Racism in America: bipartisan guilt

"I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses … And I’m not inextricably bound to either party.” 
  Martin Luther King Jr.


National Review and Townhall columnist Mona Charen recently repeated an argument often made by conservative Republicans in recent years, that the Republican party historically has been the party that fought slavery and promoted civil rights, while the Democratic party defended slavery and opposed civil rights. She was responding to a comment made by Rep. Charles Rangel (NY), who in an interview with Brian Lamb said that the former slave-holding states of the deep south, those which have historically been most racist, have switched parties. He said those who were Dixiecrats have become tea party activists, that they embrace the Confederate flag, and talk about taking our country back. He did not believe there would be the same level of animosity toward Obama if he were white. Rangel's comments on this topic came about 50 minutes into the interview, which lasted slightly over an hour. He was brief in his reply, explaining he had been asked not to talk about it.

Charen took umbrage, claiming Rangel's asserion was "utterly false and should be rebutted at every opportunity." She noted:

..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....

This is misleading. First of all she fails to note that the votes on these legislative acts were based primarily on regional divisions, not party divisions. As Politifact noted, in the House vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, "Northern Democrats backed the Civil Rights Act by a margin even larger than that of Republicans -- 141 for, just four against -- while Southern Democrats were strongly opposed, by a margin of 11 yeas to 92 nays."

And it is simply false to claim Democrats "overwhelmingly opposed" the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts. As noted, voting patterns were based primarily on region rather than party. All 43 Republican senators voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act; while 29 Democratic senators voted for and 18 against it. Almost all the Democratic opposition to this act came from the south, although some southerners, such as Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Yarborough of Texas and Albert Gore and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, voted for it.

About Barry Goldwater, I will assume he was not racist, but what was his "good faith objection" to the 1964 Civil Rights Act? Charen does not say. But Goldwater did so, on the Senate floor he said he opposed Titles II and VII of the bill. Title II outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; but exempted private clubs. Title VII outlawed discrimination in the workplace against employees based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Goldwater said these titles were unconstitutional and their enforcement would lead to the creation of a police state. In reality, the types of discrimination banned in Titles II and VII formed much of the basis for racial segregation in the south and the subjugation of black Americans.

Another major basis for the subjugation of black Americans in the south was segregation in public education. This was outlawed in a unanimous 1954 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown vs. Board of Education, which ruled racial segregation in schools was inherently unequal and violated the 14th amendment. But Goldwater claimed the court's decision was unconstitutional. Since, in his view, it was unconstitutional, it was not the law of the land, and resistance to it was therefore legitimate. In his book, Conscience of a Conservative, he said the Constitution, not the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, was the supreme law of the land. He therefore supported states resisting this decision, "excluding violence of course." He went even further, suggesting a new Constitutional amendment that "would reaffirm the State's exclusive jurisdiction in the field of education."

He added that he himself believed in racial integration, but he did not want to "impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina." This begs the question: which people of Mississippi and South Carolina? Since black people were systematically disenfranchised in much of the south, their voices could not be heard in the local or state governments. In Mississippi in 1964, black people constituted 45% of the state's population, yet less than 5% were registered to vote. The southern governments which Goldwater defended represented only a majority of white voters, and even that was questionable, as a climate of violence and other forms of intimidation threatened not only black southerners but also white southerners who might challenge the Jim Crow system.

Goldwater said he believed in a government of laws not men, and that the Constitution, not the Supreme Court's interpretation of it, was the law of the land. But the Constitution and other laws can be interpreted in many ways. We have a judicial system, with lawyers arguing opposing views and judges, headed by the Supreme Court, interpreting and applying the law. If politicians interpret the law according to their own interests or prejudices, without regard to court decisions, that would overturn our system of checks and balances, and become a recipe for anarchy. Thus, Goldwater's argument undermined the very principle he claimed to support, a government of laws not men.

Goldwater wrote his book at a time when white southern politicians were resisting Supreme Court decisions on segregation. When James Meredith, a black man, attempted to enter the University of Mississippi in 1962, Goldwater said Governor Ross Barnett had "every right" to block Meredith's entrance, that the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education was "not the law of the land," and that President Kennedy was wrong to send troops there.

Goldwater was also on record as praising the most ardent segregationist in the U.S. Senate, Strom Thurmond. As the keynote speaker to the 1960 South Carolina Republican convention, which he spoke to again in 1962, he said, "..I just wish to God we could find some more Strom Thurmonds in the country." [p. 149, "Goldwater in Dixie", Joseph Crespino, in Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape. Tucson, AZ, USA: University of Arizona Press, 2013].

Closely aligned to Goldwater's views on this topic was a "nullification" and "interposition" argument advanced by some conservatives at the time, particularly James Kilpatrick, a prominent conservative and syndicated columnist based in Richmond, Virginia. Beginning in 1955, Kilpatrick wrote many columns, some assembled together and published as a book, in which he argued that states have the right to disregard and actively resist federal court decisions they considered improper, resurrecting a doctrine originated over 100 years earlier by Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina. His argument provided the intellectual basis for massive resistance to school integration that was to take place in the south over the ensuing years: "Kilpatrick, by propagating a whole vernacular to serve the culture of massive resistance -- interposition, nullification, states' rights, state sovereignty -- provided an intellectual shield for nearly every racist action and reaction in the coming years," wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in their 2006 book, The Race Beat. The "revolution so many Northerners jubilantly anticipated in Brown," Kilpatrick said, "is not to be a two-day coup d'état, but a thirty-year Peloponnesian War."

Kilpatrick justified southern resistance not only on states rights doctrine but also on his view that black Americans were racially inferior. "What has man gained from the history of the Negro race?" he wrote in 1957. "The answer, alas, is 'virtually nothing.'" In 1964 he wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post that was rejected by the editors, in which he claimed "the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race."

Kilpatrick's racist, pro-states rights views were shared by another up and coming conservative, William Buckley, who was just starting The National Review, soon to become the intellectual journal of the right. Buckley wrote a now infamous editorial for his magazine in 1957, "Why the South Must Prevail," in which he argued that even in areas of the south where outnumbered, the white community must prevail over the black community because of their "cultural superiority". Kilpatrick, along with other prominent conservative, pro-segrgation intellectuals such as Russell Kirk, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver and M.E. Bradford wrote for the National Review and other prominent conservative journals such as Human Events and U.S. News and World Report.

The 1964 Republican Convention took place in San Francisco on July 13-16, just two weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed on July 2. A historic turning point had been reached for black Americans, yet there was still much resistance, particularly in the South. Many white southerners despised Lyndon Johnson as if he were a traitor, because he pushed this bill through Congress. They considered Goldwater, on the other hand an "honorary southerner" because of his opposition to the bill.

The great majority of delegates were pledged to Goldwater, a clear victory for the conservative wing of the party. There were few black delegates and some of those who attended were badly treated by Goldwater delegates, at times physically attacked. This almost happened to baseball great Jackie Robinson, who was confronted by an Alabama delegate while cheering a brief speech by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a speech roundly booed by Goldwater delegates. After the convention, Robinson denounced Goldwater and his supporters, and pledged his support for Johnson.

Charen notes that Goldwater was an NAACP member in Arizona, but the head of the NAACP in 1964, Roy Wilkins, expressed his concern that a Goldwater victory could lead to a police state, and "..that the civil rights move­ment would suffer repression of a drastic nature if the forces supporting Senator Goldwater should come to power.”

Martin Luther King, once vilified but now lionized by the right, also worried about a Goldwater victory:

King said of Goldwater’s voting record, “while not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists” (King,16 July 1964). King feared that Goldwater’s position that “civil rights must be left, by and large to the states” meant “leaving it to the Wallaces and the Barnetts” (King, “The Presidential Nomination”). Electing Goldwater, King said, would plunge the country into a “dark night of social disruption” (King, 21 September 1964).

Indeed, while Goldwater predicted the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would lead to the creation of a police state, police state conditions already existed for black Americans in the South, and would continue to exist if forceful federal action was not taken to break the back of systematic discrimination in jobs, schools and housing, along with access to public accommodations, which together combined into a vicious cycle to keep black Americans as a permanent underclass. And this is what the 1964 Civil Rights Act ended, while the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed the political disenfranchisement of black Americans.

Goldwater was warmly welcomed in the south during his campaign, but reporters traveling with him commented on how few black people could be seen, even in areas with heavy black population. His campaign in the south thus became a "carnival of white supremacy," according to Richard Rovere of The New Yorker. Operation Dixie, begun by Goldwater and RNC chairman Meade Alcorn in 1957 to strengthen Republicans in the south, by 1964 was taken over by hardline conservatives, who attempted to turn it into a "lily-white" organization, according to Alcorn.

It should be no surprise under these conditions that black Americans voted overwhelmingly for Johnson, while white Americans in the deep south voted overwhelmingly for Goldwater. Goldwater had already made clear his opposition to both Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, claiming both were unconstitutional. And since he had stated that the Constitution, not the Supreme Court's interpretation of it, was the supreme law of the land; and also stated he opposed federal intervention to enforce such decisions, it was unlikely under these circumstances that, if elected he would intervene at the federal level to enforce civil rights laws.

Conservatives today claim the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a Republican accomplishment, while at the same time defending Barry Goldwater's opposition to it on "principled" grounds. But if one recognizes the importance of this law and also of Brown v. Board of Education, in restoring rights promised to black Americans 100 years earlier, then how could one support for president a man who would instead allow racist white governments to continue to marginalize and oppress black Americans? This was the dilemma facing Republicans who supported civil rights in 1964.

Returning to Rangel's comments, was he wrong or unfair? First of all, it is a fact that today white Americans of the deep south are overwhelmingly Republican. That does not mean that southern white Republicans today are racist. Racial attitudes have changed greatly over the last 50 years, to the point where open support for racial prejudice and discrimination exists only on the fringes of our society. Furthermore, there are a variety of reasons why white southerners have shifted from the Democratic to Republican party, including a tradition of cultural and religious conservativism. But in the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater took the deep south, which among the white voters was overwhelmingly pro-segregation, and Goldwater supported the right of these states to maintain the racial status quo.

Writing for the California Law Review, Richard Pildes said the full effect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) took about 30 years to be realized:

The citizens that the VRA newly empowered first had to start registering and turning out to vote. Candidates had to begin appealing to those votes. The power of those votes had to manifest itself. The Democratic Party of the South had to feel and respond to pressure; as that party moved left, the Republican Party had to be reborn. Candidates had to be willing to run under these new banners. Voters had to become willing to change their party affiliation. Existing officeholders had to become willing to change their party identity. The process of changing party affiliation, for both voters and officeholders, is an enormous, once-in-a-generation experience, if that. At some point in this dynamic, a tipping point is crossed. Conservatives who had long thought of themselves as Democrats decide that they are Republicans, and there is a cascade among others who perceive themselves in the same way. If one had to date that tipping point, it was probably in the years leading up to 1994, when what experts characterize as a “surge” of Republican electoral victories occurred in the South—a surge that enabled Republicans nationally to take control of the House.71 It took about a generation, from 1965 to 1995, for the massive political restructuring wrought by the VRA to work its way through American democracy. 

Thus, as black southerners gained the right to vote, they became active mostly in the Democratic party; conversely conservative white southerners mostly migrated to the Republican party. Within both parties was a political transformation, and the end of an era of pro-segregation politicians in either party. While it would be unfair to characterize the Republican party by the actions or comments of a few on the far right, nevertheless it would seem logical that in our two party system, and with the two parties so polarized as they are now, those on the far right would be more likely to join the Republican party, while those on the far left would be more likely to join the Democratic party.

Among those who migrated from the Democratic party to the Republican party, with a stopover in the American Independent Party, was M.E. Bradford, a professor of literature at the University of Dallas, and President Reagan's first choice to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. His appointment enjoyed considerable backing from prominent conservatives, as reported in a biography:

"A letter supporting Bradford’s nomination, sent to President Reagan during the controversy, was signed by John East, Jesse Helms, John Tower, Strom Thurmond, Orrin Hatch, Jeremiah Denton, Dan Quayle and James McClure and eight other Republican senators. "Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, Bill Buckley, Gerhart Neimeyer, M. Stanton Evans, Andrew Lytle, Harry Jaffa, and dozens of others” were also named as supporters."

Bradford was a leading southern conservative intellectual, highly influential among other conservatives of his time, and a godfather of what is called the paleo-conservative movement today. He was also a racist who defended the social order of the Jim Crow south, and who wrote harsh denunciations of Abraham Lincoln. Fortunately Reagan withdrew the nomination after pressure from neo-conservatives, but that Bradford would even be considered for such a high post shows how far the Republican party had traveled in the wrong direction on racial issues.

Finally, it should be noted that until the 1950s, racial discrimination and prejudice was widespread throughout our country, not just in the south. And it existed in both parties.At the height of its power in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan exercised power in both north and south, was most directly powerful in Indiana, where it controlled the Republican legislature until a major scandal broke out. And the Klan was not just anti-Black, it was also anti-Jew and anti-Catholic. Thus, when Al Smith won the 1928 Democratic nomination, the Klan treated him as enemy number one because he was Catholic and also because he was anti-prohibition.

The Republican party got off to a good start in the 1850s with its opposition to the expansion of slavery and during the Reconstruction era with the enactment of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, abolishing slavery, granting equal rights and voting rights to black Americans. But Reconstruction lasted only a decade, and with the withdrawal of federal troops from the south, in the subsequent 70 years there was little effort by the Republican party or its politicians to restore these rights.

During this period, while racial segregation in the south was mandated by law, de jure segregation, in the north it existed primarily because of discrimination in housing and employment that was not banned by law, de facto segregation. Here in California I recall in 1966 a state initiative supported by then gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan that would overturn a state law prohibiting racial discrimination in the sale of real estate.

It is fortunate that we have come so far from a time when racial discrimination was so widespread in our nation. But those who claim that the Democratic party was the party of slavery and segregation while the Republican party was the party of abolition and civil rights need to consider that history is more complicated, neither party in untarnished on this issue, and that the divisions and alliances were not just along party lines.