Civil Rights

A Tea Party web posting is criticizing black Democrats for their overwhelming support of President Barack Obama. It seems that a black actress who says she's voting for Mitt Romney for president has been the subject of hate mail, and accusations that she's deserting the candidate and party that fought for equality for all Americans.

The posting goes on to say that it was the Democrats who defended slavery, who were tied to the Ku Klux Klan, who fastened segregation on black Americans, who beat and lynched black men and abused black women, while the Republicans fought to secure civil rights and liberties for all Americans.

At least a part of that is true, but it doesn't come close to telling the whole story. Yes, southern Democrats and numerous northern Dems too, favored human race slavery. Even northern Democrats who went to war to preserve the Union by and large opposed  emancipation. Their slogan was, "The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is," meaning no amendment banning slavery.

In the aftermath of the war, the Klan, a terrorist organization if there ever was one, was closely allied with white southern Democrats. It's also true that a Republican president, Ulysses Grant, used the army, trying to eradicate the Klan, an effort that was soon abandoned by his Republican successor, Rutherford Hayes. Thereafter, neither party did much to protect black Americans, but it was the Democrats who instituted Jim Crow laws and kept them in force until the 1960's.

Speaking as a history teacher, I always made a point of telling my students that it was President Theodore Roosevelt and his  successor, William Howard Taft, who took some baby steps towards racial equality, including hiring some black civil servants, and their Democratic successor, Woodrow Wilson, who fired all the black government employees.

However, things were changing by the 1920's. In 1921, the new Republican president, Warren G. Harding, made a speech  in Birmingham Alabama, in which he said, "Let the black man vote when he's ready to vote," which was widely taken to mean, never. Meanwhile, a new Ku Klux Klan flourished in the 1920's, opposed by both  northern Democrats and Republicans. It's true that a resolution condemning the Klan was defeated at the 1924 Democratic convention, but the Democrats' party rules in those days required a two-thirds majority to  do much of anything, and the resolution did get almost that  large a majority.

By the 1940's, the northern Democrats were clearly the controlling factor in the party, though there remained an obstreperous fanatical minority of southern Democrats who could block civil rights legislation by filibustering the Senate. Nevertheless, President Harry Truman, a Democrat, integrated the armed forces. Southern Democrats were so upset they deserted Truman in 1948 to run their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, on what was widely called the Dixiecrat ticket. Truman won the election.

Dwight Eisenhower, the great hero of World War II, became president in 1953, as cracks appeared in the Democratic "solid south." Eisenhower had no publicly held position on race relations.

In 1953, shortly after President Eisenhower took office, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court died. Eisenhower quickly decided on Earl Warren of California as his nominee to be the new Chief. Eisenhower was aware that lawsuits were headed to the court challenging segregation in the public schools. At the first meeting of the two men, which took place at a breakfast meeting of southern Republicans, Warren was shocked when the president said quietly, "Look at these people. They're not bad people. They just want don't their precious little daughters going to school and being seated next to some big black buck."

Nevertheless, it was the Warren court, headed by a Republican, that struck down segregated schools in the Brown v.Board of Education decision. (The case for segregation, by the way, was argued by John W. Davis, who was once the Democratic party's candidate for president.)

Eisenhower did nothing to foster integration until 1957, when he sent the army to enforce a court order to  integrate Little Rock Central High School.

Campaigning in 1960, John F. Kennedy, who needed to carry at least a few southern states, said nothing about civil rights. Neither did Vice-President Richard Nixon, his Republican opponent. Instead they fussed about who would do more to defend two tiny uninhabited islands off the coast of China.

As the pressure to end segregation generally grew, with Freedom Riders, sit-ins, and attempts by black Americans to integrate southern universities, Kennedy tried to finesse the situation, sending U.S. Marshals to enforce the law, but withholding the army, even as civil rights leaders and workers were murdered. By 1963, however, he could not turn a blind eye to the struggle any longer, especially when mass arrests, police dogs and fire hoses were used on demonstrators  in Birmingham. Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress that would ban segregation in most public accommodations. Southern Democrats in the Senate launched a filibuster.

It was president Johnson who guided the bill to passage, twisting every Senator's arm as hard as he could, aided to some extent by the Republican leader, Everett Dirkson. But the man who  was about to be nominated as the Republican party candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, voted against it.

This was a real sea change in American politics. It placed the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, in opposition to equal rights for black Americans. Now, I personally reject the idea that Goldwater was in any way a racist. He based his opposition on the premise that a businessman could decide who he wanted to do business with, and that was none  of the government's affair. But Strom Thurmond, the ex-Dixiecrat, left the Democrats and became a Republican. So too did millions of white southerners.

The election avalanche for Lyndon Johnson that fall swept over the entire country, except the states of  the old Confederacy, and Goldwater's home state of Arizona. The Democratic south was no more. Four years later, Richard Nixon, the political phoenix, won the White House using a "southern strategy" of trimming on the issue of racial equality. The south has been the most reliable Republican constituency ever since.

Nixon, ultimately cynical, used the image of aggressive black people to scare and infuriate whites. Probably his nastiest trick was to hire black women who characterized themselves as the "National Welfare Rights Organization," paraded at the 1972 Democratic convention and were as obnoxious as possible.

Democrats continued to win some elections in the south. Notably, in 1970, Reuben Askew of Florida and Jimmy Carter of Georgia both became governors, saying the time for segregation was past. Carter went on to win most of the southern states in his 1976 campaign for president, then lost almost all of them in 1980.

So now back to the original proposition. Is a black American who intends to vote for Mitt Romney in this year's election somehow betraying the best interests of the black community, and a black president? Is the Republican party the true defender of racial equality?

Answering the first question, I'd say certainly not. It's no more a betrayal for a black American to vote for Romney than it is for a white American to vote for Obama. (Like me, for instance.) Political polls indicate something like ninety-five percent of black Americans who vote will cast ballots for the president. That should be an indication that they know who will protect their rights, but the five percent who are voting Republican must also be accorded the presumption that they think they know what their own best interests are and those of our country.

The second question requires a little more thought and review of the historical record. I've just outlined that for you, my many readers. I'd say that until about ninety years ago the answer would have been yes. But Warren Harding, Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon turned the Republicans away from civil rights, while Harry Truman and succeeding Democrats redeemed their party's reputation before history.