Black History Month (Part 8): Nixon – civil rights and southern strategy

One of the key elements of the false narrative that misaligned historic racism with the Republican Party was the claim that President Nixon won the presidency because he had a “southern strategy” designed to win over the racist Democrat voters in the South.

It was part of a larger effort to falsely smear Nixon – and his administration policies – as racist.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Nixon was a civil rights advocate and worked closely with Martin Luther King on the Eisenhower 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts. 

As President, Nixon appointed record numbers of Blacks to high ranking government posts.  He launched a major program to provide capital for minority businesses through the newly created Office of Minority Owned Businesses under the Small Business Administration. (Headed at the time by Connie Mack Higgins, a close personal friend of mine).  One of Nixon’s signature achievements was the passage of Affirmative Action legislation.

Nixon’s pro-civil rights policies made him very unpopular among racist Democrat voters as I explained in my book, “Who Put Blacks in That PLACE?  The Long Sad History of the Democratic Party’s Oppression of Black Americans … to This Day.”

From the book:

“Nixon’s Southern Strategy – Truth v. Fiction

To explain Nixon’s and the GOP’s growing popularity in the South in the late 1960s, and to reverse a renewed trend of southern Blacks returning to the Republicans, the Democratic Party advanced another bogus political narrative. It proffered the argument that the Republican Party had gained in the South by becoming the preferred party of all-White racist voters. They claimed that southern racists had simply switched to the Republican Party to support Nixon.

There may have been a “southern strategy” to benefit Nixon, but it was not to win over the hardline racist vote. Many Whites in the South were increasingly offended by the re-emergence of violent racism of the Democrat regimes in the 1950s and early 1960s over school desegregation—which played out on the relatively new medium of television.

In addition, the demographics of the south were changing. There was a steady post-World War II migration of northerners to the sunny coastal environments of places like Florida, Georgia, Texas, and the Carolinas thanks to air conditioning. Metropolitan communities, such as Atlanta, Miami, and New Orleans, were becoming diverse centers of business and commerce. In short, the Democrat institutional racism of the past was losing its popular appeal. The culture was changing, and the GOP was the beneficiary of the new non-racist vote. The Republicans southern strategy was to offer the alternative to the Democrat racist policies. The winning issue for the GOP was not racism but rather traditional constitutional conservatism, personal freedom, and patriotism.

The racist vote still belonged to the old Democratic Party. It was a shrinking vote but enough to keep Democrat racists, such as John Stennis, Robert Byrd, and others in office for many years beyond the Nixon presidency. The old racist Democrats held most governorships, Senate seats, House delegations, and legislatures—in addition to many county and municipal offices— long after Nixon left office. It was not until 1994 that the GOP captured most of the congressional seats in the southern states—more than twenty years after Nixon left office.

If the racist element in the public had switched parties en masse, it would be reasonable to expect that a significant number of Democrat elected officials would have done the same. That was not the case. Of the tens of thousands of racist Democrat governors, members of Congress, and state and municipal officials, virtually none joined the Republican Party. They continued to hold the shrinking southern racist voters, which resulted in their eventually losing out to Republican candidates.

Pockets of Democrat racism endured in many local communities into the twenty-first century. Though they were losing influence, the hardcore racist voters understood that the Democratic Party and the Democrat candidates were still the best vehicles for keeping Negroes in their PLACE.

Further evidence that repudiates the Democrats’ version of a Nixon racist southern strategy, is found in the statistics. If you look at the number in the three Nixon presidential elections, it would be difficult to find evidence of a racist southern strategy. In 1960, Nixon lost the entire Deep South, except Florida, to the Democrats, and in 1968, he again lost the entire South to Democrats George Wallace and Hubert Humphrey. In 1972, Nixon carried the South as the incumbent president, but he also swept forty-nine of the fifty states against a universally unpopular Democrat candidate, George McGovern—and civil rights was not the seminal issue. Southern voters, including Democrats, disliked the radial left policies of McGovern as much as the rest of the nation. At the time of Nixon’s 1968 election, the racist Democrat leaders and voters in the South were in the midst of their Massive Resistance movement against school desegregation.

In his book titled The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856, author William J. Cooper Jr. notes that even at the time of Nixon’s 1972 reelection, Democrats were retaining power over the last vestiges of institutional racism:

“The South was still overwhelmingly Democratic at the state level, with majorities in all state legislatures, and most U.S. Representatives as well.

Over the next 30 years, this gradually changed. Veteran Democrat officeholders retired or died, and older voters who were still rigidly Democrat also died off. There were also increasing numbers of migrants from other areas, especially in Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.”

Additional evidence that there was no racist southern strategy was the fact that Nixon had a strong civil rights reputation and record, which did not endear him to southern racists. As noted previously, Nixon worked very closely with Martin Luther King in securing the passage of the 1956 and 1960 civil rights acts—both of which were intensely opposed by the southern Democrat leadership and their voters. His 1968 and 1972 campaigns further enhanced Nixon’s civil rights reputation—as did his affirmative action program. Nixon was never an appealing candidate to southern racist voters, and he never tried to be.

Perhaps nothing more effectively refutes the contention that the GOP simply took over the old racist Democrat voters and policies than the dramatic change in the living conditions for the Black community as Republicans assumed power. Gone were the lynchings, the bombings, the cross burnings, the institutional segregation, the Jim Crow laws, and the denial of voting rights. Those Confederate battle flags placed in positions of official honor by the racist Democrat governors and legislatures as part of the Massive Resistance movement were removed by Republican administrations.

This was also evident in the declining influence of the Ku Klux Klan. There can be no argument that the Klan was an integral part of the Democratic Party’s governance and its oppression of Negroes. In fact, Democrat leaders used the Klan as their means to drive Republicans out of the South—and to discourage voters to cast ballots for Republicans. With racist Woodrow Wilson virtually endorsing the Ku Klux Klan from the Oval Office, it grew to hundreds of thousands of active members in the early 1900s—virtually all in the Democrat-controlled southern states.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Klan membership in the Democrat southland was still at approximately forty thousand in the early 1960s. The Klan’s votes and loyalty remained with the Democratic Party. As the Republican Party gained in southern states, the size and the influence of the Klan subsided significantly. The SPLC estimates the KKK membership at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Republicans attained considerable power in the old Confederacy, had fallen to fewer than eight hundred members.

Not since Republican Reconstruction following the Civil War has the Black citizens of the South been as free and as safe as they are since Republican ascendency that began in the 1970s.

Racist Southern Democrats Surrender — Again

Recognizing that they were losing the grassroots voters in the South many of the most strident racist governors and senators declined to run for reelection. Some were then defeated, such as Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee. But others held on to their racist Democrat constituencies, such as uber-racist James Eastland, who remained in the Senate as an icon of the Old South until 1978—thirteen years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Herman Tallmadge of Georgia remained until 1981, and Russell Long of Louisiana held his Senate seat until 1987. Others who survived had to reinvent themselves as friends of civil rights—or at least the civil rights of welfare dependency. The two most successful were Strom Thurmond, one of rare southern Democrats to switch parties. He retired from the Senate in 2003 at the age of 100 and died shortly thereafter. The other was former Ku Klux Klan leader Senator Robert Byrd, who served in the Senate’s Democrat leadership until his death in 2010 at the age of 92. He never fully repudiated his role as a Klan organizer and leader and praised of the Klan until the day he died.”

“The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, as reported in an article in West Virginia History in 2008, stated that by the late 1980s, the South had “witnessed the greatest increase in racial integration” and could “boast the highest level of school integration in the nation.” It is more than coincidence that there exists a correlation between the eventual integration of southern schools and the rise of the Republican Party throughout the region—a success that contrasts with the persistent segregation in the urban centers under long-time Democrat governance.”

As Republicans assume power at the state level – and despite the continued presence of the Democrats’ old guard racists in some statewide offices — the most violent and virulent racism subsided dramatically.  But that was not the case in some communities in the rural south, where racist Democrat officeholders still had a hold on their historic racist vote.

“Even as Republicans gradually took the reins of government in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond, pockets of old-style southern Democrat racism would continue under Democrat municipal leadership in many smaller towns and cities. Places like Cumming, Georgia, and Cleveland, Mississippi, would continue racist policies into the twenty-first century.”

*  * *

“In 1987, Cumming, Georgia, was still all-White and all-Democrat— and deeply racist. This was nineteen years after Democrats claimed that the GOP had taken over the south with the support of the old racist vote as the result of a racist Nixon “southern strategy.” The racist voters had not switched to the Republican Party. There was still a strong undercurrent of the old solid Democrat Dixie in many local communities in the former Confederate states.

Democrat Joe Frank Harris was elected Governor of Georgia in 1983. He would serve until 1991. His successors would also be Democrats until 2003 when Republican George E. “Sonny” Perdue was elected—thirty-five years after the promulgation of the southern strategy myth.”

Oprah Winfrey took her show to Cumming in 1987 to investigate the racism that still influenced the politics of the community – and its Democrat leadership.  Places like Cumming, Georgia provide strong evidence that whatever the Nixon southern strategy was 20 years earlier, it was not to recruit racist voters to the GOP.

Black History Month (Part 9) will explore the civil rights record of the nation’s first Black President.

So, there ‘tis.