When Did the GOP Get So White: The Republicans’ Loss of Diversity

[Darth Nubian]

As a southerner I can tell you first hand why Blacks vote democratic. It's because conservative whites are dikks.

 

[superunknown23]

I see that Sly is still flaunting his amazing ignorance around here...

Of course, black people supported the GOP in the old days (it was the party of Emancipation!) The most racist folks in this country were southerners. Republicans were considered liberal northerners, while the South was solidly conservative democrat.
Then things changed dramatically in the 50s and 60s.
Despite the political risks, LBJ pushed for civil rights legislation, angering southern conservatives along the way (dems and dixiecrats).
The result? Them racist southerners flocked to the desperate GOP, which was in disarray after LBJ won the 1964 election in a landslide over the segregationist Republican Barry Goldwater.
Is it a coincidence that Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and other southern states went republican for the first time EVER in the 1960s and have remained so? In 1964, Mississippi went from solidly democrat to 86% republican after just ONE election cycle! What the f** happened? You'd think the Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with this sudden switch?

The GOP stopped being the party of Lincoln in the 60s and became a Goldwater-Thurmond-Helms-Falwell-Nixon-Duke-Limbaugh-Reagan-Bush-Palin diaspora. Why would self-respecting black people associate with these bigots?
Do you honestly believe that men like Rockefeller, Everett Dirksen, Ike or even Teddy Roosevelt would still feel at home in the current GOP? This is the party of Jefferson Davis now, not Lincoln.

Also, it's so funny when republicans keep referring to MLK to obliquely criticize black people. Conservatives absolutely DESPISED him when he was alive (especially William Buckley, Falwell, Reagan, Helms, Nixon and others who called him a dangerous communist)... but now that he's sanctified (and safely dead) some are even trying to claim him (didn't he vote for JFK and LBJ?)
Sorry, but you ain't fooling no one

 

[superunknown23]

"The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. The "best man" at this ceremony was a senator whose voting record, philosophy, and program were anathema to all the hard-won achievements of the past decade."
- MLK, July 16, 1964 (after segregationist Barry Goldwater won the GOP presidential nomination)

"The war has given the extreme right, the anti-labor, anti-Negro, and anti-humanistic forces a weapon of spurious patriotism to galvanize its supporters into reaching for power, right up to the White House. It hopes to use national frustration to take control and restore the America of social insecurity and power for the privileged. When a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor can become a leading war hawk candidate for the Presidency, only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events."
- MLK, November 1967 (on Vietnam and Ronald Reagan)

Lee Atwater, the father of the GOP's Southern Strategy, explaining it shortly before his death in 1991: "You start out in 1954 by saying, '******, ******, ******.' By 1968 you can't say '******' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.
"And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than '******, ******.'

Here's William Buckley, National Review founder and widely considered as the GOP greatest "intellectual" (and Ron Paul's hero):
“I am convinced that Martin Luther King belongs behind bars along with everyone else who conspires to break the law.”
“If the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote and were to use it as a block and pursuant to directives handed down by some more demagogic Negro leaders, chaos would ensue.”
“The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes - the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.”
*After the Birmingham church bombing:
"Let us gently say the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur — of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.
And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham’s Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free."
*After MLK was assassinated:
“The martyrdom [King] seemed sometimes almost to be seeking may commend him to history and to God, but not likely to Scarsdale, New York, which has never credited the charge that the white community of America conspires to ensure the wretchedness of brothers of Martin Luther King . . .”

 

[superunknown23]

The Civil Rights Act vote, a referendum on Jim Crow, clearly illustrated the northern liberal/southern conservative split:

The original House version:
* Southern Democrats: 7-87
* Southern Republicans: 0-10
* Northern Democrats: 145-9
* Northern Republicans: 138-24

The Senate version:
* Southern Democrats: 1-20
* Southern Republicans: 0-1
* Northern Democrats: 45-1
* Northern Republicans: 27-5

Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was the one who pushed this through committee (despite knowing that his party would consequently lose the South). He acted on his moral convictions, instead of political expediency.
Not surprisingly, racist white southerners immediately fled to the GOP after crying that "the democratic party deserted them and the northern Yankees had taken over".
The Party of Lincoln became the Party of Jefferson Davis and confederate flag wavers...
Black voters noticed it too and have avoided the GOP accordingly.
All this adds up to why black people steer clear of the modern GOP.
Yet, some clueless conservatives actually believe that we vote democrat simply because we're lazy "handout-seekers". Their reasoning is actually based on the racist assumption that we're not smart enough to vote rationally. They also forget that poor black folks on welfare don't even bother to vote... but then again, they assume that we're all on welfare anyway (and latinos are "illegals")
Is it any wonder why non-whites don't vote republican in general?
shyt, Asians on average have higher incomes than whites and yet they still vote overwhelmingly democrat. Do they want "handouts" too?

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Sly is sad because he's a guy who just swallows propaganda from right wing pundits who don't even believe the shyt they're saying, but they know they can get paid and have influence and power because there are people like Sly who do believe the shyt that they're saying.

The difference between the two resident board right wingers, Kingpin and Sly is this: Kingpin is Rush Limbaugh. Sly is the moron who believes Rush Limbaugh.

 

[zerozero]

thanks for posting the details superunknown23... I keep getting shocked at the new things the GOP machine will deny

sometimes global warming doesn't exist.. sometimes voter fraud exists... now the southern strategy doesn't exist

 

[Street Knowledge]

Alot of black people do have conservative beliefs but would never vote GOP

 

[Mr swag]

Obama finished them off for good