Southern Strategy Quotes
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 1963 Civil Rights Bill passage infuriated the Southern Racists, and the Republicans invited them to switch parties in revenge and by 1990 the shift was almost total.
The Nixon "Southern Strategy" was that if the Republican Party made extensive efforts to appeal to minorities, given the previous decades of support of white supremacy, they would only be successful with a few, whereas if the Party went in the other direction and supported the Whites fighting against the Democratic initiated, racist hated, Civil Rights Act, they would get almost all the racist Southern Democrats, which were most white males and many white females. This racist policy enabled the Republicans to gain control of the Federal Government more often than not whereas before, it was very unusual.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
The stranglehold that the Southern Democrats had held on civil rights legislation had been broken in 1968 by Lyndon Johnson and the other Democrats with key support from some liberal Republicans like Lindsay. However, the South felt politically betrayed. The Republican leadership, in what was one of the most brilliant political strategies in American history, played to the disaffected racist Southerners and welcomed into their party. Within the next 30 years virtually the entire South had gone Republican, and the Republican captured both houses of Congress and the Presidency with the South solidly Republican. At the time, Lindsay and some Republican leaders criticized bitterly about the party pandering to the worst racist elements of the nation. The “Party of Lincoln” had become the party of the segregationists, the racists, the hate groups of the country.
Owens had just retired after 24 years in Congress. When Reagan began his campaign the majority of the racists of the South were furious that their party, the Democrats, had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending legal segregation and racism of the South. Reagan implemented a “Southern Strategy” by using code words that endorsed Southern racism and this swung the formerly Democratic “Solid” South to the Republican side changing the balance of power for years. Although Reagan was not himself racist and was a very popular President there were many who never forgot his pandering to the racists to get elected to begin with.
