Published: June 05, 2008 02:46 pm            

Michael Curtis - The rest of the story

The half-truth is an effective way to mislead. In “Woman Dares to Reveal Democrats’ Racist Past,” Floyd and Mary Brown misrepresent by omission. They portray Democrats opposed to civil rights and a Republican Party that has consistently fought for black freedom and civil rights.

Old time Republicans were leaders in the fight for liberty and equality. They gave us the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery, the 14th that made all persons born in the nation citizens and nationalized civil liberty, and the 15th that prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

During Reconstruction, the Klan used political terrorism against the black-white Republican coalition in the South. The Republican Congress passed laws making such terrorism a crime. But the laws were crippled by Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republican presidents. The justices also struck down an 1875 law prohibiting segregation in inns, theaters and transportation. The Court later tolerated laws designed to eliminate black voters in the South.

Overturning rights for blacks was justified as “states’ rights.” The Southern faction that supported the elimination of blacks from the political process called themselves Democrats. By 1900, the nation, and even Republicans in Congress, had largely abandoned blacks in the South. Most blacks still supported the Republican Party.

That began to change in the New Deal. The Browns (in a half truth) tell us that “every civil rights law beginning in the 1860s through the 1950s and the 1960s was opposed by Democrats.” President Franklin Roosevelt (a Democrat) signed the first executive order forbidding racial discrimination in jobs in defense plants. Harry Truman (a Democrat) signed an executive order ending segregation in the military and another creating a Civil Rights Commission that supported black equality. In 1948, Democrat Hubert Humphrey led a successful fight for a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform. It called for federal laws against discrimination and to protect the right to vote.

In 1964 Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, together with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, led the fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discrimination in employment based on race, religion, national origin, or sex. The law also outlawed discrimination in hotels, motels, movie theaters and other places of public accommodation. In 1965, Johnson again joined civil rights leaders and led the successful fight for a strong Voting Rights Act that restored the right to vote to black people in the South.

Democratic support for civil rights hurt the party in the South. In 1948, Strom Thurmond bolted the Democratic Party because of its support for racial equality and formed the States’ Rights Party. He carried four Southern states. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by most Democrats in the Congress and by many Republicans, without whose help it would not have passed. Most Southern Democrats opposed it. But so did a number of Republicans – including Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, and Ronald Reagan, the future Republican president. Goldwater said the 1964 act violated states’ rights. Goldwater (and Reagan) also opposed the 1965 Voting Rights Act as “unnecessary” – though without it Southern blacks had been effectively disenfranchised and with it they regained the right to vote.

Many Southern Democratic opponents of the civil rights acts (people like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms,) abandoned the Democrats, flocked to Goldwater in 1964, and became Republicans.

When Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he told his aide Bill Moyers that he had delivered the South to the Republican Party “for my generation and for your generation.” So it was to be. Goldwater carried the deep South in 1964.

By 1968, Republican Richard Nixon and segregationist George Wallace carried every Southern state but Texas.

Goldwater transformed the Republican Party. In 1964 Goldwater Republicans took over the previously biracial Georgia Republican Party and expelled blacks from party positions. Blacks did not abandon the Republican Party to join racist Democrats. In the second half of the 20th century, most joined a party that strongly supported their rights. They left a party whose highest leaders had abandoned them.



Michael Curtis teaches Constitutional Law and Legal and Constitutional History at Wake Forest Law School.

        

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