When I was a child, my father taught me a little bit of truth can be used to camouflage a lot of falsifying.
Today’s Republicans prove this every time they blame the Democratic Party for our racial divisions.
Republicans like to point out the reality that it was Democrats who advocated for slavery, fought the losing effort of the Confederacy, eliminated Reconstruction, founded the KKK, established Jim Crow segregation and opposed the Civil Rights Movement. As true as this may be, it ignores the fact that those Democrats were conservatives who did what they did in opposition to liberal Republicans.
Sid Smith III
To ignore this significant fact, or call it “a bunch of crap” like Ben Carson does, is to pretend the Southern Democratic conservatives who described themselves as “Dixiecrats” (folks like Strom Thurman, Ted Bilbo, Orval Faubus and George Wallace) are the same as the liberals who run today’s Democratic Party (folks like Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters). This argument also presumes today’s conservative Republicans (folks like Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell and JD Vance) are the same as the liberals that once ran the GOP (folks like Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower).
This is textbook intellectual dishonesty.
The parties of today are far more ideologically polarized than they were in the past, and missing that truth greatly skews our view of political history. A more accurate way of describing the ideological heirs of slavery, segregation and white supremacy is to use the terms “conservative” and “liberal,” because what conservatives believed 150 years ago is the basis for what they believe now, and the same goes for liberals.
For instance, one of the guiding principles for conservatives down through the years has been states’ rights. The folks who advocated for slavery did so under the banner of states’ rights. The folks who fought the losing effort of the Confederacy by definition fought under the banner of states’ rights. The folks who eliminated Reconstruction did so under the banner of states’ rights. The folks who founded the KKK did so under the banner of states’ rights. The folks who established and enforced Jim Crow segregation did so under the banner of states’ rights. The folks who opposed the Civil Rights Movement did so under the banner of states’ rights.
Those same folks considered themselves “Dixiecrats” and the official name of their movement was “The States’ Rights Party.” Starting in the 1960s, under the banner of states’ rights, they supported Republican presidential candidates like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Donald Trump (all conservatives who champion states’ rights). They conceived and implemented what became known as “the Southern Strategy” starting in the Nixon administration.
“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”
Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips described the Southern Strategy this way in 1970: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10% to 20% of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that. … But Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the Blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
Reagan strategist Lee Atwater in 1981 further describes the Southern Strategy: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n****r, n****r, n****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now (that) you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is (that) Blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘n****r, n****r.’”
If the Southern Strategy is fictional, as some on the Right would like to fool you into believing, perhaps someone should inform these former Republican Party chairmen.
Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman, in 2005 told the NAACP national convention in Milwaukee that it was “wrong.”
“By the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out,” Mehlman said in his prepared text. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
Another Former Republican National Committee Chair, Michael Steele, said the following: “Why should an African American vote Republican? You really don’t have a reason to, to be honest — we haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True. … We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African Americans. This party was co-founded by Blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties; their parties walk away from them.” For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”
Sid Smith III is a music ministry consultant and serves at Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. His father, Sid Smith Jr., was a pioneer Southern Baptist Convention leader credited with starting more than 400 predominantly Black SBC churches. Sid serves on the board of director for BNG.