Note: This is part 1 of a two part commentary.

In l964, LBJ and the Democratic party establishment declined to seat the delegation of loyal Democrats from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, led by Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi, despite the fact that the regular white Democrats had secretly decided to support Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for President. Afraid of alienating southern Democrats in that election year, LBJ and the Democrats capitulated to southern racism; effectively surrendering the white vote ever after to Republicans since l964 was the last time that any Democratic Party presidential nominee has won a majority of the white vote.

So 1964 was a watershed year. It was the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Bill and the betrayal of the MFDP. It was as well the year of the urban rebellion in Harlem which kicked off the next half-decade of black urban uprisings which frightened America nearly to death.(Even more so since the Harlem masses were calling on Malcolm to come home from Africa and lead them.

How have the Republicans been so successful in weaning the white vote away from the Democratic Party?  The answer, of course, has been their successful opposition to the black struggle and their artful demonizing of black people. [Barry Goldwater for example, the Republican Senator from Arizona who was Johnson’s opponent in 1964 voted against the ’64 Civil Rights bill!]  Thus the first successful Republican candidate was Richard Nixon in 1968 who ran, on a campaign of “Law and Order” as did Democrat Hubert Humphrey, while “segregation forever” Alabama Governor George Wallace ran a more openly white supremacist campaign. But what all these candidates meant by “Law and Order” was their intent to ride “the white backlash” to power and suppress the black uprising ‘by any means necessary.’

And, the Republican who went from race-baiting as a campaign tactic to turning the government itself against Black America was Ronald Reagan who kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.  Promptly endorsed by the Klan, Reagan rejected the endorsement.  But of course the signal had been sent.

The fact then that Obama has cited Ronald Reagan as a president to emulate suggests that, growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia and then living in the rarefied campus atmosphere of Harvard's Law School--despite Henry Louis Gates’ latest encounter with the Cambridge police and Obama's own community organizing experience in Chicago--he has failed to understand either the reality of America's racial history nor the Republican definition of "compromise.” But Robert Dole spelled it out, quite specifically, in 1996 during his presidential campaign when he said: ”Compromise is getting ninety percent of what we want now and ten percent later."

Part 2 of this commentary will appear next week.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member William L. (Bill) Strickland Teaches political science in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also the Director of the Du Bois Papers Collection. The Du Bois Papers are housed at the University of Massachusetts library, which is named in honor of this prominent African American intellectual and Massachusetts native. Professor Strickland is a founding member of the independent black think tank: Institute of the Black World (IBW), headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Strickland was a consultant to both series of the prize-winning documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize (PBS Mini Series Boxed Set), and the senior consultant on the PBS documentary, The American Experience: Malcolm X: Make It Plain.  He also wrote the companion book Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Most recently, Professor Strickland was a consultant on the Louis Massiah film on W.E.B. Du Bois - W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices. Click here to contact Professor Strickland.