Warning the South Will Rise Again Meme

Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-AZ, presents President Ronald Reagan with a gift in the Oval Office, Feb. 23, 1981. © Bettmann/ Corbis hibernate explanation

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© Bettmann/ Corbis

Forty years after the passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act, history and politics are jubilant a strange convergence: Information technology was the passage of the Civil Rights Deed that launched the ascent of the president who died concluding week, Ronald Reagan.

The Civil Rights Act, signed July 2, 1964, by President Lyndon Johnson, ended legal discrimination against blacks at hotels, restaurants and section stores. It besides made discrimination illegal in hiring. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee that yr, decided to make himself a vocalism for opponents of the Act.

Goldwater said he supported the white Southern position on ceremonious rights, which was that each and every state had a sovereign right to command its laws. The Arizona Republican argued that each American has the right to determine whom to rent, whom to do business with and whom to welcome in his or her eatery. The senator was right at home with Southern politicians who chosen the Civil Rights Act an attack on "the Southern way of life."

To overcome the forces arrayed against the bill, Johnson needed as of his political skill and every scrap of emotional backwash from the previous November'due south assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Simply in one case the bill had passed, Johnson told confidants that Democrats might have lost the South to Republicans for years to come. He was exactly correct.

Today the Southward is solidly Republican. In every presidential ballot since 1964 -- save the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 -- Dixie has been the middle of GOP presidential politics. The white Southern vote was key to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and President George Westward. Bush-league was elected in 2000 because he carried every Southern country.

Ronald Reagan was key to the South's transition to Republican politics. Goldwater got the brawl rolling, but Reagan was at his side from the very showtime. During the 1964 entrada, Reagan gave speeches in back up of Goldwater and spoke out for what he called individual rights -- read that as well as states' rights. Reagan also and portrayed any opposition as back up for totalitarianism -- read that as communism.

In 1976, Reagan sought the Republican nomination confronting the incumbent President Gerald Ford. Reagan'due south entrada was on the ropes until the primaries hit the Southern states, where he won his first central victory in North Carolina. Throughout the Due south that spring and summertime, Reagan portrayed himself as Goldwater's heir while criticizing Ford every bit a captive of Eastern establishment Republicans fixated on forced integration.

Reagan lost the nomination to Ford in 1976. But when the former California governor ran for the presidency again in 1980, he began his campaign with a controversial appearance in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been brutally killed. It was at that sore spot on the racial map that Reagan revived talk about states' rights and curbing the power of the federal government.

To many information technology sounded like lawmaking for announcing himself equally the candidate for white segregationists. After he defeated President Carter, a native Southerner, Reagan led an administration that seemed to cater to Southerners withal aroused over the passage of the Civil Rights Human action afterwards 16 years. The Reagan team condemned busing for school integration, opposed affirmative activeness and fifty-fifty threatened to veto a proposed extension of the Voting Rights Human activity (the sequel to the 1964 Civil Rights Deed passed a year afterwards and focused on ballot participation). President Reagan also tried to allow Bob Jones University, a segregated Southern schoolhouse, to repossess federal tax credits that had long been denied to racially discriminatory institutions.

The genial Californian Republican denied there was any racism implicit in those policies. Even when he was characterizing poor women as welfare queens driving around in pink Cadillacs, he said it was a but matter of encouraging people to pull themselves upwards by the bootstraps. The America he seemed to envision had no need to deal with racial divisions, and he said his only desire was to encourage self-sufficiency for all Americans and to reduce all Americans' dependence on government programs.

Today it is difficult to believe that Reagan had such success using the Civil Rights Act as a whipping male child. The Civil Rights Deed is now so widely accepted that it doesn't attract controversy in any region of the country -- including the Due south. There is no debate about the right of black people, Hispanics or Asians to stay in a hotel, shop in a store or to apply for a chore without fear of racial discrimination.

In 2004, minorities are one-third of the national population and it is hard to understand how anyone could have ever argued in favor of allowing states to practice racial discrimination. Information technology is even harder to remember that in June of 1963 President Kennedy -- with race riots threatening to erupt nationwide -- had to go on national Idiot box to say that arguments over whether blacks could eat at a tiffin counter were creating a moral crisis for a nation.

After Kennedy'due south death, Johnson was able to accelerate what Dr. Martin Luther Rex had called "a horse and buggy pace" on civil rights legislation. To lessen Southern opposition, the onetime senator from Texas stripped voting rights out of the neb and fabricated it articulate that the act did not require racial quotas for hiring employees.

Johnson's maneuvers won him support from moderate Republicans as well every bit from Democrats in the North, Midwest and West. But the South was not won over. And as Johnson predicted, his victory had a biting after gustation. It sent the likes of Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and eventually other leading Southern politicians into the embrace of the Republican Political party. And in that location they found themselves in the visitor of some other former Democrat, Ronald Reagan.

At present the nation celebrates the life and legacy of Reagan with a state funeral just days earlier celebrations are scheduled to begin for the 40th ceremony of the Civil Rights Deed. Reagan's funeral, no uncertainty, will get far more than attention.

But every day America is a commemoration of the alter created past the 1964 Civil Rights Human activity. That ongoing celebration of racial equality and racial justice has outlived President Reagan. Only the racial polarization that characterized his presidency lives on as well.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2004/06/10/1953700/reagan-the-south-and-civil-rights

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