Orange_Juice
Senior Member
- Jul 24, 2008
- 1,038
- 57
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A little history.
Use to be that the party of Lincoln was the party blacks voted for. Woodrow Wilson reinforced the Democrats anti-Black stance when he fired the White House's black staff and praised the racist movie Birth of a Nation. But that changed with the new deal. Many northern blacks started to vote for democrats because of social justice issues--blacks were not allowed to vote in most of the south. The Democtratic party began to divide over Civil Rights issues as the Conservative Southern Democrats looked on with horror as Northern Democrats and liberal Republicans began to stand up for the rights of blacks to live in freedom. FDR helped get fair employment practices in the northern factories, but it was his wife that really made a lot of noise on behalf of civil rights, drawing death threats and assassination attempts from angry whites in the KKK.
Harry Truman really began pushing the envelop when he decided to integrate the military. The South was furious and many southerners left their home--the Democratic party--and formed a racial party, the Dixiecrats, whose slogan was "Segregation Forever!" This white supremecist party actually won several southern states in the 1948 election, but Truman still won.
The next decade and a half were a time of flux for the parties, as Eisenhower showed Dixiecrats the Republicans couldn't be trusted either, but when LBJ signed the Civil Rights act and the Voting Rights act and the federal government began taking a direct role in registering blacks to vote and ensuring school integration Southern Democrats flocked out of the Democratic party to the Republicans.
Conservative politicians were able to use racially charged terms like "States Rights" and "Federal Intervention" to appeal to white southerners. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" is well known, as is the fact Ronald Reagan started his 1980 presidential run in Philidelphia, Mississippi with a big States Rights rally. Philidelphia was one of the places that had witnessed one of the worst murders by White Supremicists during the civil rights movement. Reagan knew what he was doing. The South basically has taken over the now Rump Republican party and turned it into, in many ways, the Dixiecrat party light. No wonder they are so hated, and so....well...White
Use to be that the party of Lincoln was the party blacks voted for. Woodrow Wilson reinforced the Democrats anti-Black stance when he fired the White House's black staff and praised the racist movie Birth of a Nation. But that changed with the new deal. Many northern blacks started to vote for democrats because of social justice issues--blacks were not allowed to vote in most of the south. The Democtratic party began to divide over Civil Rights issues as the Conservative Southern Democrats looked on with horror as Northern Democrats and liberal Republicans began to stand up for the rights of blacks to live in freedom. FDR helped get fair employment practices in the northern factories, but it was his wife that really made a lot of noise on behalf of civil rights, drawing death threats and assassination attempts from angry whites in the KKK.
Harry Truman really began pushing the envelop when he decided to integrate the military. The South was furious and many southerners left their home--the Democratic party--and formed a racial party, the Dixiecrats, whose slogan was "Segregation Forever!" This white supremecist party actually won several southern states in the 1948 election, but Truman still won.
The next decade and a half were a time of flux for the parties, as Eisenhower showed Dixiecrats the Republicans couldn't be trusted either, but when LBJ signed the Civil Rights act and the Voting Rights act and the federal government began taking a direct role in registering blacks to vote and ensuring school integration Southern Democrats flocked out of the Democratic party to the Republicans.
Conservative politicians were able to use racially charged terms like "States Rights" and "Federal Intervention" to appeal to white southerners. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" is well known, as is the fact Ronald Reagan started his 1980 presidential run in Philidelphia, Mississippi with a big States Rights rally. Philidelphia was one of the places that had witnessed one of the worst murders by White Supremicists during the civil rights movement. Reagan knew what he was doing. The South basically has taken over the now Rump Republican party and turned it into, in many ways, the Dixiecrat party light. No wonder they are so hated, and so....well...White