New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader

10. The Dilemma of Biracial Politics in the South since 1965

10 The Dilemma of Biracial Politics in the South since 1965 1. Predictions I want to start with three predictions. In 1949 the Texas-born political scientist V. O. Key Jr. identified four devices that perpetuated conservative hegemony in the South: one-party rule, a restricted electorate, notably the disfranchisement of blacks, the malapportionment of state legislatures, notably the vast overrepresentation of the black belt, and racial segregation. If these devices were eliminated, Key believed that the “underlying southern liberalism will be mightily strengthened.” He envisaged a vigorous democracy in which party competition for popular support would bring long overdue benefits to the have-nots in the South, who had lost out, he argued, over the long run in factionalized, disorganized politics . He looked forward to class replacing race as the dominant force of southern politics, in which biracial coalitions of lower-income blacks and whites would seek to complement political democracy with economic democracy . He already saw the template of these coalitions in the elections in the late 1940s of some young, liberal white politicians, a “new generation” of southerners whose arrival Franklin Roosevelt had predicted a decade earlier.1 In 1957 Martin Luther King Jr. powerfully laid out the benefits that would accrue if African Americans were given the ballot. “Give us the ballot ,” he demanded at the Prayer Pilgrimage, and they would end lynching, elect judges who will “do justly and love mercy,” implement the Brown school desegregation decision, and “fill the legislature with men of goodwill.”2 Characteristically in 1965 Lyndon Johnson made two contradictory predictions about the Voting Rights Act. At times he fatalistically assumed that he was handing over the South to the Republican Party for the next thirty 168 years, driving whites into the GOP camp. At other times, notably when Larry O’Brien briefed him on the 1964 elections, he excitedly saw the black vote in the South as the “key” to a future liberal Democratic Party in the South.3 Key was simply wrong. Class did not replace race as the major determinant of southern politics. As one Washington political consultant observed during a campaign in Mississippi, “Race here is like sex at a horny prep school. You can’t have a conversation without discussing it.” Only a handful of Key’s New Deal–style, biracial coalitions emerged at the state level in the South— arguably, Edwin Edwards in Louisiana in the 1970s, Cliff Finch in Mississippi in 1975, a feeble rhetorical gesture from George Wallace in 1982. The frustration of lower-income whites with a government that imposed racial change but failed to halt cultural change, spilled over into a hostility to government intervention in the economic sphere that made Key’s liberal hopes chimerical.4 Johnson had both parts of his contradictory prediction right. Fatalism was his path largely. As Lewis Gould has pointed out, for a consummate party politician Johnson was actually not very interested in local party building while he was president. Whites did flock to the Republican Party: after 1964 a majority of southern whites never again voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. As for African Americans, they overwhelmingly supported the Democrats and the Democratic Party changed. For example, Congress became more liberal between 1970 and 1990 and southern Democratic congressmen became ideologically much closer to their northern colleagues.5 But the dilemmas of biracial politics suggest that the more common pattern , particularly in statewide politics, is that Democrats who need to supplement an African American base with possibly 35 to 40 percent of white votes in order to win, increasingly espouse conservative social and economic policies to secure that biracial politics. The way Johnson’s and Key’s predictions have worked out have in good measure shaped the extent to which Martin Luther King Jr.’s optimism was justified. One look at the current Louisiana state legislature is probably enough itself to cast doubt on his hope to “fill the legislature with men of good will.” In fact, the shape of biracial politics has left African American politicians with uncomfortable decisions to make. The results, the extent to which King’s faith in the ballot was justified, are, at best, ambiguous. 2. Initial Counter-revolution There were some immediate dramatic gains for African Americans as a result of the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Newly registered black voters The Dilemma of Biracial Politics in the South since 1965 169 in...