Richard Nixon Quotes
I will lay off the pro-Negro crap.
Nixon, in his second attempt to win the Presidency was told by a small group of Southern Republican politicians that his support was wavering in the South. They had already left the Democratic Party in reaction to the Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were concerned because in order to try and capture some of the more liberal anti-war Democrats, Nixon had been making speeches advocating the vigerous enforcement of of civil rights and improving the lot of the Negro. But Nixon could not afford to lose his political base inb the south. Hence the promise which did not keep very long after he was elected President. Nixon was not a strong civil rights President, but he was totally without principles and had no political idiology he would sacrifice any of his political capital for. So once he was elected, he didn't want to offend the centerists whose support he needed for his legislatrive program so he did pay lip service to the prinicples of equality when he himself was anti-Black, andti-Semitic and prejudiced in many areas including against intelelctuals.
Richard Nixon. Promise made privately to Southern Republican Politicians, 1968
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Eight years and a Civil War later, he had changed his mind and was the sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1866—the first Federal civil rights law in America. See {587711}.
Moynihan was actually not the political originator of the "benign neglect" phrase which became so controversial. It had been first used by The Earl of Durham in his 1839 Durham Report on the English policy towards Canada.
Southerners and some others wanted to discriminate and fought civil rights legislation. The excuse they gave for opposition was that the Federal Government was usurping the power of the states to determine what civil rights people of the state would have. Shellabarger made it clear that the civil rights bill would not require ANY rights to be given. It just required that if the states granted rights, they could not discriminate by race as to those rights. But the states were free to decide which rights all citizens of the state would have. See {623473} .
Blacks were fighting and dying in WWII. They were equal when they were under fire, but otherwise not. The war was against fascist protagonists whose creed was inequality while the allies were upholding freedom and equality. But making that aspiration a reality was difficult.
This painting depicted a young black girl walking to school surrounded by 4 U. S. Marshalls protecting her from the crowd of white racists trying to prevent her from attending an elementary school under court order. The vicious race hatred that school integration revealed was the national problem that was then surfacing. The graphic is the illustration that appeared in Look with that name.
Smith, an extreme racist, was so rabid that MacGregor was supporting the Civil Rights Bill, he followed him off the House floor to make this statement. MacGregor jokingly told Smith that he was wrong. He had 17 Negroes in his District.
The President had frequent stag (men only) dinners of national notables. At this dinner, the Chief Justice was seated close to the attorney who was representing the Southern segregationists in the Brown v Board of Education case that was before the court. Warren had objected to being in such close proximity to one party to a case before the court. Eisenhower, had taken Warren aside to smooth any bad feelings and thinking Warren might be distressed by the attorney’s racist and segregationist views tried to explain the Southern point of view. Although Eisenhower was not a racist or segregationist himself, he had worked closely with Southerners his whole career, and thought he understood them. Warren was so surprised by the President’s insensitive remark, that he noted it and revealed it in his memoirs.
Scott was then the Special Advisor on Negro Affairs to the Secretary of War in the Woodrrow Wilson administration. Wilaon hs commited U. S. Troops to fight oversease to "make the world safe for democracy", but many blacks and whites also saw gross hypocricy in asking Negores to fight for a Jim Crow, segregated America. See the related quotation 644805. Scott was also the major aide to Booker T, Washington, one of the leading Negro educators but a very pliable man on equal rights for the Blacks. The problem for the administration was much greater than that of WWII where the president was seen as very sympathetic to Blacks while Wilson was himself a racist. And in WWII the fight against the Nazis was a fight agaisnt racial supremacy. So this quotation and Scott's role was very important to the administration.
This was art of the Nixon "Southern Strategy" to alienate the white supremacists and racists from the Democratic Party with Civil Rights legislation and rhetoric, and get most of them to become Republicans. But as Phillips observed, when Negroes began voting in significant numbers in the South the party switching really accelerated.
The Quakers were in the forefront of not only the abolition of slavery but of the integration of the races.
As enlightened and progressive that his views on Blacks were, he was amazingly racist when it came to Native Americans. See {588991}.
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, Nixon previously served as the 36th vice president from 1953 to 1961, having risen to national prominence as a representative and senator from California. After five years in the White House that saw the conclusion to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet Union and China, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, he became the only president to resign from the office, following the Watergate scandal.
