On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down separate but equal was unanimous.
There was no dissenting opinion this time.
All nine Supreme Court Justices, on the strength of the evidence of the Clark’s Doll test, struck down “separate but equal” and everyone lived happily ever after.
Well, not quite.
A man named Harry F. Byrd, a senator from Virginia, began encouraging public schools in Virginia to close rather than to integrate. He was so upset at the idea of black and white children going to school together that he said he would rather their white children not get an education at all rather than go to school with black Americans.
And people listened.
Many schools in Virginia, even an entire school system, were closed in 1958 and 1959, in attempts to block integration.
White supremacy is no joke.
Harry F. Byrd was a Democrat.
Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 many of America’s conservatives were Democrats, not Republicans.
Republicans were known as the party of Lincoln, the party that “freed the slaves”. Conservatives, particularly southern conservatives, wanted no part of that.
It is inevitable that at some point during Black History Month some conservative news outlet in an attempt to illustrate just how politically ignorant black Americans are points out, “The people that founded the KKK were Democrats!”
And that is true. They were.
There was a time when the Democratic Party was full of Harry F. Byrds and the majority of Black Americans were Republicans, NOT Democrats.
In fact the Democratic Party was so white supremacist, um, I mean they showed so much “implicit racial bias”, that it wasn’t until 1924 that blacks were even permitted to attend their party conventions.
And nowadays, as you all know, over 90% of all black registered voters are Democrats.
So how did it change?
Barry Goldwater.
In 1964, then President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, making discrimination in public venues illegal in the United States. Barry Goldwater, a Republican, believed that the Civil Rights Act Johnson signed was unconstitutional.
He opposed it on principle.
Even former Libertarian Presidential candidate and former U.S. representative Ron Paul in 2004 reiterated his opposition 4 decades earlier to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 saying, “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.”
Diminished individual liberty?
Yes, Ron Paul believes that the “freedom” of whites to deny Blacks their “liberty” was infringed upon by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And apparently that is a bad thing.
Barry Goldwater believed that the federal government should keep its hands out of “States business”.
Sound familiar?
Remember the South rebranding slavery as the South’s “peculiar institution”. That too was their nice way of saying mind your business, leave us alone.
We must understand that the root of this “stay out of the affairs of the State” is not rooted in liberty, but it originates from slave-owners wanting government to be as weak as possible so that it couldn’t interfere with a Master’s power over his slaves.
Slave masters were demagogues and their plantations were their kingdoms. They didn’t even want the State having the power to regulate how often they should clothe and dress their “property”.
Now, in 1964, Barry Goldwater has won the Republican nomination for the office of the Presidency of the United States and he is making the argument on television, in front of all of America, that states should be allowed to implement integration at their own pace.
Huh?
He said that the federal government was overstepping its bounds by setting time limits on when the civil rights act should be implemented.
Everything Barry Goldwater said was music to the ears of white segregationists, particularly in the South.
But Black people were listening too. And they heard loud and clear what Barry Goldwater was saying about the direction of the Republican Party.
Here was a perfect opportunity for both political parties to come together on the same page and stand in solidarity against those Americans who wanted to continue the ugly tradition of denying black Americans their constitutionally protected rights. A Democrat, from Texas for Christ’s sakes signed a Civil Rights Act! That should’ve been the part of this story that was too-amazing-to-be true.
But what turned out to be even more difficult to believe was that Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, the Party that sent federal troops into the old Confederacy during the Reconstruction amazingly, incredibly, were opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the civil rights movement in general.
Republicans? The same Republicans that Jefferson Davis had said in 1860 that if they were ever to be elected to the office of the Presidency, it would be as if the North had risen a banner on which is inscribed “death to the institutions of the South” and they could no longer remain in the same confederacy with “them”.
Those same Republicans?
Well that Republican Party for all intents and purposes died the night that Barry Goldwater gave his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention on July 16, 1964.
In Goldwater’s acceptance speech he actually said to a roaring crowd of enthusiastic supporters that, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
On that night Goldwater set the tone for the Republican Party that we know today.
If you’re for small government, we’re your party.
If you’re for a government that doesn’t give out “handouts” or social programs that even indirectly improve the lives of BLACK Americans, we’re your party.
If you’re for a government that doesn’t interfere with the affairs of the states, specifically state’s efforts to disenfranchise minority voters then we’re your party.
If you’re for a government that isn’t the least bit concerned with eliminating poverty in the wealthiest nation in the world, we’re your party.
Blacks had heard everything that they needed to hear and moved in one big herd over to the Democratic Party while at the exact same time, Southern white supremacists, who had been Democrats since the beginning, who had never had a family member ever vote for a Republican abandoned the Democratic Party and became Republicans.
See, even the racial makeup of our two-party system in America has been guided by white supremacy.
1964 was also known as Freedom Summer. This was when thousands of young people converged on the state of Mississippi to try to register as many blacks to vote as possible because Mississippi whites had been wildly successful in suppressing blacks from voting.
In 1962 only 6.7% of black Mississippians were registered to vote, the lowest percentage in the country, yet blacks made up 45% of the population of Mississippi.
During the 10 weeks that these brave kids tried to get blacks in Mississippi to register to vote they learned firsthand why only 6.7% of Black Mississippians had even bothered.
In just 10 weeks in Mississippi:
80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten
37 churches were bombed or burned
30 Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned
4 civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)
4 people were critically wounded
At least 3 Mississippi blacks were murdered because of their support for the Civil Rights Movement.
On June 21, 1964, just under a month before the Barry Goldwater speech at the Republican National Convention, three Freedom Summer workers had turned up missing; James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. They were all arrested by Cecil Price, a Neshoba County deputy sheriff and KKK member.
They were never seen alive again.
During the Republican National Convention Goldwater kept talking about how the Civil Rights Act that had been passed just two weeks before the convention was unconstitutional and how southern states should be able to implement the new law on their own time lines as they saw fit.
Barely a word was mentioned about the missing Freedom Summer workers during the entire Republican National Convention.
Barry Goldwater by the way ended up being destroyed by Lyndon B. Johnson.
Johnson carried every state but South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico.
It was the worst showing in terms of getting the popular vote and Electoral College vote for any post-World War II Republican.
Curiously enough, the Washington Post reported in December 2014 that a site called Project Implicit offered a computerized Implicit Association Test that had been taken by over two million Americans online and guess what states had the most “implicit racially bias” people living there?
South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Five of the six states that voted for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election.
So when people ask you why Blacks vote Democrat at a click above 90% and they tell you that the founding members of the KKK were Democrats, you tell them that’s true, but all of those Democrats became Republicans after Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech in 1964 and they have been there ever since.
Just like this Republican Party isn’t the party of Lincoln, this Democratic Party isn’t the party of the KKK.