Over the past few months, you’ve likely been hearing videos from conservative content creators, many of them black, insisting that the Republican Party was the true home of black Americans and the Democrats were always the racists. Most notably, they’ve been saying that the Ku Klix Klan is the aegis of the Democratic Party and it hasn’t changed in all that time.
The charge is clearly
false, but not for the reasons most people think.
It’s true that the founders of
the Klan, a Christian nationalist organization founded in Tennessee in 1865 by
Confederate Civil War veterans, were registered Democrats — no surprise given
that the Republican Party was formed in 1854 and was expressively anti-slavery.
But it would be a stretch to say that the Republicans wanted to oppose slavery
to free blacks for their own sake — the party, funded by merchants who decided
that they couldn’t compete with slave labor, took that stance for economic, not
social-justice, reasons. And in fact, the opposition to slavery was originally
limited to its expansion; Abraham Lincoln tried to broker a compromise that
would mandate one free state admitted to the Union for every slave state, and
he also said, “If I can save the Union without freeing a single slave, I would
do it.”
(Indeed, the 1876 presidential
election put an end to the decade-long Reconstruction era, when Southern
electors threw the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes after he promised
to remove Federal troops from the South, which had the effect of selling out
the newly-freed slaves.)
Still, at that time most blacks
who could vote were registered as Republicans — until the 1920s, when many left
the party over President Harding’s refusal to support a federal anti-lynching
bill and President Coolidge became the only candidate not to condemn the
Klan. Blacks started leaning Democratic during the New Deal even though the
racial policies of that day limited benefits, though Eleanor Roosevelt became a
voice for civil rights, for the first time being seriously considered.
The split in the Democratic Party
began in 1948, when President Truman — a Democrat from former slave state Missouri
— issued an executive order integrating the Armed Forces. That caused many
Southern Democrats to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party, commonly known
as “Dixiecrats,” and Sen. Strom Thurmond to run for president against Truman. Then
you had the fights over desegregation in schools and public accommodations in
the 1950s.
And speaking of which, this is
where the modern conservative movement caught fire. The machinery, already
built with think tanks and media as a reaction to the New Deal by
industrialists sore at FDR, was jump-started with the Army-McCarthy hearings, during
which Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, accused the Army of
harboring communists, leading to a “Red Scare.” And that picked up in the
South, with civil-rights demonstrators being accused of such (in fairness,
small communist cells were operating in those days in Southern cities, which is
why Martin Luther King Jr. was forced to disavow any influence of communism
publicly).
But another factor largely
overlooked was the rise of libertarianism in the Republican Party in the West
and Southwest in the 1960s — and Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for president in
1964. Though never a racist, he had publicly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
passed by Congress and signed by President Johnson, on the grounds that it
overstepped the Constitution. (Goldwater, though crushed elsewhere, won the
electoral votes of five Southern states.) Suddenly, opposition to civil rights
for black Americans had justification — “big government.”
Two years later, another Western
Republican, Richard Nixon, who lost the race for president in 1960 plotted a
political comeback by unleashing what later became known as the “Southern Strategy”
by exploiting the divisions he already knew existed in the Democratic Party.
(Pat Buchanan, then an aide, gave the details in an excellent article, “The
Fall of Conservatism,” published in May 2008 in The New Yorker magazine.)
Slowly, white Southerners began migrating to the Republican Party, cemented with
fellow Western Republican Ronald Reagan.
But by this time overt racist
appeals had run their course, so Republicans started using “dog whistles” — “welfare,”
“crime,” “busing” etc. — to oppose civil rights. It was in that context that
Reagan used the phrase “welfare queens driving Cadillacs” when running for
president in 1976, and he got even more brazen when, in 1980, he gave a speech
near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil-rights workers were found murdered
in 1964, in favor of “states’ rights,” clearly a thumb in the eye to the civil-rights
movement, which led a Klan leader in Georgia named Bruce Wilkinson to endorse
Reagan, saying that “the Republican platform could have been written by a
Klansman.” (Reagan did reject the endorsement, to be sure.)
That, in a nutshell, is why labeling
the Democrats as the party of the Klan and other white supremacist groups is
obsolete. Yes, I’m aware of the late Klan recruiter Robert Byrd being feted by
fellow senators upon his death; however, he left the Klan in the 1950s;
repudiated it; apologized for joining; and, importantly, after white West
Virginians began migrating to the GOP, voted for civil-rights legislation.
Contrast that with Southern Republicans such as Bob Barr and Trent Lott attending
meetings of the Klan-adjacent Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known
as the White Citizens Council — which was arguably more influential than the
Klan because it wasn’t terrorist).
This thus represents a cowardly campaign
on the part of conservatives to run away from their own racism. And with the fear-mongering
that’s become endemic on the political right, especially with the Make America
Great Again and Christian Nationalist movements in serious trouble, I hope that
people hear the truth.
