[...] Gillespie launched into a recitation of the historical relationship between the GOP and African Americans, noting early black support for the Republican Party because of Abraham Lincoln's good works. Gillespie also cited the GOP membership of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, and the role of House and Senate Republicans in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act over the opposition of Southern Democrats. But then Gillespie had a Mae West moment.
He announced with a straight face that somewhere after the triumphs of the 1960s, "we [the GOP and African Americans] went through a period where we drifted." I double-checked my notes; that was his word, honest. "Drifted" -- as in, "wandered off course."
The Republican Party and African Americans did no such thing. If ever there was a deliberate parting of the ways with malice aforethought, it was the GOP's decision to play down African Americans and to bring the Old Confederacy under its tent through a scheme called the Southern Strategy.
You could see it coming in 1964, when the Republican Party turned away from its Northern wing, led by moderate Nelson Rockefeller. The Republican convention gave the presidential nomination to conservative Barry Goldwater, an outspoken opponent of the Civil Rights Act. Five Deep South states and Goldwater's home state of Arizona rewarded him on Election Day. They weren't enough. But the Southern Strategy was just getting underway. [...]
[...] It fell to Richard Nixon, through word and deed, to bring the Southern Strategy into full flower. And he accomplished it in 1968 with code words (touting "states' rights") and by capitalizing on a Southern white backlash against civil rights and Northern fears of black urban unrest by campaigning on a "law and order" theme. Strom Thurmond also switched to the GOP. With a third-party segregationist candidate, Alabama's George Wallace, plucking off four Southern states from the traditional Democratic column and South Carolina going Republican, Nixon's realignment of the white South was on a roll. To be fair, Nixon also backed an affirmative action Philadelphia Plan that rankled the white building trades. But that does not erase the political opportunism that ignited his Southern Strategy.
Drifted? It was outright abandonment of African Americans that took place. The party of Lincoln became the party of Jesse Helms. And having written off black voters in favor of a white conservative Southern and Western bloc, the Republican Party moved out smartly and never looked back. [...]
| That's the heart of Colbert I. King's registration-required Washington Post column "At the GOP, More Divide than 'Drift'"
posted in articles on September 5, 2004 12:26 AM | t (0)
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