|
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.
|
