Columnist
The recent conviction of the 80-year-old Mississippi racist for a 41-year-old murder reminds us that the new Republican Party, the GOP that gave us Nixon, Ford and Reagan, Bush 41 and his unspeakable son, rode into power on the backs of the Ku Klux Klan.
This triple murder in June 1964, to sum up for the attention-deficient, hastened the passing of the first Civil Rights Act in July of the same year. By promising blacks the vote, this act stampeded white Southerners into the arms of the national GOP and provided the margin needed to dominate Congress and the White House. These party-switchers would, of course, demand their pound of flesh and, along the way, pay homage to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who made it all possible.
The Civil Rights Act was first introduced by President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated before its enactment. This historic reform prescribed the initiation of equal rights for blacks in voting, education, public accommodations, union membership and in federally assisted programs. Passage of the law fell to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was a protégé of Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, who led the filibuster against it, declaring: “We will resist to the bitter end any measure which would bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”
After signing the bill into law, Johnson reportedly told close associates that “I am afraid we have lost the South for a hundred years.”
What the Democratic president from Texas meant was that the entrenched power, savvy and resources that resided in the Southern white male – and I might add racist – wing of the Democratic Party would migrate to the Republicans. This seismic shift of Dixiecrats, LBJ prophesied, would be sufficient to dominate national politics for a full century. Since JFK in 1960, no Democrat has won a presidential election unless (as with Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) he was himself a white male from the South.
So what has the recent conviction of Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in Philadelphia, Miss., to do with the modern GOP? More than the party would openly admit.
The white South as a touchstone for success has not been lost on the GOP. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign by trekking to Philadelphia in search of symbolism and Mississippi blessings. It was at this terrible place, so sacred then to Cowboy Reagan, that, on the night of June 21, 1964, the Klan abducted and murdered Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.
The trio had come to register black Neshoba County voters and were arrested for their efforts. Their disappearance shocked the nation mainly because two of the victims were white, a fact their humble survivors woefully concede all these years later. Between 1882 and 1946, according to the Negro Yearbook, a minimum of 3,425 African-Americans had been lynched in the South – a rate of one such lynching a week for 64 years. This streak continued until 1953, when the New York Times reported that May 10 marked the completion of the only 12-month period since 1882 when there were no reported lynchings of Negroes in the “modern South.”
When the tumult over the missing trio reached the White House, Johnson beseeched FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover not to treat it as just another black lynching, but to solve it. The badly beaten bodies of the three men were found in a hole that had been dug on a farm before the attack.
Forty-one years to the date after the killings, Killen, the Klansman, was convicted of manslaughter and given a maximum sentence of 60 years in prison for his role in the case. This was by no means swift justice.
The incident itself helped grease the wheels of American history. Without it, the Civil Rights Act may not have passed, and certainly not by a 73-27 vote margin in the Senate. Almost immediately, the racist Dixiecrats within the Democratic Party began looking for a new lair.
Richard Nixon flirted with the disaffected Southern white male voters in ’68 and again ’72. However, it was Reagan who fell into a swoon over the Dixiecrats and began wooing them with great vigor. By his second term, they had been won over as “Reagan Democrats” fulfilling LBJ’s prophecy that pursuing equality for African-Americans would cost the Democrats the White House.
The South may have lost the Civil War, but it appears to have won the peace, along with the Klan.