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The Pernicious Lie: Liberals, Civil Rights, and Southern Voting Patterns
On Facebook today, a liberal friend claimed that “[racist] Democrats fled to the Republican party when the [Democrats] started talking about civil rights legislation.” I pointed out that that was completely untrue. The only prominent Democrat who became a Republican was Strom Thurmond who — as a Democrat — famously ran for president on a pro-segregation platform and filibustered civil rights legislation in the Senate; as a Republican, though, he had black staff, and voted to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth a national holiday and Clarence Thomas an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. In contrast, George Wallace, Robert C. Byrd, Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, etc. all stayed Democrats.
I asked him why — if his narrative were true — Southerners continued to support Democrats for more than 30 years after the Civil Rights Movement. To which he replied, “My point was the [Democrats’] hold on the South began to die with the Civil Rights Act. That was when the GOP started to gain traction.” I again replied that that was completely untrue; Democrats maintained their grip on the South well into the 1990s.
Not being willing to give up on a good talking point, the liberal insisted:
Yes the shift began with that legislation, but it wasn’t overnight. If it wasn’t that, can you explain to me why that’s the only reliable voting block for the GOP during presidential elections? Mississippi hasn’t had a [Democratic senator] since 1972. Alabama had two [Democrats] as senators for decades until around 1980. Such a funny coincidence. I know conservatives don’t like why they gained popularity in the South, but come on now.
“Wasn’t overnight” is an overstatement when referring to the political shift that took between a quarter to a half century. It’s an intellectually lazy and dishonest view of history. As Kevin D Williamson put it in his excellent May 28, 2012, cover story for National Review, “The Party of Civil Rights:”
Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.
Since my liberal interlocutor had brought up Mississippi and Alabama — and made factual claims about their US Senators — I decided to look at their electoral histories on the state and federal levels.
Contrary to his claims, Mississippi in fact had two Democratic Senators from 1881 until 1978, and then one Democrat Senator until 1989. In Alabama, it’s true that they had “two Democrats as Senators for decades until around 1980.” The liberal labeled this “a funny coincidence.” I’m not sure what’s coincidental about “racist southern Democrats” waiting 16 years to finally act on their racism by electing a Republican to the Class III Senate seat, but I would note that the Republican, Jeremiah Denton, served only one term before “racist souther Democrats” elected a Democrat to the seat (Richard Shelby, who was elected as a Democrat before coming to his senses and switching to the Republican Party in 1994). The Class II Senate seat in Alabama remained filled by a Democrat from 1871-1997. (Coincidence!?)
Furthermore, Mississippi had a Democrat Governor from 1876-1992, and then again from 2000-2004. It had a Democrat-controlled state senate from Reconstruction to 2003, and a Democrat-controlled state house from Reconstruction to 2011.
Alabama had a Democrat Governor from 1876-1987, 1993-1995, and 1999-2003; a Democrat-controlled state senate from Reconstruction to 2011, and a Democrat-controlled state house of representatives from Reconstruction to 2011.
Here’s a fuller list for Mississippi and Alabama (similar results are found in other southern states):
Mississippi:
Winner of Electoral College (US Presidential Election):
- 1876-1944: Democrats
- 1948: States Rights Democratic Party (Strom Thurmond, at the time a Democrat Senator)
- 1952-1956: Democrats
- 1960: Unpledged Democrat
- 1964: Republican (Barry Goldwater)
- 1968: American Independent Party (George Wallace)
- 1972: Republican (Nixon)
- 1976: Democrat (Carter)
- 1980-2012: Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, Romney)
- 1876-1992: Democrats
- 1992-2000: Republican
- 2000-2004: Democrat
- 2004-2016: Republicans
State Senate:
- Democrats held majority from Reconstruction until 2003
State House of Representatives:
- Democrats held majority from Reconstruction until 2011
US Congressional Delegation:
US Senate:
- Class I: Democrats from 1881-1989
- Class II: Democrats from 1877-1977
US House Delegation:
- 1885-1965: All seats held by Democrats
- 1965-1967: 4 Ds, 1 R
- 1967-1973: All seats held by Democrats
- 1973-1981: 3 D, 2 R
- 1981-1983: 4 D, 1 R
- 1983-1987: 3 D, 2 R
- 1987-1990: 4 D, 1 R
- 1990-1995: All Seats held by Democrats
- 1995-1997: 3 D, 2 R
- 1997-1999: 2 D, 3 R (the first time Rs had a majority of US Representatives from Mississippi)
- 1999-2003: 3 D, 2 R (Oh, that didn’t last long)
- 2003-2008: 2 D, 2 R (Mississippi lost one House seat in 2000 census)
- 2008-2011: 3 D, 1 R
- 2011-2015: 1 D, 3 R
- 2015-2017: 1 D, 2 R (One of the Rs died from cancer last week)
Alabama:
Winner of Electoral College (US Presidential Election)*
- 1876-1944: Democrats
- 1948: States Rights Democratic Party (Strom Thurmond, at the time a Democrat Senator)
- 1952-1956: Democrats
- 1960: Unpledged Democrat
- 1964: Republican (Barry Goldwater)
- 1968: American Independent Party (IE, George Wallace, a Democrat)
- 1972: Republican (Nixon)
- 1976: Democrat (Carter)
- 1980-2012: Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, Romney)
- 1874-1987: Democrats (including George Wallace’s three post-CRA terms, as well as his wife’s single term)
- 1987-1993: Republican
- 1993-1995: Democrat
- 1995-1999: Republican
- 1999-2003: Democrat
- 2003-2017: Republicans
State Senate:
- Democrats held the majority from Reconstruction to the 2010 election.
State House of Representatives:
- Democrats held the majority from Reconstruction to the 2010 election.
US Congressional Delegation
US Senate: Class II:
- 1871-1997: Democrats
- 1997- 2020: Republican (Jeff Sessions)
US Senate: Class III:
- 1879-1981: Democrats
- 1981-1987: Republican (Jeremiah Denton)
- 1987-1994: Democrat (Richard Shelby was elected first as a Democrat)
- 1994-2017: Republican (Shelby switched parties)
US House:
- 1877-1885: No Republicans in delegation
- 1885-1885: 7 D, 1 R (one R server from January to March of 1885)
- 1885-1890: No Republicans in delegation
- 1890-1891: 7 D, 1 R (An R served from June, 1890, to March, 1891)
- 1891-1896: No Republicans in Delegation
- 1896-1897: 5 D, 2 R, 2 P (Populist)
- 1897-1898: 7 D, 1 P
- 1898-1901: 8 D, 1 R
- 1901-1965: No Republicans in delegation
- 1965-1967: 2 D, 5R (Aha! After the 1964 Civil Rights act, the racist Democrats put Republicans in office.)
- 1967-1973: 5D, 3 R (…and then went right back to voting for a majority of Democrats in the Alabama delegation to the US House)
- 1973-1983: 4 D, 3 R (Alabama lost a House seat in 1970 census)
- 1983-1993: 5 D, 2 R
- 1993-1997: 4 D, 3 R
- 1997-2009: 2 D, 5 R
- 2009-2010: 3 D, 4R
- 2010-2011: 2 D, 5 R (A D switched to R)
- 2011-2017: 1 D, 6R
So there you have it. According to my liberal friend, racist Democrats were so upset about the Democratic Party abandoning its racist past and joining with the Republicans to pass civil rights legislation that they continued to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in their states for 30, 40, and 45 years — as well as for Democrats George Wallace and Jimmy Carter for president — before finally becoming Republicans.
But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
Edit: Originally I accidentally identified Clarence Thomas as the first black Supreme Court Justice, when of course that was Thurgood Marsall. Thanks, Klaatu, for pointing that out. For the record, Strom Thurmond voted against Marshall in 1967, after he became a Republican.
Published in General
I think one of the best books on why the Solid South stayed solid is Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon. Although the South excluded blacks from voting in the general, the Black vote was critical in the Republican primaries throughout Reconstruction and after, meaning that Republicans couldn’t ignore African American concerns, but saw Southern white concerns as electorally irrelevant. Given the ugliness of race relations, of which segregation was only a part, this meant a polarized electorate with a permanent, small, minority for the GOP. It meant general election county returns that often resembled modern African American returns from inner cities where those who have jobs have them in public sector unions; ie, 99-100%.
Republicans have never had that, and are unlikely ever to do so in the future.
Anyone here, or anyone in the world?
Look I don’t really disagree with you James, but playing devil’s advocate for a moment, here’s an electoral map from wikipedia:
If I said that Ike was wildly popular and won in a landslide, but the only states he lost were those in the old South where racist white voters opposed his stance on integration — well that would at least be a plausible narrative given this map, would it not?
If voters in the South preferred him to any previous Republican by large margins, and he was a more effective driver of integration than any Republican (perhaps than any President), then it seems hard to believe that the 1956 election was a single issue race election. I’m not saying that voters didn’t have a residual affection for the Democrats; almost all their congressional delegations were Democratic, in part because the dying end of the Wilson/ Klan Democrats of 30 years before still lived, albeit in smaller numbers, but the South still gave a majority of its votes to a Republican for the first time. That’s not the act of a demographic that is still (pre-1964) “Solid South” or of a demographic that’s particularly focused on race, an issue on which he’d loudly and repeatedly voiced his strong opposition to their views.
There were embers of it (the Dixiecrats has managed to pull together a non-trivial movement in ’48, and there’d be a handful of eccentric Southerners able to pull together a minor embarrassment in 1960), but the people supposedly obsessed by race still voted equally for JFK and for Nixon the cycle after, despite JFK being pretty openly unfriendly. It wasn’t completely dead, but most of the politicians from that era were gone, the rhetoric was gone, the Klan and the institutions were gone, even the New Deal had mostly gone as an issue and other issues had arisen (the Cold War, etc.)
There’s a “damned either way” trap in this civil rights -ism. Why can’t we declare a clean vote
Of our documented citizen peers a civil right? Can we be self determining if there is no “we”?
But chasing after spurious definitions only legitimizes their gains. Yet gains they remain. So playing on this level is the wrong answer.
Now contrast that with the 1964 election:
Johnson campaigns on the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater voted against the latter. Goldwater wins his home state and 5 states in the deep South.
Again the narrative that LBJ won a national landslide, losing only a handful of states where opposition to desegregation was greatest, is at least plausible. The fact that 4 out of 5 voted for Stevenson just 8 years earlier reinforces the narrative that these were single issue voters for whom the issue of desegregation trumped party loyalty.
Yeah but the whole country liked Ike, he was after all the hero of WWII, and a popular incumbent during a time of peace and economic growth. Stevenson couldn’t even win his home state of Illinois.
So why didn’t he carry all 48 states? And why were the 7 states he lost all in the South?
My Grandmother (born 1899) said she was over 30 years old before she discovered that there was any such thing as a Republican in Mississippi.
When she told me that she had not voted for Jimmy Carter, I expressed surprise. She said:
“Those Democrats have made a good Republican out of me!”
One of her chief things was the anti-war movement. She said that, all her life, Democrats talked a lot about how they were going to keep us out of war, but that it was always a Democrat who sent her men to war. Then it was Democrats who treated servicemen shamefully. That was only a part of her beef with the Dems, but it was the first thing she wanted for me to hear.
The South was a one-party state until the end of WWI. Republicans spent years trying to cobble together a coalition of middle-class whites and blacks that could beat back the old Southern Aristocracy. They couldn’t do it. The aristocracy controlled the government and the Democratic Party, and through those mechanisms, controlled all economic and social activity in the South. If you’ve seen the movie The Help, my father (born in Chattanooga, 1948) says it understates the extent to which non-conformers could be ostracized. No jobs, no friends. It was a third world country, with all the corruption and evils that implies.
Then the South, belatedly, starts to industrialize. It hits the rim South first, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, and suddenly there are jobs outside the old Aristocracy, and suddenly there’s a middle class in the South. And suddenly things like low taxes, free labor, and economic development (in other words, the GOP platform) start to sound pretty nice. Add to that the South’s long martial history, and the GOP’s gradual embrace of Anti-Communism, and the slide into the Republican party makes perfect sense.
The old aristocracy can no longer control the people -or even the elected officials. If you’ve seen the movie In the Heat of the Night, it is a Yankee factory owner’s widow –a Yankee woman -who brings the old leader of the town to his knees with the threat to take her husband’s business elsewhere. And he sits there, and he takes it. And he accepts a black detective’s addition to the police in his town. There are many other such stories in the literature that are real events, not dramatizations.
Some of the Democrats simply become de facto Republicans. Here in Kentucky, Hap Chandler becomes an economic development and good business politician -notably with his base in the West (coal country) and Bluegrass (Banks and Healthcare), and not in Louisville (industrial, unionized). “We have Republicans, they’re called Chandler Dems.” And while Hap Chandler might have had enough built up goodwill to stay in office, it didn’t transfer to his heirs -who are now out and replaced by Republicans (Andy Barr).
So let’s look at those mid-century elections. The states which industrialized first, the states where the machines lost power first, voted for Ike, a business minded main street Republican. 1964 can be explained by one word: “Daisy.” Even my dad still thinks Goldwater was a war crazy loon. I don’t know if anyone in the South knew about his views on civil rights -he co-sponsored the 1957 Act (which Johnson killed).
They claim to be anti-war, but in practice they are more anti-warrior.
It seems to me that there was a general social shift away from racism after World War II. Overt racism become socially unacceptable sometime around then. Maybe that was because of the horror of Nazism. I’m not sure, what caused it, but it was a bipartisan shift. It seems to me that the Democratic Party used racism to its electoral advantage for as long as it was an advantage, then when it was no longer an advantage, they dropped it and become the party of affirmative action. There may have been honest changes of heart, but I think the driving force for Democrats rejecting Jim Crow was political expediency.
I think you’re spot on.