The New South — Black and Conservative
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In 1956, 19 Democratic Senators and 82 Democratic House members signed a Southern Manifesto pledging to resist the integration of Southern public schools as ordered by Earl Warren’s Supreme Court.
Only two GOP House members, both from Virginia, signed. The American South was as solidly Democratic as it was solidly segregationist.
The break in the dam came in a special election in Texas in 1961 to fill the Senate seat of Lyndon Johnson, newly elected vice president.
John Tower became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a Southern Senate seat by popular election.
After a raucous rally in South Carolina in 1966, Richard Nixon told this writer the future of the GOP was in the South. That was a year after passage of the Voting Rights Act and LBJ’s forecast that Democrats could lose Dixie for a generation.
Nixon believed that once desegregation was done, its natural conservatism would bring the South into the party of Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan. History has proven him right.
In 1972, President Nixon would sweep all 11 Southern states.
As for the Voting Rights Act, while it led to the enfranchisement and empowerment of the black South, it has proven a death sentence for Boll Weevils and Blue Dogs.
Southern white Democrats, descendants of the men who voted for that Southern Manifesto, are an endangered species, a dying breed.
South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas will not send a single white Democrat to Congress, if Mary Landrieu loses her run-off. The only Democrats in the House from Deep South states will be African-Americans. Tennessee, North Carolina and West Virginia are trending the same way.
Republican dominance in the New South is partly explained by the conservatism of the region, which is in tune with the national GOP. But the rise of the black Democrat and extinction of the white Democrat is also traceable to the Voting Rights Act.
Required by law and the Justice Department to create districts where African-Americans would be competitive, Southern legislatures began to draw up majority-minority districts where the black vote was so concentrated as to ensure the election of an African-American.
The GOP offer on the table for black Democrats was safe seats in Congress they could hold for decades, to build up sufficient seniority to garner real power to use on behalf of their constituents. ...
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