Yes it’s True: Dems and GOP did a switcheroo on race

EDITOR’S NOTE: I published this column seven years ago. I still rings true. I thought I’d share it again.

My academic career long ago was a mixed bag because I received terrific grades in the social sciences, but mediocre ones in the natural sciences and other disciplines. But I shined most in history.

That’s why I bristle when somebody on Facebook attempts to “school” me on the subject. I earned all-As in the subject in grammar school and high school and majored in it when I graduated from Grand Valley. I have used history extensively in my work career since, because newspapers essentially are history.

Some Facebook “friends” have suggested I don’t know my American history because I regard the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism, not far from white hoods and burning crosses. Others have suggested I am ignorant of history because I don’t buy into the notion that the Founding Fathers were “Men of Great Faith” and too often assert that the U.S. Constitution has absolutely no reference to God (you can look it up).

One of the more interesting memes on Facebook is the one I copied and pasted for this post, labeled “A Quick History Lesson.” It is cunning and dishonest because it does not tell the “rest of the story.”

Indeed the Republican Party that exploded onto the national scene in 1854 quickly became the party of Abraham Lincoln and the anti-slavery party. The statistics presented in this art work surprise me not a whit. The GOP spearheaded the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, all for expanding rights for black men in the United States. Meanwhile, the Democrats back then were the Party of No, the obstructionists, the defenders of Jim Crow.

At one time, the American deep south, taking in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Texas and Tennessee, was reliably Democratic in its voting habits. And the Ku Klux Klan had a significant role in the 1924 Democratic Convention.

But in 1928, Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate from a major party, was the Dems’ standard bearer and Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power in 1932, riding a new coalition of urban middle class and black voters and dissatisfaction with how the Great Depression was being handled by Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party, the party of business.

Things got even more interesting in 1948 when a young senator from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey, succeeded in getting a civil rights plank in the platform for Harry Truman’s campaign. South Carolina Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond pulled his state’s delegation and they went home as “Dixiecrats.”

Thurmond later resurfaced as a Republican and helped Richard Nixon’s southern strategy to counter the popularity of Democratic Alabama George Wallace.

But earlier in the 1960s, telling signs of the big switch for the two parties were showing. Democrat Lyndon Johnson proudly shepherded the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act through Congress, and he correctly predicted the Democratic Party would lose the south for the next half century.

The south went solidly for Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, despite Johnson’s landslide victory. And Nixon, helped by Thurmond, carried the south to victory over that same Hubert Humphrey who had caused so much trouble 20 years before.

Wallace was like an ancient relic as the old southern Democrat who promoted segregation in 1972. And in 1970, Jimmy Carter was elected as Democratic governor, and he shocked old-timers immediately by declaring Jim Crow was dead in Georgia.

So between 1865 and 1965, there was a lot of truth to the meme that appears with this post. However, the two sides have made a dramatic switch in the last half century, so dramatic that you had to strain to find any person of color even attending the 2016 Republican Convention.

So it really is dishonest to try to paint the Democratic Party of today as still the racist organization it was 150 years ago. And it’s dishonest and wrong to suggest the Republican Party, though the party of Lincoln 150 years ago, today still carries on that tradition of fairness to minorities. I believe it not.

Making this assertion simplifies history to being stagnant, as changeless as canal water. So I say to those who support this meme — You don’t know history.