On July 29, President Biden spoke at the LBJ Presidential Library to stress his party’s commitment to equal rights of black Americans. This summer is the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer 1964 and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts. It is an important occasion to correct and better understand the pivotal history of that era and how it informs political argument today. Journalists, academics, and Hollywood continue to falsely reify the Democrat party as heroically saving black people from the throes of anti-black racism. One of the significant moments of this alleged rescue is the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964.
The Democrat party under the Senate leadership of Robert Byrd fought the passage of the bill in the Senate for 14 hours of filibuster. President Biden eulogized former Klan member Byrd in 2010. In the speech, Biden described Byrd as “dean of the Senate” and a “dear friend and mentor.”
Six Republican senators and 20 Democrat senators voted to deny cloture alongside Byrd in 1964 — an attempt to prevent the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At the time, the Senate was composed of 67 Democrats and 33 Republicans. Eighty-two percent of the Republican Senate caucus voted for passage of the Civil Rights Act. Two thirds of Democrats supported passage, and one third opposed. The House vote was 289-176 in favor of the legislation. Ninety-one Democrats voted against (37%) the bill in the House, and 35 Republicans voted against it (20%).
The final passage of the bill on June 19 in the Senate may have been a factor in the abduction of James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. These three CORE workers, after helping with training in Oxford, Ohio, traveled to Mississippi to help with black voter registration and educational activities. These efforts were known as Freedom Summer 1964, and hundreds of college students volunteered to help James Farmer, Jr.’s organization — The Congress of Racial Equality — enact the practical necessities of racial equality.
The abduction of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman in Mississippi on June 20, 1964 galvanized the nation and ensured the final signing of the law by LBJ on June 2 as a national and even federal search for the bodies of the civil rights workers continued until August 4. On that date, based on information from FBI informants inside the KKK, the bodies were located beneath an earthen dam. The killings were among the most atrocious in the long struggle for equal rights among blacks in the South.
A sincere and honest history of the struggle for black equality would acknowledge the essential and pivotal role of Republicans, stretching from Lincoln to Grant to Harding and Coolidge to Eisenhower and more. In the aftermath of the Tulsa massacre of a vibrant black community on June 1, 1921, Oklahoma Democrat partisans told reporters the next morning, “Yes, you Republicans made quite a muss of things.” Harding and Coolidge campaigned in Oklahoma in the fall of 1920 in favor of political equality between blacks and whites. They broke the Democrat party’s hold upon the state in November of 1920.
The term “Republican” was used throughout the early 20th century by Democrat partisans as a political slur against those who were either black or black sympathizers. This was common because in the aftermath of emancipation, blacks voted so consistently for the Republican Party. It was an essential component of the argument that the non-white presidential candidate of Warren Harding was unfit to be President in 1920 — since he was alleged by Democrat partisans to have a black grandmother in his genealogy.
The Republican stand against anti-black racism was evident in Eisenhower deploying troops to Little Rock to end anti-black segregation of schoolchildren.
In 1968, the architect of many of the nation’s most important reforms against anti-black segregation — James Farmer, Jr. — ran for Congress as a Republican. Farmer reported in his 1985 biography that the poll worker in New York City conceded that vote fraud was part of how that election was conducted. Despite more than 25 years of sacrifice for American Civil Rights, Farmer lost his election to the first black woman to serve in Congress — Democrat Shirley Chisholm. Republican President Richard Nixon asked Farmer to work in his administration on issues of urban renewal. After working for more than a year under Nixon, his black friends insisted that he resign, believing that Republicans were not on the side of the black community. Farmer was rarely called upon to exert public leadership compared to those black leaders such as Jesse Jackson, who solidified the alliance between the black community and the Democrat party.
Farmer always believed that the black community should not be exclusively controlled by either the Democrats or the Republicans. James Meredith, who singlehandedly desegregated the University of Mississippi remains relatively uncalled upon in current racial controversies because of his profound Christian convictions running counter to current political norms. In more recent history, one of the nation’s most significant black historians, Carol Swain, retired from Vanderbilt University due to public pressure about her political statements against this type of reactionary ideological history. Swain academically deconstructed the sacrosanct “Southern switch strategy,” venerated as the modern verification of Republican anti-blackness.
Kamala Harris correctly observed in the Democrat primary debates of 2020 that Joseph Biden was a defender of anti-black school segregation in the 1970s. Biden said prior to winning the South Carolina primary in 2020 that black voters were not black if they did not vote for him. This call rallied black voters to save the relatively weak Biden campaign of 2020. South Carolina is now the official first stop in Democrat presidential primaries as arranged by the DNC. Biden’s 2020 win in South Carolina with strong help from the black community came at the expense of Bernie Sanders, who actually did work as a leader of CORE at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. In 2016, CNN elevated Richard Spencer from ignominy to spectacle by arguing that he was a white supremacist supporting Donald Trump. When Spencer announced that he was endorsing Joe Biden for president in 2020, he was summarily dropped by CNN and others as a rhetorical marker for “white supremacy.”
Harris and Biden have an opportunity to lower the temperature in American politics by acknowledging the profound positive role Republicans play in reducing anti-blackness. Trump’s role in reducing black incarceration and his support of HBCUs are two important examples that could be acknowledged. The refusal to delineate this more accurate racial history of America serves the narrow partisan interests of the Democrat party and its socially powerful affiliates. It does not well serve the American public or the black community. It harms the soul of America.
Dr. Ben Voth is professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of several academic books regarding political communication, presidential rhetoric, and genocide.
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