September 23, 2006
Race and Electoral Politics Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon, enthusiastic about a Michael Steele’s run for the Senate in Maryland, praises a Steele TV ad, which he links to, and writes that while his man may not win, “the fact that a black Republican has a good shot at winning a statewide race in the very blue state of Maryland is powerful evidence that the days of the Democratic Party monopolizing the black vote may be over.” I don’t think this is too likely, and one of the reasons for this improbability was suggested in yesterday’s Washington Post story on the race, which revealed that Steele is not only running amusing TV ads; he is also running radio ads, including: “. . . a Baltimore radio advertisement targeting African American listeners that was sponsored by the Washington-based National Black Republican Association. The ad identifies Martin Luther King Jr. as a Republican and pins the founding of the Ku Klux Klan on Democrats. One woman says: ‘Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.’ ‘The Klan?’ her friend replies. ‘White hoods and sheets?’ First woman: ‘Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.’ Second woman: ‘Seriously?’” This is good history, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough, and voters seem to know it. This version of history omits that crucial period from 1964 through, well, just the other day. LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act thinking that he had handed the South to the Republican party for a generation, and in 1968 Nixon’s Southern Strategy suggested that LBJ had it right. There was a great inversion in the electorate: African-American voters moved wholesale into the Democratic party—where many had moved in the New Deal, in any case—and Southern white voters defected to the Republican Party, which seemed at best indifferent and often hostile to the Civil Rights movement. Is that appearance of indifference or hostility a liberal slander? In 1993 American Heritage ran an interview with Jack Kemp in which Kemp noted of the Republican Party and African-American voters that “we had a great history, and we turned aside. We should have been there with Dr. King on the streets of Atlanta and Montgomery. We should have been there with John Lewis. We should have been there on the freedom marches and bus rides. We should have been there with Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955. “I don’t know if you’ve read Taylor Branch’s book Parting the Waters, but he makes it very clear that the failure of the 1960 Nixon campaign to express any public or personal sympathy with the plight of Dr. King when he was in prison for demonstrating on behalf of civil rights and Coretta Scott King—who was pregnant at the time, in October of 1960—coupled with John F. Kennedy’s making one phone call for maybe 30 seconds (thanks to Harris Wofford, for whom I have high regard and respect), may have cost us that election.” It has arguably also cost the Republicans some elections since, and it may well cost Michael Steele a seat in the Senate. This is not because the Republican Party is now running national campaigns against civil rights for African-Americans, but because it was fantastically tin-eared, at best, about civil rights for decades, and because when Southern Republicans like Trent Lott reveal recidivist tendencies on race, they are hounded out of Republican leadership posts not by George Bush, but in spite of him, as a result of campaigns run by libertarian Republicans and independents in the blogosphere. And because George Bush campaigned at universities which forbade interracial dating. And because in parts of the Old South, the Republican party is still seen as pursuing the strategy that helped win Richard Nixon the White House in 1968.
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