The "Southern Strategy" is a Lie | Pundit House
Ken Raymond
Jun 2011
Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, which the democrats say is the reason black people had to support them during the 1960′s–is a lie.
And it’s probably the biggest lie that’s been told to the blacks since Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government after getting the NAACP to support him.
After talking with black voters across the country about why they overwhelmingly supports democrats, the common answer that’s emerges is the Southern Strategy.
I’ve heard of the Southern Strategy too. But since it doesn’t make a difference in how I decide to vote, I never bothered to research it. But apparently it still influences how many African Americans vote today. That makes it worth investigating.
For those that might be unfamiliar with the Southern Strategy, I’ll briefly review the story. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, most blacks registered as democrats and it’s been that way ever since.
And that doesn’t make any sense when you consider the fact that it was the democrats that established, and fought for, Jim Crow laws and segregation in the first place. And the republicans have a very noble history of fighting for the civil rights of blacks.
The reason black people moved to the democrats, given by media pundits and educational institutions for the decades, is that when republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he employed a racist plan that’s now infamously called the Southern Strategy.
The Southern Strategy basically means Nixon allegedly used hidden code words that appealed to the racists within the Democrat party and throughout the south. This secret language caused a seismic shift in the electoral landscape that moved the evil racist democrats into the republican camp and the noble-hearted republicans into the democrat camp.
And here’s what I found, Nixon did not use a plan to appeal to racist white voters.
First, let’s look at the presidential candidates of 1968. Richard Nixon was the republican candidate; Hubert Humphrey was the democrat nominee; and George Wallace was a third party candidate.
Remember George Wallace? Wallace was the democrat governor of Alabama from 1963 until 1967. And it was Wallace that ordered the Eugene “Bull” Connor, and the police department, to attack Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. and 2,500 protesters in Montgomery , Alabama in 1965. And it was Governor Wallace that ordered a blockade at the admissions office at the University of Alabama to prevent blacks from enrolling in 1963.
Governor Wallace was a true racist and a determined segregationist. And he ran as the nominee from the American Independent Party, which was he founded.
Richard Nixon wrote about the 1968 campaign in his book RN: the Memoirs of Richard Nixon originally published in 1978.
In his book, Nixon wrote this about campaigning in the south, “The deep south had to be virtually conceded to George Wallace. I could not match him there without compromising on civil rights, which I would not do.”
The media coverage of the 1968 presidential race also showed that Nixon was in favor of the Civil Rights and would not compromise on that issue. For example, in an article published in the
Washington Post on September 15, 1968 headlined “Nixon Sped Integration, Wallace says” Wallace declared that Nixon agreed with Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and played a role in ”the destruction of public school system.” Wallace pledged to restore the school system, in the same article, by giving it back to the states ”lock, stock, and barrel.”
This story, as well as Nixon’s memoirs and other news stories during that campaign, shows that Nixon was very clear about his position on civil rights. And if Nixon was used code words only racists could hear, evidently George Wallace couldn’t hear it.
Among the southern states, George Wallace won Arkansas , Mississippi , Alabama , Georgia and Louisiana . Nixon won North Carolina , South Carolina , Florida , Virginia , and Tennessee . Winning those states were part of Nixon’s plan.
“I would not concede the Carolina ‘s, Florida , or Virginia or the states around the rim of the south,”Nixon wrote. ”These states were a part of my plan.”
At that time, the entire southern region was the poorest in the country. The south consistently lagged behind the rest of the United States in income. And according to the
“U.S. Regional Growth and Convergence,” by Kris James Mitchener and Ian W. McLean, per capita income for southerners was almost half as much as it was for Americans in other regions.
Nixon won those states strictly on economic issues. He focused on increasing tariffs on foreign imports to protect the manufacturing and agriculture industries of those states. Some southern elected officials agreed to support him for the sake of their economies, including South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.
“I had been consulting privately with Thurmond for several months and I was convinced that he’d join my campaign if he were satisfied on the two issues of paramount concern to him: national defense and tariffs against textile imports to protect South Carolina ‘s position in the industry.”Nixon wrote in his memoirs.
In fact, Nixon made it clear to the southern elected officials that he would not compromise on the civil rights issue.
“On civil rights, Thurmond knew my position was very different from his,” Nixon wrote. “I was for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and he was against it. Although he disagreed with me, he respected my sincerity and candor.”
The same scenario played out among elected officials and voters in other southern states won by Nixon. They laid their feelings aside and supported him because of his economic platform’”not because Nixon sent messages on a frequency only racists can hear.
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Nixon had
an excellent record on civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was an avid champion of the
desegregation of public schools. The progressive columnist Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”
Upon his taking office in 1969, Nixon also put into effect America’s first affirmative action program. Dubbed the
Philadelphia Plan, it imposed racial goals and timetables on the building trade unions, first in Philadelphia and then elsewhere. Now, would a man seeking to build an electoral base of Deep South white supremacists actually promote the first program to legally discriminate in favor of blacks? This is absurd.
Nixon barely campaigned in the Deep South. His strategy, as outlined by Kevin Phillips in his classic work, “
The Emerging Republican Majority,” was to target the Sunbelt, the vast swath of territory stretching from Florida to Nixon’s native California. This included what Phillips terms the Outer or Peripheral South.
Nixon recognized the South was changing. It was becoming more industrialized, with many northerners moving to the Sunbelt. Nixon’s focus, Phillips writes, was on the non-racist, upwardly-mobile, largely urban voters of the Outer or Peripheral South. Nixon won these voters, and he lost the Deep South, which went to Democratic segregationist
George Wallace.
And how many racist Dixiecrats did Nixon win for the GOP? Turns out, virtually none. Among the racist Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was the sole senator to defect to the Republicans — and he did this long before Nixon’s time. Only one Dixiecrat congressman,
Albert Watson of South Carolina, switched to the GOP. The rest, more than 200 Dixiecrat senators, congressmen, governors and high elected officials, all stayed in the Democratic Party.
The progressive notion of a Dixiecrat switch is a myth. Yet it is myth that continues to be promoted, using dubious case examples. Though the late Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and John Tower of Texas and former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott all switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP, none of these men was a Dixiecrat.
The South, as a whole, became Republican during the 1980s and 1990s. This had nothing to do with Nixon; it was because of Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “
Contract with America.” The conservative appeal to patriotism, anti-communism, free markets, pro-life and Christianity had far more to do with the South’s movement into the GOP camp than anything related to race.
Yet the myth of Nixon’s Southern Strategy endures — not because it’s true, but because it conveniently serves to exculpate the crimes of the Democratic Party. Somehow the party that promoted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and racial terrorism gets to wipe its slate clean by pretending that, with Nixon’s connivance, the Republicans stole all their racists. It’s time we recognize this excuse for what it is: one more Democratic big lie.
The myth of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’
