Racial Politics
U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D–GA) claims that the racist Dixiecrats “went to the Republican Party” and “gave the South to the Republicans” because Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson “passed” the 1965 “voting rights bill.
IN FACT, the vast bulk of Dixiecrats stayed as Democrats, and Congressional Republicans voted for the 1965 bill at a higher rate than Democrats, who have been fueling racial divisions for more than 150 years. Here are the specifics:
- In the 1850s, the Republican Party was formed on the basis of opposition to slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 as the first Republican president.
- During his campaign, Lincoln stated that “he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave,” and “those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”
- Before Lincoln’s election, Southern Democrats warned that a “Black Republican” presidential victory would cause them to split from the United States, and when Lincoln was elected, 7 Southern states immediately seceded while identifying slavery as their main reason for doing so.
- For 80 years following the end of the Civil War, Republicans passed Constitutional amendments and laws to protect the life, liberty, and other rights of black people, while Democrats largely opposed these efforts and successfully blocked other Republican attempts to provide further protections.
- Immediately after World War II, the Democratic Party suffered heavy losses in Congress due to their hostility to civil rights, and Northern Democrats joined with Republicans in trying to pass civil rights laws, but Southern Democrats watered them down and impeded them.
- In 1948, Democrats added a provision to their platform stating that “racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws, on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution.”
- As a result of that platform change and Democrat President Harry Truman embracing civil rights for the armed forces, a group of Southern Democrats split from the Democratic Party in 1948 to form the States Rights Democratic Party, commonly called the “Dixiecrats.”
- The Dixiecrats supported segregation and laws that banned interracial marriages, and the party quickly dissolved after a weak showing in the 1948 presidential election.
- In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent several companies of the U.S. Army to Little Rock, Arkansas to disperse a mob provoked by Democrats that was blocking the integration of a high school.
- Over the opposition of former Dixiecrats who returned to the Democratic Party, Congress passed and LBJ signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 with 80% of Congressional Republicans and 65% of Democrats voting for it.
- A year later, Congress passed and LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with 81% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats voting for it.
- From 1958 to 1999, the portion of white Southerners who said they would be willing to vote for a black president increased from 8% to 95%, and Southern whites began switching en masse to the Republican Party as they became more financially prosperous and as Democrats shifted left on issues like gun control and taxpayer-funded abortions up through birth.
- Despite the strong inverse association between declining racism and Republican gains in the South, certain Democrats, journalists, and scholars alleged that Southern whites switched parties because Republicans engaged in a “Southern Strategy” of courting racism.
- In reality, the main demographic of Southerners who supported segregation were poor whites who continued to vote for Democrats at roughly the same rate for decades.
- Among the 21 Democrat Senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only one of them (Strom Thurman) became a Republican, while the other 20 stayed as life-long Democrats.
- Prominent segregationists like George Wallace, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, and Orval Faubus were Democrats who never switched to the Republican Party.
- After more than a century of engaging in anti-black discrimination, Democrats began supporting anti-white discrimination in the 1960s with the stated aim of ensuring equal outcomes for people of different races.
- Over the ensuing decades, Democrats have routinely amplified and distorted rare tragedies to accuse Americans of systemic racism and have made numerous racially charged false allegations about issues like voting rights, education spending, mortgage rates, healthcare discrimination, income disparities, the criminal justice system, and more.
