Eric Brown Apparently it is a great big lie — an “utter fabrication with malice and forethought” — to say that the Democrats lost their longtime hold over the old Confederacy because their support for civil rights legislation drove white Southerners away. do you know how mad this lie makes me? When the secret truth is that Republicans have always been, and will always be, the single most pro-civil rights party ever. but lots of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, so therefore Democrats are the real racists Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. So: It’s true, and no one denies this, that Republicans used to be very good on civil rights and Democrats used to be super racist. It’s true that Woodrow Wilson was a bigot and (Northern, liberal) Republican senators were better than (Southern, conservative) Democratic senators on civil rights in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and Johnson was a big ol’ Texas racist. But the segregationists didnt all wake up and decide to vote for Republicans starting in 1965 — they revolted. George Wallace started a third party. They continued fighting for racism within the party, and they eventually lost. But it wasnt until the conservative movement had finished fully taking over the Republican Party that the great shift finished. After devoting a lot of words to LBJ’s very real history of being a loud-mouthed racist, Williamson explains that Johnson’s dumb, loud-mouthed racism was just a reflection of the whole of Democratic Party philosophy and belief since time immemorial. Eisenhower, as a general, began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman, as president, formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House. Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:31:00 +0000
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