Crossposted from Dameocrat Blog! Bob Herbert makes some very interesting observations on GOP chairman Ken Mehlman’s apology for the “Southern Strategy”. This is more extensively linked on my blog. I can’t figure out how to use html here, without getting errors.
The Southern strategy meant much, much more than some members of the G.O.P. simply giving up on African-American votes. Put into play by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the mid- to late 1960’s, it fed like a starving beast on the resentment of whites who were scornful of blacks and furious about the demise of segregation and other civil rights advances. The idea was to snatch the white racist vote away from the Democratic Party, which had committed such unpardonable sins as enacting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and enforcing desegregation statutes………………..
The important thing to keep in mind was how deliberate and pernicious the strategy was. Last month a jury in Philadelphia, Miss., convicted an 80-year-old man, Edgar Ray Killen, of manslaughter in the slaying of three civil rights workers – Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney – in the summer of 1964. It was a crime that made much of the nation tremble, and revolted anyone with a true sense of justice…..
So what did Ronald Reagan do in his first run for the presidency, 16 years after the murder, in the summer of 1980? He chose the site of the murders, Philadelphia, Miss., as the perfect place to send an important symbolic message. Mr. Reagan kicked off his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, an annual gathering that was famous for its diatribes by segregationist politicians. His message: “I believe in states’ rights.”…..
And in both of Mr. Bush’s presidential campaigns, his supporters, especially his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, have gone out of their way to prevent or discourage blacks from voting. In a particularly vile episode last year, Florida state troopers conducted a criminal investigation that zeroed in on black voter turnout efforts in Orlando. A number of people were indicted, including the mayor, Buddy Dyer, a Democrat who was then suspended from office…..
The “Southern Strategy” is a GOP effort began in the 1960s by Republican politicians like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, to try and attract disaffected whites to the Republican party, by taking advantage of their anger and the “Civil Rights” movement. It was largely successful in the South. The South was known as the Solid South because it voted Democratic all in lockstep every Presidential election from the Reconstruction onward. This was largely because of a reactionary pro-Segregation Wing of Democrats known formally as the Dixiecrats.
Senator Strom Thurmond, challenged the Presidential candidacy of Harry Truman as a Dixiecrat in 1948. He ran under the banner “Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!” He also used the n-word many times in his speeches.
Later it turned out Thurmond had fathered a black child, as a teenager in the 1920s. The amnesiac press failed to make note of this in his obituaries. He had lead one of the longest filibusters in Senate history to prevent the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957″. In the 1960s he resigned from the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans in protest of Lyndon Johnson’s support of “The Civil Rights Act of 1964”. This is when. Goldwater and Nixon started openly courting the Dixiecrats, and it has been a Republican tradition up to this very day. Now it is the Solid South because it votes Republican. This is largely because of the “Southern Strategy”
