Business in Black and White: American Presidents and Black Entrepreneurs in the Twentieth Century

5. Nixon and the “Militants” The GOP and Black Capitalism during the Presidential Election of 1968

110 5 Nixon and the “Militants” The GOP and Black Capitalism during the Presidential Election of 1968 One of the most turbulent periods in American history occurred in 1968. Besides the growing internal discord related to the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam as well as increasing racial polarization , Americans during this fateful year were being asked to elect a new president. In this setting, candidate Richard Nixon used his “Southern strategy,” which included the use of such racially charged code words as “law and order,” to elicit support from conservative whites. Even so, the “Machiavellian” Nixon simultaneously and secretly conferred with noted black power advocates Floyd McKissick and Roy Innis to help construct his black capitalism initiative. Employing a less devious campaign strategy, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, Nixon’s chief competitor for the Republican nomination in 1968, publicly declared the efficacy of greater economic development in America’s primarily black inner cities. In the end, Nixon, aided by his working relationship with black militants and his both overt and subtle overtures to conservative whites, beat back Rockefeller’s challenge as well as that of Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey to win the White House. When looking back at the words and actions of Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968, the evidence clearly suggests that all the candidates in 1968 endorsed policies to stimulate African American community development. Nevertheless, Richard M. Nixon, because he was the eventual winner of this pivotal election, has come to personify this federal policy initiative. Thus it is important to analyze Nixon’s motivation for placing black capitalism on the public ’s agenda and subsequently on the government’s agenda. Because of Nixon’s complex and well-documented personality and political persona, three explanatory scenarios will be used to accomplish this task. The GOP and Black Capitalism, 1968 111 Explanatory Scenario 1: The “Southern Strategy” and Black Capitalism According to Earl Black and Merle Black’s The Rise of Southern Republicans, two political circumstances precipitated Nixon’s use of the Southern strategy during the 1968 presidential campaign. First, Nixon sought to expand the GOP’s inroads in the South made during the Eisenhower administration. Second, owing to Johnson’s and the Democratic Party’s direct association with civil rights legislation, the GOP viewed white southerners as being increasingly receptive to voting for a Republican. Although the South appeared to be solidly Democratic during the first decades of the twentieth century, according to Black and Black, the Republican Party made significant inroads in the region during the Eisenhower administration. The Blacks note that during the 1950s, the GOP directed recruitment efforts “toward the more dynamic Peripheral South states, where urbanization and industrialization were creating large white middle classes sympathetic to the economic conservatism of the Republican party.”1 Consequently, by 1968, urban, middle-class whites in the upper South were already predisposed to vote Republican. Although the Republican Party already had a constituency in the upper South, Nixon viewed reaching other white southerners as “as an unmatched opportunity to strengthen his political base and that of his party.”2 Consequently, to broaden his base of white voter support throughout the South, Nixon focused on exploiting the greatest fear of whites in the Deep South: black people. As an illustration of Nixon’s political cynicism, while he engaged in his Southern strategy, his campaign also promoted the notion of black capitalism. From the standpoint of the Machiavellian Nixon, promoting black economic development would not necessarily offend southern whites because the South had long had its own, separate, black business infrastructure. Although Nixon identified the South as a focal point of his campaign, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace also saw Dixie as a significant source of political support. Thus another important goal of Nixon’s Southern strategy was to undercut the more conservative Ronald Reagan’s quest for the GOP nomination, as well as to undercut George Wallace’s independent quest for the White House.3 112 Chapter 5 Another factor leading to Nixon’s Southern strategy was his embrace of the ideas of Kevin Phillips, then a relatively unknown demographer and statistician working for the Nixon presidential campaign. Phillips’s assertions, published in 1969 as The Emerging Republican Majority, contributed to Nixon’s electoral success in 1968. According to him, Nixon and subsequent GOP presidential candidates could be guaranteed victory and could help establish a Republican majority in...