The GOP Hasn’t Been A Champion of Civil Rights For Decades
by
John J. Dunphy
Conservatives take great pride in boasting that their beloved Republican Party has an unbroken record of supporting civil rights, while the Democrats created the Ku Klux Klan and, therefore, couldn’t possibly have done anything to advance racial justice. They’ve learned this distorted view of American history from Fox News, right-wing blogs and web sites as well as from conservative “authors” of political diatribes masquerading as books. Here are the REAL facts.
The 19th-century Democratic Party had a southern power base and was indeed the party of choice for slave-holders and northern slavery sympathizers. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 to oppose the extension of slavery into new territories — not to abolish slavery as many contemporary Republicans claim, although the party contained an abolitionist element.
The GOP indeed supported the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. After the Civil War, the Democratic party in the South was the party of white supremacy and indeed founded the KKK. Northern Democrats showed little interest in championing the cause of civil rights. The post-Civil War Republican Party was no longer the ardent champion of American blacks that it had once been, but the hardcore racists were generally Democrats.
During the New Deal of the 1930s, some northern Democrats began championing civil rights and openly opposed the Southern racist Democrats. In 1964, a major realignment occurred. President Lyndon B. Johnson and a liberal Democrat-liberal Republican coalition in Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which alienated many Southern Democrats.
Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential candidate, opposed the act — and the Deep South went Republican in the general election. Senator Strom Thurmond, a long-time South Carolina Democratic racist who had run for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform, became a Republican!
Richard Nixon in 1968 adopted an anti-civil rights “Southern Strategy” with Thurmond’s help. In the presidential election, Nixon and George Wallace carried the ENTIRE South, except for one state. In 1980 the GOP ran Ronald Reagan for president, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and ran for CA governor in 1966 on a platform that opposed open housing. While campaigning in Mississippi, Reagan made a speech near the location where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 to announce that he supported “states’ rights,” a code term for opposition to civil rights. Southern racists got the message and Reagan carried the entire South, with the sole exception of Carter’s home state of Georgia.
In summation, the Republican Party long ago abandoned its championing of civil rights in exchange for the votes of southern racists, while the Democratic Party, once a bastion of white supremacy, now strongly supports civil rights and is the party of choice for people of color. I don’t expect any conservatives to stop parroting the party line that the GOP has an unbroken history of supporting civil rights — can anyone say “cognitive dissonance”? — but at least those of you with functioning minds now know the truth.
John J. Dunphy is the author of Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois, Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials: The Investigative Work of the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group, 1945–1947 and other works of non-fiction.