South Carolina, which started the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, MAY have finally conceded defeat on June 23, 2015, with the courageous speech by State Senator Paul Thurmond, son of the notorious segregationist and racist Governor and Senator Strom Thurmond, who made his career on racial division.
A burden to the Democratic Party, when Lyndon B. Johnson was able to overcome Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, and courageously get through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Senator Strom Thurmond quickly switched to the Republican Party, and over the next generation, the Confederate South transferred its loyalties to the Republican Party, despite their hatred of the party because of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
The Republicans welcomed and embraced the segregationists, and did whatever they could to appeal to the prejudices of many Southern whites, rather than elevate them to a level of tolerance and open mindedness.
And when the Supreme Court damaged the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 decision, it was Republican state legislatures and Governors who rushed to pass voter restriction laws, designed to harm African Americans and other minorities, as well as the poor, reminding us of what had happened after Reconstruction ended in the late 19th century. They were not afraid to show their purpose, to deny people the vote on flimsy grounds, and showed no conscience.
This sudden transformation after the Charleston Massacre is what finally brought out the truth, that the Republicans have been promoting racism, and even after the disaster, many Republican office holders and Presidential candidates were slow to react.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was hesitant to call for removal of the Confederate Flag, but finally did so under duress, but it was state Senator Paul Thurmond, son of Strom Thurmond, who showed true courage and guts in denouncing what his father had stood for, and saying the flag must be removed.
There are still plenty of bigoted Southerners in South Carolina and elsewhere, who rushed to buy Confederate flags, shirts, and other paraphernalia, but thank goodness that Walmart, Ebay, Amazon and other retailers announced the end of such sales yesterday.
It is time for the Republican Party nationally to stop voting restriction laws, and truly compete for the African American vote and the Hispanic-Latino vote too, and also to stop the attack on women and on gays and lesbians, as they are now the party of so much hate. The white racist vote is rapidly declining, and the GOP is living in the past, reveling in its promotion of narrow mindedness and intolerance!
We are all in this together as a nation, and the Republican Party must change dramatically, and must repudiate the Tea Party Movement whackos, or it will expire in the near future!
“Lyndon B. Johnson was able to overcome Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, and courageously get through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965” Actually President Lyndon Johnson, who had an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Congress, liberal Democrats, together with Conservative and Liberal Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, a conservative Republican, who convinced all but six Republicans to vote for cloture on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This vote broke a Southern filibuster led by Senators Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Strom Thurmond (D-SC). The “Conservative Coalition” which was made up of the conservative wing of the Republican Party led by Taft and the Southern Democrats, was primarily a coalition against the New Deal. The wing led by Taft did not share the Southern Democrats policies and views on civil rights and segregation. Although the coalition usually voted together on economic issues, the differed on civil rights. Republicans (and particularly conservative Republicans) played in the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Contrary to popular amnesia, it was the congressional Republicans, conservatives included, not the Democrats, who were most responsible for this great victory for equal civil rights for all Americans. The civil-rights bill of 1964 was enacted with strong bipartisan and bi-ideological (conservative and liberal) support. But, the credit for the civil-rights victory has gone almost exclusively to liberals and Democrats, particularly to Senator Hubert Humphrey (D, Minn.) in Congress, and to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. However, much of the hard work of advancing the legislation was done by congressional Republicans — conservative stalwarts including Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, Charles Halleck of Indiana, William McCulloch of Ohio, Robert Griffin of Michigan, Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio, Clarence Brown of Ohio, Roman Hruska of Nebraska, and moderates such as Thomas Kuchel of California, Kenneth Keating of New York, and Clark MacGregor of Minnesota. All of these Republicans served as major leaders of the pro-civil-rights coalition either as floor managers or captains for different sections of the bill.
Although the Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress at the time, a much-higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill. For example, in the House, Republicans voted for civil rights by a margin of 79 percent to 21 percent, 136-35. The Democrats’ margin was 153-91 or 63 percent to 37 percent.
However, the single-most-important vote for the legislation was the attempt to cut off the anti-civil-rights filibuster in the Senate. In order for the bill to pass, civil-rights supporters needed two thirds of the Senate to break a filibuster by the opposition. Republicans voted overwhelmingly to break the filibuster by 81.8 percent (27-6), but only 65.7 percent of the Democrats voted to end the filibuster (44-23). Thus, if only Republicans in the Congress had voted, any potential filibuster would easily have been overridden. But, if only Democrats had voted, the pro-civil-rights forces would not have been able to obtain the necessary two/thirds vote to break the filibuster and the civil-rights bill would have died. No Republicans, conservatives and moderates, in Congress, no civil-rights bill — it is as simple as that.
The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles†or “code†for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.†Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.
Only a handful of Republicans opposed the civil-rights bill. The most prominent among them was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who became the party’s presidential candidate in 1964. Interestingly, Goldwater had always been a strong supporter of racial equality and supported the Eisenhower civil-rights bills of 1957 and 1960 that strengthened voting rights for African Americans. As Lee Edwards noted in The Conservative Revolution: “As chief of staff of the Arizona National Guard he [Goldwater] had pushed for desegregation of the guard two years before President Truman desegregated the U.S. armed forces.” Goldwater stated that workforce discrimination was “morally wrong,” but worried that in the future the federal government might “require people to discriminate on the basis of color or race or religion” and, thus, in the end, opposed the bill.
The civil-rights bill of 1964 banned discrimination in voting, public accommodations, education, federal programs, and employment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. In supporting the legislation, the bipartisan coalition invoked Judeo-Christian tradition, the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and particularly the concept of “equality of opportunity.” Southern Democrat opponents charged that the legislation would lead to racial preferences, but the bipartisan congressional leaders clearly stated that this was not the intent of the bill.
On April 9, 1964, Hubert Humphrey replied to the allegation that Title VII on employment discrimination would lead to racial preferences by stating, “It the Senator can find in Title VII…any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.”
To ensure that the bill would not be misinterpreted to promote racial and gender preferences, the pro-civil forces added an amendment to Title VII, Section 703 (j) that stated, “Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer…to grant preferential treatment to any individual or any group because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin…on account of an imbalance which may exist…with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, or sex, or national origin…in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons…in any community…or in any available work force….”
By the end of the debate more than 40 members of Congress denounced racial and gender preferences, and no one spoke in favor of them. Opposition to preferences was voiced by liberals including: George McGovern (D, S.D.), Edmund Muskie (D, Md.), Adam Clayton Powell (D, N.Y.), and John Lindsay (R, N.Y.), as well as conservatives including: Everett Dirksen (R. Il.), Gordon Allot (R, Co.), Frank Carlson (R, Kan.), and James Bromwell (R, Iowa).
But in the decades since the passage of the civil-rights bill, judicial activism, and bureaucratic rulemaking have violated the clear intent of the Congress in prohibiting racial and gender preferences. Humphrey should have started eating the pages of the Civil Rights Act one by one.
Since 1964, two serious efforts have been launched to recapture the American principles of individual rights and equal opportunity embodied in the original legislation. First, in the 1980s, the Reagan Justice Department under Edwin Meese and Bradford Reynolds challenged group preferences in the name of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Second, in the 1990s, the California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209) and Washington State’s initiative I-200, promoted by Ward Connerly, used the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in successful referenda that outlawed racial and gender preferences in those states.
Most conservatives and Republicans stood with Meese and Reynolds, and with Connerly. Those who did not should be ashamed of themselves, for they betrayed the spirit of Dirksen, Halleck, McCulloch, and those other rock-ribbed conservative Republicans who played such a large part in enacting the most important civil-rights legislation of the century. Conservatives and Republicans who understand both the history of their party and the bedrock constitutional and moral principles on which it rests support the original intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as well as the foundational principles of the American republic) and the elimination of racial-, ethnic-, and gender-group preferences — once and for all.
Max is running it into the ground now. Max needs to give it up.