Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government

5. Right Turn? The Republican Party and African American Politics in Post-1965 Mississippi

5 Right Turn? The Republican Party and African American Politics in Post-1965 Mississippi Chris Danielson The state of Mississippi, regarded as the most recalcitrant of the southern states in the civil rights era, might have been expected after the civil rights laws of the 1960s to have immediately seen the surge of an all-white Republican Party that advocated federal restraint and cared little for black voters. That may seem true now in the era of Haley Barbour, but this was not necessarily the predestined path for the Mississippi GOP. While many scholars have commented on the role that race has played in the shift of southern whites to the GOP, southern party leaders did not always immediately embrace the creation of all-white parties. The Mississippi Republican Party experienced a considerable internal schism over the viability of the black vote in post-1965 Mississippi. Federal law also complicated the aims of state GOP conservatives, and GOP presidential administrations pursued a more nuanced path than simply embracing white segregationists. While Republican presidents favored weakening or abolishing the Voting Rights Act when it came up for extension, GOP administrations, especially that of Ronald Reagan, actually expanded the state’s black office-holding through their enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. For much of the pre-1965 era, the Republican Party commanded the allegiance of black Mississippians, but this had changed by the middle of the century. The Mississippi Republican Party, first under the leadership of the Black and Tans and then under the Lily White delegation after 1960, did not provide any examples of leadership for civil rights activists during the 1950s. With the state GOP and Democrats both appealing to white segregationists , black Mississippians relied on their own political efforts during 150 · Chris Danielson the 1950s and 1960s, through civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).1 When federal registrars arrived in Mississippi in 1965 to register black voters under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the increase in the number of black voters was not significant enough to have an immediate impact on the state GOP. The party leadership under Wirt Yerger, a Greenville insurance salesman, firmly opposed civil rights legislation. While the Republicans did not indulge in the crude racial demagoguery of Democrats like Ross Barnett, they represented a growing demographic of suburban, white, conservative professionals across the South who had little interest in soliciting black votes. Like the rest of the emerging Sun Belt, Mississippi’s suburban areas became the base of Magnolia State Republicanism. Yerger told the national Republican chairman the oft-repeated statement that he did not favor “writing off completely any vote [the black vote specifically], but I do think it is best to go hunting where the ducks are.”2 The “ducks” were the rural whites who made up much of the state Democratic Party. Prentiss Walker took that approach in 1966 when he challenged Senator James Eastland’s reelection bid. A chicken farmer who had won a congressional seat in the 1964 election, Walker joined his Democratic colleagues in opposing the Voting Rights Act and solely focused on the white vote. During the Senate campaign, Walker tried to “outsegregate,” in the words of state AFL-CIO chief Claude Ramsey, Eastland, but most white voters stayed with Eastland.3 The failed GOP candidacies in the 1960s showed the difficulty the white conservatives of the party had trying to convince white Democrats to leave the party of states’ rights and segregation. A two-party system threatened to weaken white supremacy by dividing the white electorate. While white Mississippians voted overwhelmingly for Goldwater in 1964, they did not reciprocate with state Republicans since their Democratic opponents had even more fervent commitments to Jim Crow. The “Great White Switch” had occurred, as Earl and Merle Black labeled the shift of southern white voters to voting Republican in presidential elections, but party identification with the Democrats continued on the state and local level due to the continuing white dominance of the Mississippi Democratic Party.4 Black voting continued to grow as registration increased in the late 1960s, and the state GOP could not ignore the numbers. The enfranchisement of black Mississippians under the Voting Rights Act created a major ideological cleavage in the Republican Party that would last for years even as they made another bid for the governor’s office in 1967. Since 1960, The Republican...