The Democrats were racists! Let’s look back and see evidence of that.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of the civil war. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” After the emancipation and the end of the Civil War black people in the South had one political advantage – there were a lot of them. And those who could vote were voting for Republicans. The Grand Old Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and some of the country’s most ardent reconstructionists.
And after Reconstruction was overthrown, Southern Democrats put up barriers to the ballot for black voters – we’re talking poll taxes, literacy tests, and lynch mobs.
But that didn’t mean everything was great for African Americans in the Republican Party. After Reconstruction, factions of white Republicans did try to force black people out of the Grand Old Party. This so-called lily-white movement would ebb and flow well into the 20th century, when President Herbert Hoover, a Republican supported by the KKK, was quoted saying he wanted to make the Republican Party, quote, “lily-white.”
As that New Deal propaganda newsreel makes clear, black folks were hit especially hard by the Great Depression. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat from New York, runs for president and wins, but he does so with basically no black support. This is the moment the parties start to flip. There was a brief moment in the ’40s and ’50s when black voters really were up for grabs for either of the parties. But in the mid-’60s, we really start seeing this demographic makeup of the Democrats and Republicans of today crystallize.
How did we get here?
1930
The shift in the two parties started with FDR and the New Deal. The new deal helped black communities and by the 1936 presidential election FDR wins again, but with more black votes than the previous election. The general public starts to notice Northern Democrats are different than Southern Democrats.
1948
The States’ Rights Democratic Party (whose members are often called the Dixiecrats) was a short-lived segregationist political party in the United States, active primarily in the South. It arose due to a Southern regional split in opposition to the Democratic Party. After President Harry S. Truman, a member of the Democratic Party, ordered integration of the military in 1948 and other actions to address civil rights of African Americans, many Southern conservative white politicians who objected to this course organized themselves as a breakaway faction. The Dixiecrats wished to protect Southern states’ rights to maintain racial segregation.
1960
The presidential election is close between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Near the election, Martin Luther King Jr is placed in jail. Jackie Robinson, a Republican at the time and friend of Richard Nixon, encouraged Nixon to call MLK. Nixon declined. JFK called MLK (his wife to be exact) when he was in jail. This made headlines in the press and the black vote goes to JFK. Nixon narrowly lost the election due to it.
1964
President Lyndon Johnson, who was pressured by black organizers and activists, takes up the mantle of civil rights in a serious and sustained way to everybody’s surprise. The Civil Rights Bill passes and Republican Barry Goldwater voices his frustrations at the 1964 National Convention. About 1% of all delegates at the 1964 Republican National Convention, the lowest that the Republican Party has seen since African Americans started becoming delegates to the convention. At the convention, they are being called racial slurs. They’re being told to get out. They are being told that they are not welcome. One delegate has his suit set on fire by a Goldwater delegate. And it is representative of a significant shift happening in the party.
1968
Jackie Robinson leaves the GOP in disgust when his former friend Nixon wins the White House in 1968 with his law-and-order politics. Nixon also focuses on federal overreach in local politics and state rights. This sets the talking points and politics of the Republican Party for the next 50 years.
1980
Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail in 1980 said he wanted to “make America great again.” He popularizes the concept of the welfare queen and radicalizes entitlement spending along with taking the war on drugs to the next level.
Regan managed to a tie the religious right, who cared about issues like abortion, with white conservatives who were resentful of the changes from the civil rights revolution. In the Reagan years and beyond we really start to see the South go reliably red in presidential elections.
2016
With Donald Trump, calls for equity, were often written off as political correctness and blamed on woke culture. The Republican Party is then gaslit to believe that the Democrat Party is the party that has racist tendencies. Although true in 1863 and through part of the 1900s the two parties’ stance flips and this proves the Democrats were once racist. Focus on “were” here, please. You know past tense.
