Pat Buchanan sets record straight on Democratic Party’s civil-rights record.
“For the first time since President Richard M. Nixon’s divisive ‘Southern strategy’ that sent whites to the Republican Party and blacks to the Democrats …” began a New York Times story last week.
Thus has one of the big lies of U.S. political history morphed into a cliche – that Richard Nixon used racist politics to steal the South from a Democratic Party battling heroically for civil rights.
A brief stroll through Bruce Bartlett’s “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past” might better enlighten us.
Where Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the U.S. government and had the pro-Klan film “Birth of a Nation” screened in his White House.
Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of the Old Confederacy all six times they ran, when Southern blacks had no vote. Disfranchised black folks did not seem to bother these greatest of liberal icons.
As vice president, FDR chose “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas who played a major role in imposing a poll tax to keep blacks from voting.
Among FDR’s Supreme Court appointments was Hugo Black, a Klansman who claimed FDR knew this when he named him in 1937 and that FDR told him that “some of his best friends” in Georgia were Klansmen.
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