As a substitute, Democratic nationwide management made the primary daring transfer. A 12 months earlier than the 1948 presidential election, noting
As a substitute, Democratic nationwide management made the primary daring transfer. A 12 months earlier than the 1948 presidential election, noting the success of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal electoral coalition, a campaign-strategy memo drafted by Clark Clifford and James Rowe, advisers to President Truman, argued that “the Northern Negro voter at the moment holds the steadiness of energy in presidential elections for the straightforward arithmetical purpose that the Negroes not solely vote in a bloc however are geographically concentrated in pivotal, massive and carefully contested electoral states corresponding to New York Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.” Truman’s resolution to signal govt orders desegregating the army and the federal work drive was an electoral broadside constructed, partially, to assist win over the help of northern Black voters.
It labored. Truman gained 77 p.c of Black voters, and with them the Nice Migration vacation spot states of Illinois and Ohio by only a mixed 40,000 votes — and these states’ electoral votes supplied the margin of victory. The well-known image of the re-elected president holding up the inaccurate newspaper headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” exists largely as a result of Dewey, the Republican governor of New York, with a strong document on civil rights, had grown instantly lukewarm on the difficulty, making halfhearted appeals to Black voters within the North whereas rising entreaties to white conservatives within the South.
The election consequence was proof of the brand new electoral benefit Black solidarity supplied a celebration prepared to ship racially progressive insurance policies. And the choice of many Southern Democrats, upset with the social gathering’s formal embrace of civil rights at that 12 months’s Democratic Nationwide Conference, to mount a third-party presidential bid that 12 months hinted that an opposing bloc of more and more disgruntled white segregationists was looking for a brand new residence.
The Democrats’ and Republicans’ nationwide platforms on this interval typically addressed civil rights in practically equal measure, and generally Republicans had been extra progressive on the query. President Dwight Eisenhower declared within the 1950s that racial segregation harmed the nation’s safety pursuits. Deploying the 101st Airborne to implement the combination of Little Rock Excessive College in 1957, he warned that “our enemies are gloating over this incident and utilizing it all over the place to misrepresent our entire nation.” Richard Nixon held positions on civil rights much like John F. Kennedy’s throughout the 1960 presidential marketing campaign, and gained practically a 3rd of the Black vote that 12 months (although within the South, the place the vast majority of the Black inhabitants nonetheless lived, Black voters had been successfully barred from the polls).
It was the final time a Republican would win greater than 15 p.c of the Black vote in a presidential election. Stumping for Nixon in 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, declared that “there’s hardly sufficient distinction between Republican conservatives and the Southern Democrats to place a chunk of paper between.” When Goldwater turned the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and voiced his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Black voters bunched themselves into the Democratic Social gathering for good, supporting Lyndon Johnson at a fee comparable with Barack Obama’s practically a half-century later.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, in the meantime, vastly expanded the Black citizens — voter-registration charges amongst nonwhites leapt to 59.eight p.c in 1967 from 6.7 p.c in Mississippi; to 51.6 p.c from 19.three p.c in Alabama; and to 52.6 p.c from 27.four p.c in Georgia. Black turnout soared. And George Wallace’s third-party candidacy for president in 1968, operating on a segregation platform and profitable 5 states within the course of, was the final gasp for segregationists working outdoors of the two-party system.
Inside a decade, white Southern Democrats had been responding favorably to the appeals of the Republican Social gathering. Richard Nixon’s “regulation and order” chorus and Ronald Reagan’s renewed name for “states’ rights” had been racialized, implicitly speaking opposition to progressive insurance policies like busing and tapping into anxieties a couple of quickly integrating society. With explicitly racist appeals now socially taboo, symbolic and ostensibly colorblind gestures made the transition simpler by reframing the race query as one about free-market rules, private duty and authorities nonintervention. Racial segregation may very well be achieved with out brazenly championing it; the social hierarchy maintained with out evangelizing it. American voters, Black and white alike, obtained the message.