More than half a century has passed since President Richard Nixon launched his infamous “southern strategy,” which found the Republican Party pursuing the votes of white racists who had angrily left the Democratic Party because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And after all these years, history professor Leonard Steinhorn asserts in an October 30 op-ed for the Washington Post, the GOP is still grappling with its racism problem.
The GOP certainly didn’t start out as the party of racism. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, who became an ally of the abolitionist movement. And when Republican Teddy Roosevelt was president in the 1900s, African-American neighborhoods in northern cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston leaned GOP. However, the Democratic Party made a lot of inroads with black voters under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal in the 1930s.
In the 1960s, Steinhorn explains, Nixon saw a golden opportunity for his party: appealing to a sense of white grievance. The professor recalls, “Nixon inflamed the ‘silent majority’ and ‘forgotten Americans’ with coded language about race and ‘law and order’ that played to their sense of grievance and victimization.”
View the complete October 30 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.