Jeff Shapiro is a liberal who despises anything that even remotely resembles even a center-right position. This piece is the most vicious one he's written in awhile. The battle flag and noose have not been issues for Sen. Allen in ages and Shapiro looks pathetically desperate by bringing them up now. The current Dem governor, as Shapiro well knows, also signed the Heritage proclamation. George Allen received 20% of the black vote according to Shapiro's own paper, so for Shapiro to claim it 'rattled' anyone is pure hyperbole.
The editorial page of the RTD holds up the work of Taylor Branch for justification of their position today that the GOP is now 'reaping what it sowed' when the GOP coddled racists [their claim]. Branch sees the world through a liberal prism and his work cannot be trusted. The RTD EB should understand that.
If, however, what Branch claims about the Republican party is true, then it is something in need of addressing. This does not mean we adopt the CBC agenda as our own. It means we do a better job of explaining why we disagree with it.
I grew up in a very southern Republican household and I saw nothing of any purge Branch claims occurred. My parents were deep-south Republicans because they viewed the Democrats as soft on Communism and they rejected the racism the southern Democrats peddled in the '40's and '50's. They continue to be Republicans to this day for the very same reasons.
Dec 22, 2002
The Context
History does not forget. The significance of Trent Lott's words lies in their context - in stories that many prefer to remain untold.
George Lee of Memphis began attending Republican National Conventions in 1940. In 1952 he seconded the nomination of "Mr. Republican" himself, Senator Robert A. Taft. Lee was an African-American, the proud personification of the Lincoln Republican. When Republicans convened in 1964, however, he and other loyalists were cast aside. Throughout the South, blacks who had supported the Republican Party for decades were purged.
Taylor Branch's Pillar of Fire - the second of his two-volume history of the civil rights movement - describes the scene as Republicans met to nominate Barry Goldwater. The South's 375-person delegation was lily white. The regional caucus called its headquarters Fort Sumter. The South was not alone. California sent an all-white delegation, too. Only 14 of the convention's 1,300 delegates were black.
The developments represented a seismic shift. Although the economic deprivations of the Depression drove blacks into Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition, African-Americans traditionally had voted Republican - particularly for President. As recently as 1952 and 1956, Dwight Eisenhower carried blacks by decisive margins. Blacks trended toward John Kennedy in 1960 (and probably provided him with his margin in the Electoral College), but a sizable percentage stayed with the GOP.
The country-club caricature may have zinged the GOP with all too much accuracy, but Republicans traditionally were more likely than Democrats to support civil and political rights. Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a voting-rights bill at the turn of the century. The overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress voted for the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Democrats erected and enforced segregation's bleak barriers. Yet when Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 act, when Strom Thurmond switched parties, when the GOP welcomed to its bosom diehards who had opposed racial progress and reconciliation, the party betrayed the confidence of African-Americans. The GOP's rise in the South reflected many positive influences (and, more than anything else, may have resulted from the migration of voters from the industrial states to the Sunbelt). Republicans also prospered because on racial issues they abandoned their roots. Meanwhile, national Democrats were asserting their commitment to civil rights. Their platforms no longer tried to appease malevolent segregationists.
Language counts. The U.S. has endured its share of Vardamans, Bilbos, Talmadges, and other demagogues who used the vilest terms. Others preferred more gentle prose. They referred to states' rights and local control and community standards and constitutionalism and all sorts of high-sounding virtues when the real point was to perpetuate separate-and-unequal. This newspaper knows. When Lott spoke at Thurmond's farewell, those with memories heard. Students of political history recognized the cadences, too.
Lott's performance reminded them of many things - of the GOP's devil's bargain with a Dixiecrat remnant (Lott had served as an aide to a Democratic Congressman who was an arch-segregationist), of a party whose dominant faction deliberately turned its back on citizens who had supported it for a century. Lott's ill-considered statement - and the pressure it put on Republicans - suggests the GOP is reaping what it sowed.
RTD
Hitlery said something similar - must be dim talking points.