Even though he disagreed with the main point of my recent column about Medicaid cutbacks, I enjoyed reading Joseph Boggess’ Letter to the Editor because he reminded us that the Democratic Party once was even more inclined toward racism than the Republican Party is today.
It wasn’t a point I had intended to emphasize, but it never hurts to be reminded that things can evolve over time, even to the point where they become the opposite of what they once were. Being “Slim” Smith, I know this from personal experience.
In my column I made reference to former Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson’s crude comments about Black poverty in the Delta in 1967. Boggess noted something I had not intended to stress – that Johnson was a Democrat.
In making that distinction, Mr. Boggess provides a great opportunity to trace the ideological journeys of the two parties.
The Democratic Party, founded about 30 years before the Republican Party (1854), became the pro-slavery party before the Civil War and the party of Jim Crow, racial terrorism and opposition to civil rights after the war. The Republican Party was founded by radical Northerners to abolish slavery, then after the War, help former slaves find their footing during the Reconstruction period.
So, yes, on the subject of race Republicans were the good guys and Democrats were the bad guys. That much is historically accurate.
Some people just assume that time stood still and the two parties’ ideologies were forever frozen in place.
But both parties began to shift.
For the Republican Party, the first big transition came with the Tilden-Hayes Compromise when the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction in exchange for the Democrats giving the White House to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, whose presidential race with Democrat Samuel Tilden had ended in a virtually a tie.
From that point on, the Republicans were the pro-business party, leaving behind its historical support of Black Americans.
In the 1930s, the Democratic Party began to reach out to long-ignored Black citizens when FDR’s New Deal legislation included aid to Black citizens as well as white citizens during the Depression.
FDR was the fault line as competing ideologies fought for control of the Democratic Party.
The 1948 and 1964 elections proved that racial animus among Southern States could be a political winner. In 1948, segregationist Strom Thurmond, running a third-party campaign, won four states in the presidential election, including Mississippi.
Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, voted against the Civil Rights Act and although he lost in a landslide, Republican strategists took note that he won five Southern states, again including Mississippi. The two elections helped Republicans realize they could win white votes by stoking racial resentment.
The Civil Rights Movement solidified both parties’ positions on race.
When Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he reportedly said, “We have lost the South for a generation.”
He wasn’t wrong. The passage of these laws fractured the Democratic Party, alienating many Southern whites who had relied on segregation as a social order.
The Republican Party saw an opening – a pathway to political dominance not through expanding civil rights, but through exploiting racial backlash that had reached a fever pitch in the South with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling abolishing segregation.
Thus was born the Southern Strategy — and the true transformation of the Republican Party.
The Southern Strategy wasn’t theoretical. It was explicit, tactical, and racist.
Reagan’s rise marked the triumphant completion of the Southern Strategy. He famously launched his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered. There, he preached about “states’ rights” and leaned into racialized cultural tropes (coining the phrase Welfare Queens) all while claiming colorblindness. He knew how to say racist things without sounding racist.
The GOP was no longer the party of Lincoln. It was now the party of Southern resentment, racial grievance, and coded language — and remains so until this day.
The swap of ideology was complete. The fact that Paul Johnson was a Democrat in 1967 is no more relevant to party ideology today than my weight in 1977 is to my current condition.
So in the end, it really doesn’t matter if you call it Republican, Democrat or, for that matter, Uncle Bob. Because the one thing that has always been true about racism is that it has always found a home in the conservative party, whether it was the Democrats of the Jim Crow era in the first half of the 20th Century or the Republicans of today’s New Jim Crow.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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