Why Did Black Voters Flee The Republican Party In The 1960s?
"The data suggests that even as late as 1960, only about two-thirds of African-Americans were identified with the Democratic Party," he says. "Now, two-thirds is a pretty big number. But when you compare it to today, that number hovers at about 90 percent."
Ninety percent. So what happened?
Well, according to Hutchings and to Tufts University historian Peniel Joseph, Barry Goldwater happened.
"Barry Goldwater, for Republicans, becomes a metaphor for the Republican response for this revolution that's happening in the United States," Joseph says.
The "revolution" was Freedom Summer, the period 50 years ago when hundreds of college students, most of them white, had journeyed to Mississippi to help black Mississippians become registered voters. The state's response to that integrated movement had been swift — and violent. Less than a month before the GOP met for its national convention in San Francisco, organizers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney (who was African-American and Mississippi-born) and Michael Schwerner had been kidnapped on a dark back road in Neshoba County. The only hint that they'd existed was Schwerner's charred Ford station wagon.
The media attention that followed the men's disappearance roiled the entire South. (Their bodies would be found in early August, buried in the shallow earthen works of a dam.)
Then, two weeks after the men's disappearance and mere days before the GOP convention opened, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, making discrimination in public venues illegal.
Peniel Joseph says the events outside the GOP's convention hall affected what went on under its roof. Supporters of the presumed front-runner, liberal New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, were blindsided by the party's well-organized conservative wing, which nominated Arizona's Sen. Barry Goldwater. His nickname was "Mr. Conservative."
Goldwater can be seen as the godfather (or maybe the midwife) of the current Tea Party. He wanted the federal government out of the states' business. He believed the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional — although he said that once it had been enacted into law, it would be obeyed. But states, he said, should implement the law in their own time. Many white southerners, especially segregationists, felt reassured by Goldwater's words. Black Americans, says Vince Hutchings, felt anything but:
"African-Americans heard the message that was intended to be heard. Which was that Goldwater and the Goldwater wing of the Republican party were opposed not only to the Civil Rights Act, but to the civil rights movement, in large part, as well."
An Abrupt Exit From The GOP
When Goldwater, in his acceptance speech, famously told the ecstatic convention "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," he was speaking of "a very specific notion of liberty," says Peniel Joseph: "Small government, a government that doesn't give out handouts to black people. A government that doesn't have laws that interfere with states' rights. A government that is not conducting a war on poverty."
Fifty years ago, when the ultra-conservative wing of the GOP overthrew Republican moderates to choose Barry Goldwater as the party standard-bearer, black voters deserted the GOP in droves.
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And todays republican party is saying singing the same tune Goldwater did.
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