Featured What Needs to Happen to END Racial Unrest?

The myth of a GOP ‘Southern strategy’

While chatting with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN over the weekend, Rep. Charles B. Rangel, D-New York, dropped a few falsehoods as casually as cigar ash.

His assertion — that the Republican and Democratic parties “changed sides” in the 1960s on civil rights, with white racists leaving the Democratic Party to join the Republicans — has become conventional wisdom. It’s utterly false and should be rebutted at every opportunity.

It’s true that a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, shepherded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to passage. But who voted for it? Eighty percent of Republicans in the House voted aye as against 61 percent of Democrats. In the Senate, 82 percent of Republicans favored the law, but only 69 percent of Democrats. Among the Democrats voting nay were Albert Gore Sr., Robert Byrd and J. William Fulbright.

The Republican presidential candidate in 1964 also opposed the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater had been an enthusiastic backer of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts (both overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats). He was a founding member of the Arizona chapter of the NAACP. He hired many blacks in his family business and pushed to desegregate the Arizona National Guard. He had a good-faith objection to some features of the 1964 act, which he regarded as unconstitutional.

Goldwater was no racist. The same cannot be said of Fulbright, on whom Bill Clinton bestowed the Medal of Freedom. Fulbright was one of the 19 senators who signed the “Southern Manifesto” defending segregation.

OK, but didn’t all the old segregationist senators leave the Democratic Party and become Republicans after 1964? No, just one did: Strom Thurmond. The rest remained in the Democratic Party — including former Klansman Robert Byrd, who became president pro tempore of the Senate.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherv...-of-a-gop-southern-strategy.html#.VEmwYPnF-So

 

The Myth of ‘the Southern Strategy’

Everyone knows that race has long played a decisive role in Southern electoral politics. From the end of Reconstruction until the beginning of the civil rights era, the story goes, the national Democratic Party made room for segregationist members — and as a result dominated the South. But in the 50s and 60s, Democrats embraced the civil rights movement, costing them the white Southern vote. Meanwhile, the Republican Party successfully wooed disaffected white racists with a “Southern strategy” that championed “states’ rights.”

It’s an easy story to believe, but this year two political scientists called it into question. In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html

 

Coulter shreds 'southern strategy' myth

Liberals have accounted for Democratic losses in the southeast to what has become known as the GOP’s “southern strategy.” Conservative author Ann Coulter debunks the “southern strategy” excuse in her new book “Mugged.”

The single most important piece of evidence for the Republicans’ alleged southern strategy is President Johnson’s statement, after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, tat “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” That self-serving quote is cited by liberals with more solemnity than Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Johnson’s statement is of questionable provenance. The sole source for the quote is LBJ assistant Bill Moyers, whose other work for the president included hunting for gays on Barry Goldwater’s staff and monitoring the FBI’s bugs on Martin Luther King’s hotel room, then distributing the tapes to select members of the Johnson administration and the press. If this were my case-in-chief for an important point, I’d want better sourcing than a sanctimonious liberal fraud.

A source for information about LBJ who is not a partisan hack, dirty trickster and MLK-adultery publicist is Robert M. MacMillan, Air Force One steward during the Johnson administration. Macmillan reports that when LBJ was flying on Air Force One with two governors once, he boasted, “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”
SEE RELATED:
Coulter goes on to show that LBJ continually rejected civil rights bills proposed by only Republicans and it was not until 1964, when Johnson finally signed the civil rights act with very little help from his fellow Democrats in Congress. Even after the passage of the civil rights act, Democrats continued to win elections in former segregationist states all the way through the election of George H.W. Bush despite the folklore of the GOP “southern strategy.”



Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog...s-southern-strategy-myth-gop-s/#ixzz3H1WJAdat
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

 

The neocons and nixon's southern strategy

Lear’s reflection upon ingratitude comes to mind as one reads of the squabble among neoconservatives over who among them was first to stick his nail file in the back of Trent Lott.

Charles Krauthammer enters a claim for the Kristol-Bennett crowd, while Jonah Goldberg of National Review and cashiered Bush speech-writer David Frum insist they, too, played supporting roles.

Whether Lott may have been innocent of any hate crime, or whether they might have had a moral duty to step in to stop a lynching of one of their own – even had Lott blundered – seem to be thoughts that never once intruded upon these tiny minds. Yet their collusion in ruining Lott, their relish in the pats on the head they are receiving from the left, confirm the suspicion: Neoconservatives are the useful idiots of the liberal establishment.

With Lott gone, Bill Kristol is now collaborating with the New York Times in its rewrite of the history of the 1960s, a decade of liberal debacles, to credit racism for the Republicans’ success.

“Lott is really virtually the last of the products of Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ to be in major positions of power in the Congress,” Kristol assures the Times. “With his leaving, you will have cleared out people who … have a somewhat compromised image to the country as a whole.”

Now, as a co-architect of the Nixon strategy that gave the GOP a lock on the White House for a quarter century, let me say that Kristol’s opportunism is matched only by his ignorance. Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South (by this writer) that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the “party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”

In that ’66 campaign, Nixon – who had been thanked personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 – endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society.

In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for vice president. Why? Agnew had routed George (“Your home is your castle!”) Mahoney for governor of Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the riots that erupted after the assassination of King. The Agnew of 1968 was both pro-civil rights and pro-law and order.

When the ’68 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent, Humphrey at 29 percent, Wallace at 22 percent. When it ended, Nixon and Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent. The 9 percent of the national vote that had been peeled off from Wallace had gone to Humphrey.

Between 1969 and 1974, Nixon – who believed that blacks had gotten a raw deal in America and wanted to extend a helping hand:

raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
doubled the budget for black colleges;
appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and universities;
invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business loans to minorities 1,000 percent, increased U.S. deposits in minority-owned banks 4,000 percent;
raised the share of Southern schools that were desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent. Wrote the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, “It has only been since 1968 that substantial reduction of racial segregation has taken place in the South.”
The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie. Nixon routed the left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.

Nixon led America out of a dismal decade and was rewarded with a 49-state landslide. By one estimate, he carried 18 percent of the black vote in 1972 and 25 percent in the South. No Republican has since matched that. To see Kristol colluding with the Times to rewrite that history to make liberals heroes and Republicans villains tells us more about him than about the era.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2002/12/16477/#H501kWlrAYkQuTii.99

 

It would take it not happening so much without anything being done.

Perhaps it would help if there wasn't such an acrimonious response by so many white people every time Blacks complain about racial injustices.

Perhaps it would take white people recognizing and acknowledging that everything ain't better?

Nope. Because neither side wants to acknowledge that there is some merit to what the other is saying.

There have been four black ELECTED Senators in all of American history.Blacks are 13% of the population, but make up only 2% of the Senate.

Of the 400 richest Americans, there is 1 black person.


44 Presidents. 1 Black.

Now you take the vast underrepresentation of ANYBODY but white people historically in the majority of "power" positions, and it may start to scratch the surface of why things aren't as rosy from the perspective of black people as a lot of white people seem to think.

 

I live in metro Atlanta. I deal with a lot of urban neighborhoods. I have lots of black work associates, friends at church, in my neighborhood, and all around me. I get to see and hear things that the average person in white America does not. And I must say , it definitely helps to hear and LISTEN to what black people are saying.

The history of Blacks in this country has been particularly tumultuous. Some of it is of their own making. But a lot of it is of the making of a majority who couldn't conceive of there still being racial prejudices and racism in society to the degree that Blacks say because they don't see it.

And that's easy to do...when you're in the majority.

I've seen white people say to well spoken black teenagers or colleagues "you talk like a white person" as though that is a compliment and as though the majority has the market cornered on good grammar.

I've heard the majority say that Blacks act like animals , that they are more prone to violence than the majority.

I've heard the majority say that black people are dirty and that they are stupid.

I've heard the majority say that they don't want to live next to black people or use the rest room after them.

And I'm just talking about folks who identify themselves as evangelical Christians.

Having seen these things out of God's people, why would I doubt there to not be credence to some of the claims of racial prejudice that Blacks make?

I take seriously God's command to love my neighbor as myself as all Christians should. Perhaps if we started treating people as PEOPLE instead of allowing our prejudices and biases to categorize people by the color of their skin and by our own skin color stereotypes, then perhaps it will all go away.

But again, this is an issue of love. One does not have to have the same skin color as another to understand how to just love them.

One does not have to have the same skin color as another to understand that you can learn so much more about people by spending time with them and loving them and listening.

One does not have to share the same skin color as another to understand and see that the things they say are happening actually are happening.

I can speak passionately when I see black people, white people, gays, drug addicts, etc being treated in an unChristlike manner.

That doesn't mean that I'm black, white, gay, or a drug addict. :laugh:

 

Almost took you seriously. And then….

Yeah. Baloney you have.

 

Perfect example of why it won't end until Jesus comes back. Folks like you think that it sounds too ridiculous to be true.

But I have sat with young black men and their grandfathers and great grandfathers as they talked about the things that happened to them as their grandsons and great grandsons listened incredulously.

Your lack of belief doesn't make the truth any less truthful.

Your "unbelief" is the same approach a lot of the majority takes whenever black people say anything now.

So RD2, it'll fix itself once Jesus gets His hardheaded, coldhearted people out the way and then deals with the lost.

 

Yeah, it's me. Racism in this country is my fault.

Yes, Zaac. Baloney you have heard that from the majority of evangelical christians you have met. Complete and utter baloney. And you're not willing to even try to prove it.

The stupid don't stop, here at the B.B..

You knew it at the beginning of the thread. Racism will end when conservatives accept they're hopelessly racist.

 

Yea exactly.

 

Question.

When he says "majority" in that context , could he mean the majority race, meaning some whites? (who are ,of course, the majority race in this country)

When I read it, that's the way I took it.

Now that you bring it up, it makes me wonder.

Did he actually mean the majority of whites? If so, I also call baloney.

In my lifetime, I have heard those remarks maybe a handful of times. So if he meant it that way, he's making it up.

Trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here.

 

Yes carpro, that is exactly what I meant.

 

Telling the truth while covering your butt... nice gymnastics. Careful though, you will be a liberal operative, commie sympathizer soon.

 

http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/25/c...shed-to-keep-successful-black-men-down-video/

 

Kind of doubtful, or he would have corrected me the first time. What he did was say I was the problem.

 

Are you willing to go whole-hog with that type of reasoning? Currently, Protestants have no representation at all in the Supreme Court, with its 6 Catholics and 3 Jews. In case you want to argue that the SC is not an elected body, then ask the same thing about the current House of Representatives-- who is under and who is over? And if you think 'proper' representation is always numbers, how many settings can be questioned there?-- owning convenience stores, the NFL, the NBA, the PGA, airline pilots and flight attendants, nurses, owning professional sports teams, law firms, architectual firms, show shine stands,... and on and on. Do you see any discrepancies between male/femle, black/white, Jew/Christian, Protestant/Catholic, European American/Asian American,.....?

Yes or NO: must the number among racial/ethnic/religious/gender groups be completely equal or serve as proof of discrimination?

 

That would kinda be fun. :thumbs:

 

Save the strawmen. We're talking skin color. It continues to be and always will be a sore spot for folks in the majority when Blacks or anyone in the minority questions representation.

It's difficult for a lot of folks in the majority to comprehend because they've never had to view things from the perspective that Blacks and other minorities do.

And I don't think I mentioned discrimination. I said racial prejudices and racism. There's a difference.

I simply offered forth some reasons as to why things aren't as rosy from the perspective of Blacks as a lot of folks in the majority seem to want to think.

I've had these conversations with black people. Attempting to reframe the conversation into something else does not deal with the reality of what they are seeing.