Haley Barbour 'revises' post-civil-rights-act history

[BurtWorm]

:eyes:

In other words, he lies.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_09/025497.php

BARBOUR EXPLAINS THE SOUTH WITH BASELESS, REVISIONIST HISTORY.... For much of the 20th century, America's Southeast, now the Republicans' strongest region, was closely aligned with Democratic politics. The shift began quickly after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, culminating in the Republican stronghold we see today.

As far as likely presidential candidate Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the corporate-lobbyist-turned governor, is concerned, the transition can be explained as a matter of generational change. Barbour's version of events, though, is so wildly ridiculous, it bears no resemblance to reality.

Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."

This is utter nonsense.

This comes up from time to time, especially when Republicans are feeling defensive about race (or when right-wing Mississippi governors prepare to run against the nation's first African-American president), so let's set the record straight.

...

In the wake of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, the Republican Party welcomed the white supremacists who no longer felt comfortable in the Democratic Party. Indeed, in 1964, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater boasted of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and made it part of his platform. Other than his home state, Goldwater won exactly five states in that race: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. To pretend this had nothing to do with race -- we're talking about states that hadn't backed a GOP candidate since the Civil War -- is absurd.

This was, of course, right around the time when figures like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond made the transition -- leaving the Democratic Party for the GOP.

...

[bbdad]

1. Barbour is full of baloney.

I'm 60 years old. I grew up during the civil rights movement. The fact is that almost all of the Southern so-called "Democrats" in Congress who opposed civil rights legislation (along with many northern conservative Republicans, such as Gerald Ford) were CONSERVATIVES. From the time I started the third grade, I grew up in the Texas Congressional district that was represented at one time by George H. W. Bush. (This, of course, would be Bush The First -- who, incidentally, when he was a Congressman, once referred to Martin Luther King, Jr., as "an extremist." Imagine that.) I can tell you that the white Republicans living in that district were extremely racist. My parents had to guard against my being infected by their racial attitudes. When King was assassinated during my junior year in high school, my Republican classmates were all over themselves with glee. I saw less glee from them when school let out for the summer. As a childhood friend of mine told me during the Presidential election campaign in 1968, most of his high-school football teammates supported George Wallace, the segregationist third-party candidate. (The football players in my school district were so far to the right that I was amazed when I learned four years later that a leading liberal politician in Texas named Bob Gammage, who is now retired from a long career in politics, had been a college player.) My wife is a conservative Republican, but is not a racist and agrees with my observations. Now largely apathetic about politics (as I am, for personal reasons), she stopped making monetary contributions to the Republican party because she got fed up with the leadership of her party welcoming segregationists into her party. As a woman of "Anglo" (mother) and Palestian Arab (father) descent, she's never cared for racist bigots.

[BurtWorm]

2. Rick Perlstein reminds us in Nixonland that LBJ knew he'd basically written the death warrant

for the Democratic Party in the South when he signed the Civil Rights Act. I don't think he was thinking all those Democrats would just die out to be replaced by broad-minded Republicans. ;-)

Welcome to DU, by the way! :toast:

Nice post! Thanks.

[bbdad]

4. LBJ may have had his share of character flaws, ...

... but undeniably he showed moral courage in signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. He knew perfectly well that the Democratic Party would be hurt politically for many years.

Thanks for the welcome and the compliment! :)

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. The Part About Gerald Ford Is Incorrect

He supported the landmark civil rights legilation of the 60s and was a supporter of affirmative action. He even filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court to support the University Of Michigan's affirmative action program:



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/opinion/30toobin.html

[bbdad]

6. Thank you, DemocratSinceBirth, for providing the link.

I appreciate learning this information about Ford. I had read that when he was a Congressman he had voted against the Voting Rights Act in 1965; so, I had a negative impression of his civil rights record. But when he was President, in 1975 he supported the extension of the Voting Rights Act (which, incidentally, Ronald Reagan opposed). Ford also supported the Equal Rights Amendment.

I was born in and have resided in Texas for most of my life. The state's first Republican U.S. Senator since Reconstruction (elected in a special election in 1961) was John Godwin Tower, a conservative. Throughout most (if not all) of his service in the U.S. Senate, on civil rights and race-related issues his voting record was identical to that of the Southern "Democratic" segregationists; yet Tower publicly represented himself as not being an enemy of black Americans. Yeah, right.

[butterfly77]

3. Kicked&Recommended!

:kick: