Knowledge is Power…Voting & District Power!

Noel Pinnock, MPA

In the Beginning…

The Republican Party was formed in 1854 after the Democrats voted to protect and to extend slavery. The 1860 Democrat platform declared its support for the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery passed Congress with support of every voting Republican member at the time, with the support of only 23% of the Democrat members.

When the 14th Amendment passed, not even one Democrat in Congress voted for civil rights for African-Americans. The Republican Party of Texas emerged in Houston on July 4, 1867, with 150 African Americans and 20 Anglos. That same year, the Ku Klux Klan actively began to attack African-Americans and Republicans.

Two of the first three statewide leaders of the Republican Party of Texas were African-American. The first 42 African-Americans elected to Texas Legislature were all Republicans. From 1865-1869, Texas Democrats passed “Black Codes” to prohibit African-Americans from voting, holding office, and serving on juries. They also refused to acknowledge Juneteenth and even drafted a new State constitution requiring that State Representatives and Senators be only “of the white race (males).”

When the Republicans gained the Texas Legislature in 1869, they established a system of free public schools to educate all the children of the state (something Democrats had refused to do) and started a Texas State Militia and a Texas State Police in which African-Americans proudly served.

When Democrats recaptured the Texas government in 1872, Democratic Governor Richard Coke’s election was described as “the restoration of white supremacy and Democratic rule.” Texas Democrats engaged in bizarre gerrymandering specifically to prevent African-American members from being re-elected to the Legislature. When African-American Republican legislator Robert L. Smith departed in 1897, no African-American Republican was elected in Texas until 1966, when the US Supreme Court ordered Texas Democrats to redraw districts.

Texas Democrats enacted a poll tax that reduced African-American voter turnout in Texas from 100K to only 5K (95% drop in turnout), and passed whites-only primary laws as well as Jim Crow segregation laws.

As victims of Democrat racism and segregation, African-Americans were loyal to the Republican Party they started. In fact, Republican President Herbet Hoover received more than ¾ of the African-American vote over his Democratic challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first president to appoint an African-American to an executive position on the White House staff. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed under Democrat President Lyndon Johnson were based on language proposed by Republicans in the 1960s. And even though they controlled both Houses of Congress by wide margins, Democrats were unable to garner enough Democrat support to pass the bills. Without the strong support of the Republicans in Congress at that time, the civil rights acts of the 1960s would not have become law.

The Big Switch…

African-Americans, who had traditionally given strong support to the Republican Party since the American Civil War, shifted to the Democratic Party in the 1930s, largely due to New Deal relief programs, patronage offers, and the advocacy of civil rights by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In many cities, such as Chicago, entire ward-based Republican apparatuses in black neighborhoods switched parties virtually overnight.

However, in the late 1960s, the New Deal Coalition began to fracture, as more Democratic leaders voiced support for civil rights, upsetting the party’s traditional base of conservative Southern Democrats and ethnic Catholics in Northern cities. After Harry Truman’s platform showed support for civil rights and desegregation laws during the 1948 Democratic National Convention, some Southern Democrats, called “Dixiecrats” temporarily abandoned the national party and voted for South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond. They voted for his electors on the regular state Democratic ticket. Although Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower carried half the South in 1952 and 1956, and Sen. Barry Goldwater also carried five Southern states in 1964, Democrat Jimmy Carter carried all of the South except Virginia.

The national party’s dramatic reversal on civil rights issues culminated when Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On doing so he commented, “We have lost the South for a generation.” Meanwhile, the Republicans, led again by Richard Nixon, were beginning to implement their Southern strategy, which aimed to resist federal encroachment on the states, while appealing to residual racist feelings among conservative and moderate white Southerners in the rapidly growing cities and suburbs of the South. But the shift in the party loyalties and platform led to the big switch!