One thing we keep hearing from the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party today, especially since the party's humiliation in the presidency of George W. Bush, is that it's Democrats who are the racists and that they, the Republican Party, are the real champions of African Americans.
That's pretty odd because, in 2005, Ken Mehlman, then chairman of the National Republican Committee (RNC), appeared before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and apologized to them for the behavior of the Republican Party. According to Wikipedia, the NAACP is "an African-American civil rights organization." To the best of my knowledge, it's America's oldest and most well-established one.
What is the RNC to the Republican Party? Wikipedia describes it as "responsible for developing and promoting the Republican political platform, as well as coordinating fundraising and election strategy. It is also responsible for organizing and running the Republican National Convention."
So Mehlman had the standing to know what he's talking about when he said what he did.
What did he say?
From USA Today:
"GOP: 'We Were Wrong to Play Racial Politics" (7/14/2005)
"Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to one of the nation's largest black civil rights groups Thursday, saying Republicans had not done enough to court blacks in the past and had exploited racial strife to court white voters, particularly in the South. 'It's not healthy for the country for our political parties to be so racially polarized,' said Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman.
"'Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,' Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 'I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.'"
African Americans vote Democratic at rates above 90%. We have two Republican explanations for that, both of them racially insulting. The first explanation is that Democrats bribe African Americans with welfare, which is doubly insulting. The first insult is that African Americans are corrupt, and the second insult is that they're all using safety net programs. In 2012, Newt Gingrich even openly said so. At a town hall event in New Hampshire that year during the Republican primary elections, he said: "the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps." The second explanation is that African Americans are "enslaved" on the "Democratic plantation," which denies African Americans free will and critical thinking skills, or, again, suggests that they are somehow especially susceptible to personal corruption.
Despite those and similar, profoundly insulting remarks, ultra-rightist Republicans still claim that they are the "real" champions of African Americans today. To prove the point, they gesture toward Abraham Lincoln, dead in his grave, lo, these past 149 years. This, by the way, is the very same Lincoln who used immense federal power to quash a vast, regional, separatist rebellion of pro-slavery insurgents claiming states' rights to unilaterally secede. Are we really talking about the same Republican Party?
And when the ultra-rightist Republicans accuse the Democratic Party of being the party that's racist, they again look to the past. They point to the segregation era when the majority of white southern racists were Democrats. Yes, it's true, the Democratic Party had a large contingent of conservative southern racists back in the early 1960s. After President Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, almost all of them left the party and became Republicans. Johnson even knew it would happen ahead of time. He famously said that the Democratic Party had "lost the south for a generation." He underestimated the effect by a couple of generations or so.
A lot of ultra-rightist Republicans still mock the late Senator Robert Byrd of Virginia, a Democrat who used to be a Klansman. What they don't admit is that Robert Byrd apologized for his early years and said that he had been wrong.
These same Republicans don't like to talk much about the late Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who broke with the Democratic Party as early as 1948 because he didn't like the ways Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had been moving in race relations. Roosevelt and Truman were opening up federal jobs and the military's ranks to African Americans, and they were winning the African American vote for it, too. Thurmond and other southern Democrats broke away from the Democratic Party to form a short-lived third party, called the "States' Rights Democratic Party," also known as the Dixiecrats. Their platform was:
"We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights."
Thurmond became the Dixiecrat nominee for president in the election of 1948.
After losing the election, Thurmond returned to the Democratic Party where he remained until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he then left it to become a Republican. He was joined then and soon after by scores of other southern Democrats. They knew the Republican Party was their home. After all, the GOP's presidential nominee for the election of 1964 was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a pivotal figure in Republican politics.
At the height of the African American civil rights movement, Goldwater, claiming "states' rights," promised that, if elected, he would remain aloof and not use federal power to enforce the civil rights guaranteed to all Americans by the Constitution. In the matter of race relations, he would carve out an exception for African Americans. While he didn't openly say that, that's what "states' rights" meant. The segregationists found their man and joined his party. They knew what he meant. As for the character of today's Republican Party and Goldwater's enduring influence in it, Republicans view President Ronald Reagan as a leader to be emulated, and Reagan always called himself "a Goldwater Republican."
After switching parties in 1964, Thurmond remained a lifelong Republican and never apologized for the racism he promoted and defended. He even secretly fathered a biracial daughter whom he never publicly acknowledged. She was a dirty little secret to him.
There's a big difference between Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond, and that difference, besides right and wrong, is the difference between humility and arrogance. Byrd apologized. Thurmond never did.
Ken Mehlman, on behalf of the Republican Party, had the decency to apologize to the NAACP. Today's ultrarightist Republican Party has retracted the apology. They're still the party of Strom Thurmond, and today's southern white vote is almost monolithically Republican.
