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It’s No Mystery Why Racists Have Fallen in Love With Trump’s Republican Party
(www.thenation.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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politics
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Strom Thurmond famously switched parties because the Democrats decided to end segregation.
The story there is actually fascinating. There was a time during the late 50s, early 60s when it could have been Republicans who were champions of civil rights.
After all, it was Eisenhower who started desegregating the military, and who ordered the 101st Airborne in to protect the Little Rock Nine.
Southern Democrats were the people pushing back against it all, because they were the conservatives.
Republicans and Democrats worked together on the 1957 civil rights act. And when there was pushback against it, Democrats and Republicans worked together to weaken the bill with some bad amendments. Stom Thurmond set a record for a standing filibuster during this process.
Then Eisenhower pushed through the Civil Rights act of 1960. This made it easier for black people to actually vote, but that was it.
The moment that sort of cemented things with the racists choosing the Republican side was the election of JFK. Well, not exactly the election itself, but a moment during the election.
Martin Luther King was arrested in October 1960, Kennedy publicly(ish) called King's family, and pulled favors to get King released, which likely saved King's life.
Oddly, Nixon and King had known each other for a few years at that point, and King had given Nixon advice a few times. Nixon, was told by his campaign manager to maintain silence about King's arrest. Kennedy and King had only recently met, although one of the people working on Kennedy's campaign was a long time friend of the King family.
Anyway, King was released, and national newspapers credited Kennedy, and lambasted Nixon for his silence. King as well was angry at Nixon, because the two were friends, or so King had thought.
So Kennedy was elected, and the black vote helped. Nixon took that as a bit of an insult.
Kennedy, didn't really do much for civil rights as president until shortly before his assassination. He met with civil rights leaders in 1963 and made a speech a few months before his assassination.
It was actually that assassination that let Johnson push through the Civil Rights act of 1964. "Fulfilling Kennedy's dream" justified a lot of shit in the 60s, from civil rights to moon missions.
So yeah, 1964, Berry Goldwater ran on a platform of segregation and racism as a Republican and drew in Thurmond's support. That failed, but Nixon took up the tactic in 1968 with the Southern Strategy, and that cemented the party switch. The southern racists all jumped on to team Republican.
And Johnson did it begrudgingly because he was a racist piece of shit. Carter was the first Democratic president who actually cared.
Great comment. The subject goes way beyond "this party racist" because it's really the economic interests and arrangements that the parties cater(ed) to, for which racism, and this notion of race itself, developed out of. The way both sides dealt with the Populist movement is very important as well. Booker T Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Cotton Expo basically sets the stage for things like "race relations" going forward, and the general approach to "lead the negro to his rightful place in life." Jim Crow order was imposed as well, which most people only view as a racial order and not an economic one.
This goes past the 50s-60s too, the time that most people associate as the Democrats becoming a party of civil rights with their base of northern liberals. At this same time you had the notion of the neighborhood, urban planning switching to these subdivisions, entire areas of housing built to accommodate people of the same economic status. This is more how northern segregation functioned, with the help of mortgage and real estate laws. Well educated northern liberals certainly didn't want low income housing projects in* their* neighborhoods, and would not elect a representative to city council who wouldn't defend their property values.