen, a racist white Southern Democratic president named Johnson finally allowed the party to begin moving beyond the legacy of the last racist white Southern Democratic president named Johnson.
Among the twenty-seven Senate “nay” votes on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was Republican Barry Goldwater. Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights did not doom his campaign. Instead, just a few weeks after he cast that vote, his party nominated him to be its presidential nominee. Outside the party’s convention in San Francisco, Black baseball legend and longtime Republican Jackie Robinson joined fifty thousand demonstrators against Goldwater. Meanwhile, one of the few Black Republican delegates inside the building was barred from participating “solely because of their race,” author Leah Wright Rigueur explains in her book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power. One Pennsylvania delegate, William Young, even had his suit set on fire and was told to “keep in your own place.” Another delegate, George Fleming of New Jersey, briefly walked out of the convention “sobbing that he was tired of being mistreated by ‘Goldwater people,’” the New York Times reported. Fleming told the Times that the Republican convention delegates called him “nigger,” pushed him, and stepped on his feet. “I had to leave to keep my self-respect,” he said.
These protests did not change the outcome of the convention. On July 16, 1964, Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president, urging the country to be “proud of its past,” and did not back down on his rhetoric. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater thundered to the crowd. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” As the delegates cheered, the old Republican Party perished. The party that once freed the slaves, amended the Constitution, enacted progressive civil rights legislation, and dispatched federal troops to protect African Americans from racism in the 1860s had become a new party that nominated a right-wing standard-bearer in the 1960s. The Grand Old Party was dead.
As the party of Lincoln died, a new Republican Party was slowly birthed. The 1960s GOP planted its seeds deep in the poisonous soil of white racial resentment. But when the roots strengthened and the sapling grew to maturity, the ripened fruit from that forbidden tree would tempt the party back toward the sin that had repeatedly torn the nation asunder. The modern racial conflicts we face today trace their roots to that tainted ground.
After signing the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson reportedly predicted, “We just lost the south for a generation.” He was, at least, partly correct. The Democrats’ unexpected embrace of civil rights slowly wiped out the party in the South. After Johnson signed the bill, Georgia—a state the Democrats had carried in every presidential election from 1868 to 1960—voted Republican for the first time in its history. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina joined in, voting Republican for the first time since the Reconstruction era. The pattern continued for decades. In six of the next fourteen presidential elections after 1964, Democrats failed to carry even a single state in the South.
The post–civil rights political realignment of white Southerners from Democrat to Republican allowed some ticket splitting for a few Democratic congressional candidates over the years, but when Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu lost her Senate reelection race to a Republican in 2014, it marked the end of an era. It had been a remarkable fifty-year transition. On the day President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there were twenty-one Southern Democrats in the Senate, but by January 3, 2015, with a Black Democratic president in office, there were no Democrats from the Deep South left in the chamber. After a century of political dominance in the South, the Democratic dynasty had come to an end.
The root cause of this dramatic political realignment was race, America’s original fault line. As the two major parties swapped their identities, the two largest racial groups in America correspondingly switched their party affiliation. In 1964, 94 percent of Black voters cast their ballots for Democrat Lyndon Johnson, the highest percentage of Black voter support of any year on record at that time. In contrast, white voters started moving in the opposite direction. The post-1964 racial dynamics taught Democrats that they needed to assemble multiracial coalitions to win presidential elections and taught Republicans that they no longer needed a significant percentage of Black votes to win those same elections. Democrats tried repeatedly to win back white voters by nominating white Southern men like Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, and Al Gore of Tennessee, or by selecting running mates like Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, John Edwards of North Carolina, and Tim Kaine of Virginia, but this would not fundamentally alter the trajectory of the two parties. Despite numerous outreach efforts, no Democratic presidential nominee has won the white vote since 1964. Even the two white Southern Democrats who did capture the presidency—Carter and Clinton—failed to win the white vote.
The new political reality did not happen by accident. “Political success goes to the party that can cohesive
ly hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices.” That was the theory put forward by Republican operative and Nixon campaign veteran Kevin Phillips in a 1970 New York Times article entitled “Nixon’s Southern Strategy.” Phillips laid out a cynical argument for why Republicans should essentially ignore Black voters. “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,” Phillips argued.
Other Republicans, while not disputing the math, understood there was danger in speaking so publicly about these intentions. When Nixon nominated two segregation-supporting Southerners—Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell—to the US Supreme Court, the Senate rejected both of them—the first time a president had been denied two of his Supreme Court nominees since Grover Cleveland. “We flat out invited the kind of political battle that ultimately erupted,” grumbled a young Nixon aide named Lamar Alexander. “This confirmed the southern strategy just at a time when it was being nationally debated,” he wrote in a White House memo. Years later, in a 2007 interview with the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, by which time Alexander had become a Republican senator, he confirmed that “the Southern strategy of John Mitchell [Nixon’s campaign manager] and Kevin Phillips was so important in the ’68 campaign.”
Other postmortem confessions also confirmed what was happening. In a 1981 interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater described how the changing status of Black people forced the language of white racial resentment to evolve from the explicit opposition to integration of the 1950s to a more subtle racism of the Reagan-Bush era of the 1980s:
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, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “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.”
Politicians rarely leave smoking guns behind, but this was as close as one could come to finding one. The forty-two-minute recorded Atwater interview was not released until November 2012, when it was finally published in The Nation. By that time, Atwater had already tried to atone for his 1988 campaign tactics in a widely reported deathbed confession, where he specifically apologized for calling Mike Dukakis a “little bastard” and for saying he would make Willie Horton his running mate. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not,” Atwater said. The apology interview appeared in January 1991, when Atwater was fighting a brain tumor that he knew would soon take his life. Two months later, the forty-year-old adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush was dead.
In yet another confession, former Nixon domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, explained the rationale behind the “War on Drugs” in a 1994 interview published in Harper’s Magazine in 2016.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people.… We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Nixon’s campaign against Blacks and hippies was a fitting strategy for the Archie Bunker era, a time when Americans sat down every week to watch a racist white man from Queens, New York, pine for the good old days when non-college-educated, working-class white men could still earn a decent living and settle down in a safe, nonthreatening white neighborhood. But the values of racial resentment that led those white voters to political conservatism were also being used to justify the eradication of government policies and institutions that protected working-class whites. By weakening labor unions, depressing wages, deregulating corporate activity, canceling pension funds, cutting taxes, and dismantling the social safety net, conservatives were not only hurting Black and brown people, they were also reconditioning an entire generation of white people to expect less from the government than what it had offered their parents. As job security disappeared, health care benefits vanished, and college education costs skyrocketed, working-class whites were encouraged to direct their anger at low-income “minorities” alleged to be on welfare, rather than at a corporate-driven economic system that primarily served the interests of, and skewed its resources toward, big businesses and the wealthy.
By using racially coded words and dog whistles, Nixon gave Republicans and conservative Democrats a seemingly neutral language they could use to speak to white voters without making them feel racist. Instead of calling for segregation, they complained about “forced busing.” Instead of calling Blacks criminals, they talked about “law and order.” Instead of labeling Blacks as lazy, they talked about “welfare.” At the same time, they created a caricature image of blackness that was wholly dependent on government largesse for survival. Although white welfare recipients vastly outnumbered Black and brown ones, welfare was portrayed as a government device to help minorities. Thus, by attacking the federal government, conservatives could simultaneously appeal to hard-core white racists who believed the government was forcing them to live with Black people, and, at the same time, reach soft-core racists who did not necessarily object to the theory of equality but felt their hard-earned tax dollars were being wasted to feed and house lazy Black people. Antigovernment rhetoric also allowed Republicans to merge two important wings of their party—the country club Republicans who wanted tax cuts and the racial resentment Republicans who felt they were losing out to Black people because of government programs and affirmative action. Reducing the size of government was a stroke of evil political genius. It limited the amount of help given to Black people, and it limited the number of tax dollars given to the government, thereby appeasing both the country club Republicans and the racial resentment Republicans.
Post-Nixon Republicans expanded on the strategy. “There’s a woman in Chicago,” Ronald Reagan told a white New Hampshire audience in 1976. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.” Reagan told the audience the woman was collecting Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, and other welfare benefits under her multiple aliases. “Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000,” he claimed. Without ever mentioning the woman by name or race, Reagan’s use of the words “Chicago” and “welfare” conjured up a powerful image of a Black inner-city “welfare queen” who was abusing the system to enrich herself at the expense of the good, white taxpaying citizens. It did not matter to Reagan that the story was an elaborate exaggeration about a forty-seven-year-old woman named Linda Taylor who did not have eighty aliases and did not make $150,000 a year. “The story does not quite check out,” the New York Times reported after Reagan’s speech, but at that point, the damage was done.
When Reagan secured the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, he turned to another racist dog whistle. “I believe in states’ rights,” he told a white Southern audience at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. Republicans from Lincoln to Eisenhower had publicly rejected states’ rights arguments that racist Southern Democrats used to justify slavery and the segregation of Black Americans, but here was Reagan in 1980 sounding just like a 1950s Southern Democrat as his campaign traveled to the same community where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were notoriously kidnapped and killed in 1964.
This was not the party of Lincoln that had deployed the United States military to wage war against rebellious slave stat
es. Nor was this the party that ratified three historic constitutional amendments to prevent states from blocking the rights of African Americans. This was a new party that had nominated a self-described “extremist” presidential nominee in 1964 and learned from that experience of bitter loss how to communicate to Southern racists without offending Northern moderates. Nothing, from slavery to segregation, had bothered Southern racists more than federal government intrusion in the affairs of their states, and Reagan’s message of states’ rights communicated a clear sense of solidarity with that cause.
Reagan followed through on those commitments as president. Just a few weeks before the 1982 midterm elections, he launched his controversial War on Drugs. “Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods,” Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow. The truth, she explained, is that Reagan launched the war before crack became an issue and “hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985” to build support for the war. This explains why Reagan never mentioned “crack” or “cocaine” anywhere in his October 1982 speech. He did mention that “millions of dollars will be allocated for prison and jail facilities.” That was the hidden agenda, and African Americans would soon become the direct targets of mass incarceration.