“Pawns in a White Man’s Political Game”

The political seduction of black America, part 1

“PAWNS IN A WHITE MAN’S POLITICAL GAME”

The political seduction of black America, part 1

Glenn McNair

Editors’ note: This is the first part of a two-part essay. The second part is here.

Introduction

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered the commencement address at Howard University. His speech, “To Fulfill These Rights,” was more than a commemoration of the graduation of the Class of 1965—it was also Johnson’s diagnosis of what ailed Black America and his plans for healing it. Johnson said, “In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.” A “devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice,” had left blacks “trapped—in inherited, gateless poverty.” Johnson described the historic importance and power of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the soon-to-be-enacted Voting Rights Act of 1965. This legislation gave blacks the right to “vote, to enter public space, to go to school” and to “be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.” But in perhaps the most important part of the speech, Johnson said that this civic freedom was not enough: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, ‘Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

The nation had a responsibility to right the wrongs it had perpetrated against blacks and giving them formal equality was inadequate to the task. In Johnson’s words, “We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”[i] Johnson promised black America that the federal government would bring about the reality of equality through the programs of the Great Society. With that promise Johnson seduced blacks into changing their historic view of the federal government’s role in racial uplift. Blacks were receptive to Johnson’s message of racial empowerment through government action because they had come to agree with him that legal equality alone could not undo centuries of oppression.

From 1865 to 1965, blacks had looked to the federal government to stop state governments from enacting racially repressive legislation; major civil rights groups had sought to end segregation and discrimination in employment, education, and the exercise of civil rights. What blacks had not wanted the federal government to do—in the main—was correct historic wrongs and make them the socioeconomic equals of whites. With the oppressive hand of state government removed blacks would improve their own lives. This attitude regarding the government’s role in black life changed with the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the promises of Johnson’s Great Society. From welfare programs to affirmative action, from guaranteed incomes and reparations to land and full-employment initiatives, blacks and their leaders came to look increasingly to the federal government to make them whole.

This new black posture led to a white backlash against civil rights and a realignment of the American political system, out of which the Republican Party emerged as the majority party for most of the remainder of the century. Republicans would pursue a conservative agenda on racial issues, attempting to limit government involvement to the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, and they would attempt to ensure equality of opportunity—not equality of results. The party would also use race cynically at various moments to improve its political fortunes. The overwhelming majority of white Americans shared the Republicans’ view of the role of government in racial matters. Blacks would continue to insist on activist government and cast their lot with a Democratic Party that was out of touch with the American public and initially powerless to use government to fulfill Johnson’s promises and black expectations; later, it would lack a commitment to doing so. Indeed, when in power the Democrats courted white America with their own form of racial conservatism and opportunistic racial politics while trying to retain black support through symbolic gestures. Even when led by the nation’s first African American president, the Democratic Party proved to be unable and unwilling to produce socioeconomic equality.

In 1962, James Meredith enrolled at the all-White University of Mississippi behind the rifles and bayonets of federal troops sent in by President John F. Kennedy. To white liberals, and much of the black public, this made Kennedy a hero; to white Southerners he was the most despotic president since Abraham Lincoln. He was in fact neither: he had conspired with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett to stage the desegregation in a way that would make both look good to their respective constituencies. The performance failed when white Ole Miss students—not in on the production—decided to riot. A white Northern liberal and a white Southern segregationist had colluded to advance their political interests at the expense of blacks. When blacks got wind of the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Kennedy and Barnett, they felt, according to the journalist T. George Harris, “like pawns in a white man’s political game.”[ii] In the six decades since Ole Miss, the two political parties have continued to use blacks and race issues as pawns in their political games.

Prior to the New Deal, blacks had sought fairness and equality before the law and the ability to exercise fully their Constitutional rights. Blacks did not expect the government to improve their economic circumstances or heal them after centuries of slavery, segregation, and racial subjugation. Blacks had benefited from Franklin Roosevelt’s economic programs and some leaders and groups had begun to agitate for government aid, but overall, the emphasis remained on civil rights and equal treatment through the mid-1960s. After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks, especially those in the North, persuaded themselves that there were structural limitations to what desegregation and anti-discrimination laws could accomplish. Poverty, economic inequality, and unemployment—issues of class—came to be seen as more important in shaping the material conditions of black life than issues of discrimination or caste.[iii]

The rise of government intervention

By 1967, even Martin Luther King Jr. had come to believe that civil rights laws alone would not elevate blacks to socioeconomic equality with whites: poverty was the central issue. “The Negro still lives in the basement of the Great Society…. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted…. In consequence, Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascend by using their own resources.” King argued that America had come to “realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will,” and that “no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.” To end this structural poverty the nation had to “create full employment” or “create incomes.” For the hardcore unemployable, “new forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised.”

In King’s view, poverty and other major social problems were linked, and the government had to solve them holistically. “We are likely to find that the problem of housing, education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.” As a wealthy nation America could do away with poverty if it had the focus and will, but not without cost. “Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.”[iv] While they would continue to fight for civic equality and use the traditional rhetoric of civil rights, for King and other black leaders the civil rights struggle had become a fight for economic empowerment and equality, a racialized class struggle.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society “War on Poverty” included the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA). The EOA created the Office of Economic Opportunity, which would oversee a wide range of federally funded local anti-poverty programs. The Great Society also established Medicaid and Medicare, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA, an urban Peace Corps), the Model Cities program for inner-city redevelopment, as well as aid to education, rent supplements for the poor, the food stamp program, and funds for the rebuilding of urban transportation networks. The budget for the program was $1 billion in its first year and $2 billion a year for the following two years. All the major civil rights groups, including the increasingly militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), supported the Great Society and wanted to see it expanded. Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, believed that the Great Society’s $2 billion was not nearly enough to end poverty in America; $50 billion would be needed to do that. For other civil rights leaders, even Young’s $50 billion was not enough to solve the economic problems of black America.[v]

In October 1966, A. Philip Randolph announced the Freedom Budget, a federal spending plan calling for full employment, a guaranteed annual income for the unemployed, adequate health care, an end to slums, and the rebuilding of the nation’s transportation systems. Implementing the Freedom Budget would cost $185 billion dollars over ten years. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), SNCC, and CORE all signed off on the budget. The Freedom Budget represented the first time that the Civil Rights Movement itself advanced a comprehensive economic reform package, and represented a consensus among civil rights groups on the new priorities of the movement.[vi]

In February 1967, Lyndon Johnson met with a group of Freedom Budget sponsors; it was the first opportunity for civil rights leaders to discuss the initiative with the president. Johnson addressed traditional civil rights issues—voting, fair housing, civil rights enforcement—and the Great Society. Regarding the new redistributionist black agenda, the president said some leaders were asking for more than they could reasonably expect. The assembled black leaders did not bring up the Freedom Budget because it was clear the president would not have been receptive, since its cost dwarfed even the expansive Great Society. Backers could not find support for the budget on Capitol Hill and it was never implemented.[vii]

Even the most militant black groups found no ideological inconsistency between championing black nationalism and fighting for more black political power and receiving government aid. In its ten-point platform, the Black Panther Party “demanded” government-provided full employment for blacks: “We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income.” The government owed black people reparations in the form of the “overdue debt of forty acres and two mules.” Blacks would take payment in “currency which will be distributed to our many communities.” Point three of the platform called for “decent housing, fit shelter for human beings.” If white landlords failed to provide this decent housing, then “the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government-aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.” The Black Panthers wanted “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.”[viii] Government was responsible for providing the land, bread, housing, and clothing, at a bare minimum.

The black-separatist Republic of New Africa (RNA) hoped to build an independent nation encompassing Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. This black “homeland” would be governed by the Tanzanian political philosophy of Ujamaa, which emphasized the concepts of egalitarian and communitarian “familyhood” supposedly practiced in traditional African societies. To bring about this just, communal society the RNA turned to the federal government. In its 1972 “Anti-Depression Program,” the RNA asked that Congress pass legislation “authorizing the peaceful cession of land and sovereignty to the Republic of New Africa in areas where blacks vote for independence.” Congress should also pay “three hundred billion dollars ($300,000,000,000) in reparation for slavery and unjust war against the Black Nation to the Republic of New Africa.”[ix] Congress, not surprisingly, denied these requests. Blacks from across the political and ideological spectrum wanted government to expend billions to improve their condition.

The change in demands from formal equality and citizenship to a redistribution of the nation’s wealth in the name of racial economic justice led to an immediate and severe backlash from whites. While a 5-to-1 margin of blacks supported the anti-poverty programs of the Great Society, a 5-to-4 majority of whites opposed them. Seventy percent of poor whites disapproved of the program because they concluded that they would not benefit because they were not black. By late 1966, eighty-five percent of whites believed the Civil Rights Movement was moving too fast, up from the 49 percent who felt this way in 1965 and 34 percent in 1964. More than 80 percent of whites thought that civil rights protests were hurting the black cause, creating a negative image of blacks in the national imagination. A white housewife in Joliet, Illinois, said, “When I see on TV these demonstrations it makes me think of them as savages.” Another young white woman in Galveston, Texas, described civil rights activists as “a bunch of nuts—yelling because they have nothing better to do.”[x]

The rise of Black Power militancy, with its violent rhetoric and occasionally violent actions, frightened and alienated whites. The urban riots that began in the summer of 1964 created the impression that blacks were an unstable population that wanted “something for nothing.” The riots made 57 percent of whites in cities fear for their personal safety on the streets; half of the white population outside cities felt this way. Whites began to question the black movement and its goals. This withdrawal of white support led to increasing black frustration and an escalating spiral of interracial distrust and recrimination.[xi]

As blacks became more insistent on government intervention and structural changes in the political economy, lower middle-class whites came to see these demands as threats to their way of life. Integration endangered white ethnics’ control of labor markets, unions, the civil service, and municipal politics. Working-class whites in high-tax states viewed tax increases to support welfare programs as attacks on their pocketbooks and status. Busing heightened fears about the safety and futures of white children, and affirmative action and quotas reduced the numbers of jobs that had always been the preserve of whites. For large segments of white America these priorities constituted “reverse discrimination.”[xii] Blacks and whites had different perspectives on what the government should do to achieve racial and social justice, and these conflicting worldviews manifested themselves in a radical change in the political landscape.

Race and presidential politics: a brief history

From FDR to Truman

The Democratic coalition crafted by Franklin Roosevelt consisted of white Southerners, urban ethnic and religious minorities, blacks, labor unionists, and Western farmers and ranchers. This combination of constituencies gave the party a split personality. The Southern-Western wing was conservative and committed to limited government and local control. Coalition members from the South and West envisioned a racially and culturally homogeneous world where theirs were the dominant values. Blacks, labor unionists, and the ethnic minorities were much more liberal, even social democratic, in their orientation, and therefore favored more activist government. Given these two different perspectives on the role of government, there were always tensions within the coalition; the racial, religious, and cultural heterogeneity of the party added to these tensions. Collapse was inevitable.[xiii]

Blacks joined the New Deal coalition because of the economic benefits Roosevelt’s programs provided; civil rights and racial justice were not initially major issues for the Democratic Party. This changed in 1948 when the Democrats adopted a strong civil rights platform at its national convention. Harry Truman needed black support in his tight presidential race against Henry Wallace and Thomas Dewey. Taking this strong stance led to the revolt of the Southern segregationist Dixiecrats under the leadership of Strom Thurmond. From this moment on race and civil rights would be volatile issues within the party.[xiv]

From JFK to LBJ

Civil rights agitation reached its peak in 1963, the last year of John Kennedy’s administration. Kennedy had spent the early years of his presidency trying to retain the votes of Northern blacks while not losing the support of white Southerners or alienating powerful Southern Democrats in Congress. But Martin Luther King’s mass protest in Birmingham and the televised violence associated with it compelled Kennedy to act. He proposed a comprehensive civil rights bill and sent it to Congress. The bill threatened to unravel the Democratic Party’s fragile coalition. If it passed, the party would probably lose the South, and the ethnic and religious minorities of the North had little sympathy for civil rights. On the other hand, the bill would solidify the support of blacks and Northern liberals.[xv]

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson shepherded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress and won the 1964 presidential election in a landslide, but that did not mean America shared his goals and values on social and racial issues; Johnson believed his public support was broad, but not deep. Ominously for the Democratic Party and Johnson’s social agenda, five Deep South states had cast their ballots for Johnson’s conservative Republican opponent Barry Goldwater, a staunch opponent of the Civil Rights Act. Race was the fault line within the Democratic Party and Johnson’s strong stance on civil and voting rights exposed it.[xvi]

The increasing assertiveness of women and anti-Vietnam War protesters added to the growing instability of the Democratic coalition. After the mid-1960s it began to splinter into traditional, reactionary, and left-liberal wings. Divisive social issues like school prayer, abortion, crime, and civil rights increasingly replaced the bread-and-butter economic issues that had been the core concerns of the Democratic Party, and—from the vantage point of most white Americans—the Democrats were on the wrong side of these issues. Whites believed that the Democratic Party was advancing the interests of blacks at the expense of whites.[xvii]

George Wallace’s candidacy

All the tensions within the nation and the Democratic Party played themselves out during the 1968 presidential election. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey represented the Democrats after Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race because of his inability to heal the national divisions over race and war. The resurrected Richard Nixon was the Republican nominee. The wildcard in the race was independent candidate George Wallace, the racist, segregationist governor of Alabama. Wallace had run for president in 1964 as a Democrat and made a surprisingly strong showing outside the South. He appealed to white ethnics in northern and midwestern cities, largely because they were on the frontlines of urban transformation. It was into their neighborhoods that blacks spread as they migrated out of ghettos, and it would be their children who would be bused into ghettos to produce integration. These whites felt as if they were victims of the social engineering of faraway upper middle-class white liberals who wanted to act on their principles at the expense of the white working-class. This liberal elite despised Wallace, so he was a hero to ethnic workers.

Wallace also benefited from urban rioting, increasingly disruptive anti-war protests, and the general feeling among whites that traditional values were under assault by the counterculture. Wallace knew that significant numbers of Americans hated civil rights protesters and felt that radicals were systematically undermining the traditional pillars of America society—God, family, and patriotism. This was evidenced by increasing crime rates, legalization of abortion, and the rise in out-of-wedlock births. Wallace played on these fears in his opposition to civil rights and anti-war protests, busing, taxes, and in his support for prayer in schools. In 1964, he had won from 35 to 45 percent of the vote in Democratic blue-collar precincts in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Baltimore, and thus demonstrated the political potential of anti-black anger and resentment. Wallace was the first national politician to take advantage of the white backlash against civil rights, but he would not be the last.[xviii]

Nixon’s first term

Vietnam affected nearly every American institution but it would not be the defining issue in the 1968 election because Nixon and Humphrey were fairly close in their positions on the war. Race and “law and order” would be the key issues. Rioting had caused most Americans to doubt the Great Society and the pace of civil rights. Americans were tired of forking over tax dollars to black criminals and rioters and being blamed for their problems. Democratic mayors complained that the taxes collected from their constituents produced nothing but urban violence. Congress launched an inquiry to determine whether individuals involved in Great Society programs participated in the riots. The Kerner Commission concluded that white racism created the poverty and ghetto conditions that produced the riots. Lyndon Johnson and white Americans rejected this conclusion. They would not be held responsible for the misbehavior of blacks.[xix] The candidate best qualified to slow down civil rights and anti-war protest, muzzle black militants, and end urban violence—restoring “law and order”—would be the next president.

In the Republican primaries, Nixon had to compete against California Governor Ronald Reagan for the backlash vote. Reagan had opposed civil rights and championed “law and order” for years. Nixon could defeat Reagan by reaching out to white Southern Republicans. In trips to the South, he promised to oppose busing, put the brakes on school integration, and appoint conservatives to the federal bench. At the Republican convention he met with delegates from six Southern states and pledged to attack busing, federal involvement in open housing, and Southern racial matters generally. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” worked and he secured the nomination. To better appeal to white backlash voters in the general election, Nixon chose Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his vice-president. Agnew had come to national prominence because of his forceful response to riots in Maryland. He was also the first Greek American nominated by a major party for high office and the first Southerner to be included on a national Republican ticket since Reconstruction. As a Greek and “law and order” Southerner, Agnew would appeal to all the groups supporting Wallace, white Southerners and Northern working-class ethnic whites.[xx]

Nixon was perfectly positioned to take advantage of “law and order” as an issue. He could argue that Wallace was too extreme, and that Humphrey was not strong enough. He presented himself as the moderate alternative while sending Agnew out to provide the red meat rhetoric to potential Wallace voters. Humphrey tried to present himself as a “law and order” candidate by playing up his offensive against organized crime as mayor of Minneapolis in the 1940s. This tactic failed because the analogy between urban rioting and the Mafia seemed absurd to most people. Moreover, it would be difficult for any Democrat to campaign as a “law and order” candidate after the violent disorder of their national convention in Chicago. Humphrey also alienated the white public on the issue by arguing for more police training, implying that the riots might have somehow been the fault of law enforcement. He was also sympathetic to the idea that poverty and racism caused the riots, a thesis anathema to most white voters. Finally, since blacks interpreted the phrase “law and order” as code for “anti-black,” Humphrey could not press the issue too far.[xxi]

Wallace did not have to concoct a new “law and order” strategy to appeal to disaffected white voters; he simply continued the attacks on blacks, anti-war protesters, and the counterculture he had begun in 1964—although he toned down his explicitly racist rhetoric. He drew most of his support in 1968 from white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, outdrawing Humphrey and Nixon in this demographic three weeks before the election. Wallace voters were also most prevalent in white urban districts abutting black neighborhoods, those whites who felt they had the most to lose from black migration and empowerment.[xxii]

Initially, Humphrey ignored Wallace because he thought the Alabamian would indirectly help him by hurting Nixon; however, as the campaign progressed it became clear that union members and urban ethnic whites, key components of the Democratic base, were moving toward Wallace. Humphrey had to fight back and so launched a massive appeal to unions and labeled Wallace a racist. Nixon knew that Northern Wallace voters favored him over Humphrey by a small margin, but 80 percent of Wallace voters in the South preferred him to Humphrey. With Wallace out of the race, he would pick up the white backlash vote in both regions. Nixon went on the offensive, but not by branding Wallace a racist or opposing his positions on racial issues; instead, he argued that Wallace was intemperate, crude, unpresidential, and unlikely to restore domestic peace. The joint attacks by Nixon and Humphrey proved effective: by October the number of Americans who believed Wallace was a racist went from 40 to 67 percent and those who thought he would restore law and order dropped from 53 to 21 percent.[xxiii]

When the votes were tallied Nixon had narrowly defeated Humphrey—but Wallace had taken five Deep South states and amassed forty million votes. But Nixon’s slim margin of victory concealed the consensus that had emerged around issues of race and civil rights. Sixty percent of Americans, and an even higher percentage of whites, had voted for a racist or someone who had exploited race for political gain. Nixon won with less than 12 percent of the black vote. (In contrast, he had collected 32 percent of the Black vote in his 1960 presidential bid.) Republicans found that they could win by ignoring blacks, and they would never again seriously reach out to black voters in a national election. The Republicans would also win the white vote in every presidential election to the present day. The two major parties had diverged over race; the Republican Party was now the party of whites and the Democratic Party the party of blacks.[xxiv]

Nixon’s second term

Racial issues—this time affirmative action and busing—were at center stage in the 1972 presidential election, which pit incumbent Republican Richard Nixon against Democrats George McGovern and George Wallace. In 1971, Wallace had decided to run as a Democrat rather than under the auspices of his American Independent Party because he hoped to draw in all the disaffected and conservative elements in the Democratic Party, splitting it and securing his nomination. Wallace won 42 percent of the vote in the Florida primary and finished second to Hubert Humphrey in Pennsylvania and Indiana, despite Humphrey outspending him eight-to-one. By mid-May 1972, Wallace had garnered 3.3 million votes to 2.5 million for Humphrey, and 2.1 million for George McGovern. Wallace was upending the Democratic Party with his jeremiads against anti-war demonstrations, abortion, busing, rising crime rates, and opposition to religion in schools. His run for the White House came to a sudden and tragic end on May 15 when Arthur Bremer, a psychopathic loner, shot and paralyzed him.[xxv]

Many whites boycotted the 1972 Democratic convention, but there were more blacks and Hispanics in attendance than at any political convention in American history. Party rules redrawn in 1968 granted proportional delegate representation to minorities, giving blacks unprecedented power. Before the convention the Congressional Black Caucus introduced a nonnegotiable list of demands that included full employment, a guaranteed national income of $6,500 per year, national health care, an urban homestead act, a proportional share of cabinet posts by race, a racial set-aside of 15 percent in all federal contracts, and home rule for the District of Columbia. Blacks insisted on a commitment to these initiatives from putative Democratic nominee McGovern. Fearing the loss of black delegates, McGovern agreed to support busing, a guaranteed income, and black proportional representation in all federal jobs. McGovern’s acquiescence to black demands fractured the party: when the convention ended blacks were the only major group to support McGovern.[xxvi]

In 1968, Nixon had campaigned as the candidate who would bring the nation together; in 1972, he played on the nation’s divisions to remain in office, campaigning against busing, affirmative action, welfare, and by presenting the Democratic Party as out of touch with mainstream American values. Polling revealed that 75 percent of Americans opposed busing, while 75 percent favored integration. Nixon delivered a nationally televised address condemning busing, while strongly supporting the idea of integration. The public response to Nixon’s approach was overwhelmingly positive. McGovern, on the other hand, was in a no-win situation. If he opposed busing, he risked losing the support of blacks, and if supported it he would lose white Southerners, urban ethnic whites, union members, and suburbanites. Even if he came out strongly in favor of busing, the issue would not ignite blacks and bring them to the polls because they were in fact conflicted about busing. To avoid the possibility of alienating the single constituency in his corner, blacks, McGovern continued to endorse busing.[xxvii]

The 1972 election was the first in which affirmative action was a major issue. Like busing, affirmative action (especially programs that relied on numerical quotas) produced a racial and ethnic backlash. Union members rejected affirmative action and quotas because they threatened to undermine employee seniority systems, and quotas at the Democratic convention had cost union delegates—stalwarts of the New Deal coalition—to lose positions and influence. As a result, the AFL-CIO did not endorse McGovern, the first time in decades that the union had not backed a Democrat. The most surprising opposition came from Jews, who had traditionally allied themselves with blacks. For Jews, racial quotas smacked of the kinds of quotas that had historically been used against them in education and employment. Again, McGovern was backed into a corner: having already supported proportional representation in federal employment, he could not very well come out against affirmative action. Nixon again crafted a nuanced position on both sides of the issue, coming out strongly against quotas while supporting the vague idea of affirmative action.[xxviii]

Nixon once more reached out to white Southerners. He promised less vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws and defended two rejected Southern nominees for the Supreme Court, arguing their defeat was a manifestation of anti-Southern bias in Congress. He championed a strong national defense and traditional values on social issues. When Nixon visited Atlanta, he drew the second largest crowd in the city’s history. He need not have worked so hard. McGovern was anathema in the South; many top Democrats threw their support behind Nixon and others refused to appear with McGovern and said they would not vote for him. Nixon carried 75 percent of the white vote in the Upper South and 86 percent in the Deep South.[xxix]

Nixon won the election in one of the largest landslides in the nation’s history. The electoral votes of every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia went to him; McGovern even lost his home state of South Dakota.[xxx] In The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969, the Republican strategist Kevin Phillips had argued that growing black political power and influence within the Democratic Party would drive out its more conservative elements, especially in the South. In a two-party election these disaffected elements, which would also include significant numbers of northern and midwestern ethnic whites and blue-collar workers, would go to the Republican Party. Phillips urged Republicans to facilitate this exodus by supporting black voter registration and participation. He also counseled the party to play up its conservatism. Renegade Democratic voters would combine with growing conservative elements in the expanding suburbs, especially in the Southwest and California, to give the Republicans an Electoral College majority for the foreseeable future. Republicans could win without the black vote and Democrats would be left with blacks and liberals in the Northeast as their only reliable constituencies.[xxxi] Phillips’s prophesy became reality in 1972, and Republicans would dominate presidential politics through 2008, in large part because the party’s positions on race.

To be continued! Part 2 of this essay drops next week.

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Glenn McNair is a professor of history and director of African Diaspora Studies at Kenyon College. He is also the author of Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System and is also the Dr. William T. Moore Distinguished Editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Prior to entering academia, he served as a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, and a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. He wrote “The Black Panthers Were Not Revolutionaries” for the Journal of Free Black Thought.

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[i] Lyndon B. Johnson, “To Fulfill These Rights,” in Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents (Bedford Books, 1995), 201–7.

[ii] Martin Luther King, Jr., “It’s a Difficult Thing to Teach a President,” Look, November 17, 1964, 61–62, cited in James N. Giglio, and Stephen G. Rabe, Debating the Kennedy Presidency (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2003), 192.

[iii] Alonzo L. Hamby, “The Democratic Moment: From FDR to LBJ,” in Democrats and the American Idea, ed. Peter B. Kovler (Washington, DC: Center for National Policy Press, 1992), 268; Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the “Silent Majority”,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, eds. Steve Fraser, and Gary Gerstle (Princeton University Press, 1989), 254.

[iv] Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here?” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, ed. Clayborne Carson, and Kris Shepard (Warner Books, 2001), 181, 187–89.

[v] Dona Cooper Hamilton, and Charles V. Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 155, 158–60.

[vi] Hamilton and Hamilton, The Dual Agenda, 147–49.

[vii] Hamilton and Hamilton, The Dual Agenda, 156–57.

[viii] Hamilton and Hamilton, The Dual Agenda , 173; Alexander Bloom, and Wini Breines, eds. Takin’ it to the Streets: A Sixties Reader (Oxford University Press, 2003), 125–27.

[ix] The Republic of New Africa. 1972. Anti-Depression Program of the Republic of New Africa--to End Poverty, Dependence, Cultural Malnutrition, and Crime Among Black People in the United States and Promote Inter-Racial Peace. Jackson, Miss.: Office of the President, The Republic of New Africa. p. 102, in Donald Cunningen, “The Republic of New Africa in Mississippi,” in Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, ed. Judson L. Jeffries (University of Illinois Press, 2006), 97–98, 102.

[x] William Brink, and Louis Harris, Black and White: A Study of U.S. Racial Attitudes Today (Simon and Schuster, 1967), 120–21, 134.

[xi] Rieder, “Silent Majority,” 256; Brink and Harris, Black and White, 123.

[xii] Rieder, “Silent Majority,” 255.

[xiii] Hamby, “Democratic Moment,” 248–49, 260.

[xiv] Hamby, “Democratic Moment,” 271.

[xv] Hamby, “Democratic Moment,” 278.

[xvi] Hamby, “Democratic Moment,” 280.

[xvii] Rieder, “Silent Majority,” 259; Steven M. Gillon, “The Travail of the Democrats: Search for a New Majority,” in Democrats and the American Idea, ed. Peter B. Kovler (Center for National Policy Press, 1992), 287.

[xviii] Rieder, “Silent Majority,” 254; Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 13-15, 17, 23, 42. For the best discussion of George Wallace’s role in national politics see, Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1995).

[xix] Jeremy D. Mayer, Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960–2000 (New York: Random House, 2002), 70, 72–73.

[xx] Mayer, Running on Race, 82-84.

[xxi] Mayer, Running on Race, 87-88.

[xxii] Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich, 22, 41.

[xxiii] Mayer, Running on Race, 91–93.

[xxiv] Mayer, Running on Race, 94–95

[xxv] Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich, 52.

[xxvi] Mayer, Running on Race, 107, 110; Rieder, “Silent Majority,” 259.

[xxvii] Mayer, Running on Race, 108–9, 115; Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich, 46.

[xxviii] Mayer, Running on Race, 116–18.

[xxix] Mayer, Running on Race, 114–15.

[xxx] Mayer, Running on Race, 121.

[xxxi]Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), 110, 287–88, 460–74.