Geography of Race in the United States/Race, voting rights and segregation/Racial realignment of parties, 1948-1980

The "Solid South," 1948

The other side of the coin of black disenfranchisement in the South was one-party rule. As this map of returns in the 1948 Congressional elections shows, almost all counties in the Deep South delivered 98% or more votes to the Democrats. Matters were soon to change. Democratic President Truman was the first president since Grant to take up the cause of blacks when he desegregated the armed forces. The emergence of advocates of black civil rights in the national Democratic party was to set the stage for an historic realignment of party affiliations in the South. At the Presidential level, rebellious "Dixiecrats"--Southern Democrats opposed to the mild civil rights platform of the national Democratic party, ran Strom Thurmond for President, winning 39 electoral votes (S.C., Miss., Ala., La.). This was the first indication that white Southern Democrats were willing to abandon their party over racial issues--although not yet that they were willing to join the Republican party.

Portent of an "Emerging Republican Majority," 1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forced the South to desegregate its public accommodations (public transport, restaurants, etc.) and forbade racial discrimination in employment. When President Johnson signed the Act into law, he lamented that his action would end the dominance of the Democratic Party in the South. The first indication that he was right came in the Presidential election of 1964. Although the Civil Rights Act could not have been passed without the support of moderate Republicans, overcoming the steadfast opposition of Southern Democrats, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Sen. Barry Goldwater, opposed the Act. No racist himself, Goldwater nevertheless believed that the Act exceeded the Constitutional powers of Congress. His message made him popular in the Deep South, where he won the only states outside his home state of Arizona. (Va. and W. Va., missing data here, went for Johnson.) Although the election was a disaster for the Republicans, Goldwater's sweep of the Deep South was the first indication that the Republican party could successfully bid for a majority in the South.

George Wallace and electoral opposition to civil rights, 1968

In 1968, George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate against Nixon and Humphrey, on an explicitly segregationist platform. Humphrey had been the main champion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Senate; Nixon, while no civil rights activist, rejected an overtly racist platform. Feeling abandoned by both parties, Southern white racists flocked to Wallace's cause, winning him the Deep South states of Ark., La., Miss., Ala. and Ga.

Political analyst and Nixon campaigner Kevin Phillips, analysing 1948-1968 voting trends, viewed these rebellious Southern voters as ripe for Republican picking. In The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, 1969), he correctly predicted that the Republican party would shift its national base to the South by appealing to whites' disaffection with liberal democratic racial and welfare policies. President Nixon shrewdly played this "Southern strategy" by promoting affirmative action in employment, a "wedge" issue that later Republicans would exploit to split the Democratic coalition of white working class and black voters. (See John Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (U Chicago Press, 1996)). This strategy soon produced the racial party alignments that prevail today.

% Distribution of Blacks, 1980

To grasp the significance of the racial realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties, the geographic distribution of blacks in 1980 provides a useful guideline. The continuing geographic legacy of slavery is evident in the high concentrations of blacks in the Southern "Black Belt" (so named for its rich black soil, not for its racial composition) running from Virginia to the Mississippi. However, in contrast with 1880, blacks are also substantially represented in the Northeast corridor from Philadelphia through N.J., New York City to Hartford; along I-94 from Detroit to Chicago, and in scattered urban areas (e.g., Buffalo, Pittsburgh). Watch these areas closely in the final map on this tour.

The "Reagan Revolution," 1984

The success of the "Southern strategy" was made evident at the Presidential level in the 1984 election, pitting Ronald Reagan against Democrat Walter Mondale. (Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee for 1976 and 1980, obscured this because he was competitive in the South). Democrats had picked up votes in the South due to the re-enfranchisement of blacks via the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is observable in the low Republican (hence high Democratic) turnout in areas with large black populations--the Southern Black Belt and urban North. However, Democrats lost more white votes than they gained black votes--not only in the South, but in white Northern suburbs. Thomas and Mary Edsall, in Chain Reaction (W.W. Norton, 1991), argue that Republican success in the Northern suburbs showed that opposition to government programs that benefit blacks appealed to Northern whites, who, identifying crime and welfare dependency with blacks, were receptive to coded Republican messages ("welfare queens," "special interests," "quotas") appealing to antiblack racial antipathies.

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