For the third installment of our month-long collaboration with the This Day podcast, we go to 1964 and a moment when the two major parties in this country, in a sense, switched. This Day hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Eric K. Ward, executive vice president of Race Forward, to trace the story from Jim Crow through the New Deal and into the Civil Rights Act—and to understand why the Democratic coalition that produced it was always too contradictory to survive. How did Black voters move from Lincoln’s party to LBJ’s? And what did White Southerners do when their party started to leave them behind? Be sure to check out Eric’s documentary White with Fear on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/show/white-with-fear/ Learn more about this special series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/ If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to all episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show Attention, Washington, DC-area listeners! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. The Context host, Alex Lovit, will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one? The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct
Alex Lovit:
Hello, listeners. This is your host, Alex Lovit. Today, we're bringing you part three of our month-long collaboration with a podcast called This Day. If you missed the first two episodes, you don't need to go back and start at the beginning, but we do hope you'll check out the whole series.
To recap, we're doing a special series as part of Kettering's America 250 initiative, Democracy Under Construction. We're covering key events in American history that have brought us closer to an inclusive democracy and all the work that remains to be done. It's a co-production with This Day. So in our feed for the rest of this month, you'll be hearing conversations among this day's co-hosts and guests about these important moments in American history. And if you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day's feed for two more episodes on each of these topics. I'll be the guest on the third episode each week.
And don't forget, the collaboration wraps up with a live recording in Washington DC featuring Kettering Senior Fellow, the Reverend Dr. William Barber II. If you're in the area, join us on Monday, October 19th at the Howard Theater for a live taping of This Day. There's a link in the show notes to buy tickets and to This Day's podcast feed. Okay, here's the episode. Enjoy.
Jody Avrigan:
Hello, and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avrigan.
This week in two parts, we go to 1964 and a moment when the two major parties in this country in a sense switched. As you know, listeners, all this month, we have been partnering with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for a series that we are calling Democracy Under Construction. This is our chance to talk about the key moments that our democracy has expanded, contracted, realigned. And if we are talking about political and democratic realignment, well, the story of Southern realignment is probably the most consequential political shakeup in modern American politics until maybe right now, but that is for later in the discussion or maybe a future episode.
But for now, let's talk about how over the course of the 1960s the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and in turn started to lose many Southern white voters who had been loyal democratic voters basically since the Civil War. So here to discuss the path from Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Hubert Humphrey, LBJ, Wallace, Nixon, as always, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt and Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.
Nicole Hemmer:
Hello, Jody.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Hey there.
Jody Avrigan:
And throughout our partnership with Kettering all this month, we are going to be joined by special guests who are friends of Kettering, people who think deeply about how to make sure our democracy works for all, and no better guest for this episode than Eric K. Ward. Eric is executive vice president of Race Forward and one of our leading experts on the connection between authoritarian movements, hate violence, and the health of our democracy. He works across a mix of activism, government, law enforcement, business, and civil rights groups. And most importantly to me, he's a musician and a card carrying member of the A Song Can Help Change the World Club. Right, Eric?
Eric Ward:
Songs may be the only things that indeed have changed the world.
Jody Avrigan:
Oh, well, there's a bold argument that I'm open for. And maybe over the course of this episode, we could talk a little bit about the music of this, though certainly our focus is on tracing the political story. That said, I mean, Eric, given all the things that you work on and think about, we should keep in mind throughout this that it's not just a politics story, but it's a democracy story and the kind of fallout of this realignment on real people's lives and real people's opportunity in our democracy is at the heart of all of this.
That said, let's spend a little time tracing the path for how we got to the early mid-60s and this political earthquake that we're talking about. And as with all of these stories, you could wind the clock back 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 200 years, thousand years, I don't know, but maybe let's go back to the early 20th century.
We've done episodes, Kellie, on the failure of reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, but can you just lay out for us, Kellie, the political contours for Black and white Americans in say the South in the '20s and '30s?
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Oh, sure. All Black people are Republicans. I mean, that's the short of it. For the most part. If you think about the end of the 19th century, if you think of Lincoln as the Republican Party leader, when Black people first got enfranchisement, or I should say when Black men first got enfranchisement and the ability to vote, the Republican Party was the party for the freedmen. It was the party for Black people who were pushing to get civil rights and pushing to get economic and political power. And so that is a mainstay all throughout the end of the 19th century until Reconstruction ends politically, and Black people are pretty much robbed of their ability to vote because the South has made this sort of bargain with the North about kicking out union troops, about bringing back their own white supremacist power. And the Democratic Party begins to take hold, take the reins of control back in the South again.
And for decades, Black people really don't have political enfranchisement. They can't vote in the South. If you're a Black man living in Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama, there's a poll tax, there's a literacy tax, there's a grandfather clause. There are all of these stipulations that keep Black Republicans from participating in democracy. And so what you get is a solid Democratic south that is basically a one party system in which Black people can't really participate. And that changes in the 1930s and 40s and 50s you will start to see, especially when you get to the 1960s and the civil rights movement, but that had been sort of the origin story of Black people and their relationship to the Republican Party.
Jody Avrigan:
But between what you just laid out, between the end of Reconstruction and as we start to get into the '30s, for 44 years, the South votes for Democratic presidential candidates consistently, Southern whites who are at the heart of it all. But I'm curious for all of you, you say, okay, Black southerners are bound to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil War, but is it that they are looking to partisan politics for their rights? I mean, I think this is one of the things I want to tease out throughout this episode is how much are they actually looking at these parties as the salvation and how much are they saying, "Well, yeah, I guess we prefer this party over the other one, but at the end of the day, neither one really has our back."
Kellie Carter Jackson:
I think that's about you. The latter.
Nicole Hemmer:
Right. I was about to say, Black people didn't understand the parties as their salvation. They understood the Republican Party as a vehicle through which they might be able to better secure their rights. But if you think about somebody like Frederick Douglas who in the early days of the organized abolition movement was even like, "Why would we fight for the vote or why would we try to operate under this constitution? It's all illegitimate." And he then changes over time and says, "Okay, actually there's a way that we can use this system in order to secure our rights, but our rights exist outside this system. The system is just the tool."
Jody Avrigan:
Eric, thoughts on that?
Eric Ward:
I think that's right. I think one of the things we understand about those moments and about Black America is that it has been one of the most pragmatic voting blocks. And we might think that pragmatism came after Black folks won the right to vote, the universal vote in this country, but it has always been a pragmatic look at the expansion of social change. So Black folks were Republicans because Republicans were challenging racism.
When that began to falter, you see other trends. There is folks on the left put an overemphasis on a number of Black leaders who joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Disproportionate number of Black folks were attracted to the Communist Party, not because they were attracted to Marxism per se, but because it was the only political space that was challenging racism directly. It's not until the Democratic Party picks up that struggle really under Lyndon B. Johnson that you begin to see migration out of the Republican Party towards the Democratic Party, but primarily in the North, not the South. We're still pragmatic.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah, that's fascinating. We'll return to that in all the different eras that we're tracing here. But a couple things about Reconstruction through the '20s, and especially Black Southerners and the Republican Party. It is worth saying, I take your point, Nikki, about salvation doesn't come through a party, but it is worth pointing out, and we've done a few episodes about that sort of small window of reconstruction where there really was actual political power in some pockets for Black southerners, right?
Nicole Hemmer:
Absolutely. I mean, this is why Reconstruction was reviled for so long by so many white Americans, both in the South and beyond, why there's a whole generation of historians who rewrite Reconstruction as this terrible period, because the Republican Party was such an effective institution for an expression of Black political power in that period between... I mean, it's a very brief window-
Jody Avrigan:
It's a small period.
Nicole Hemmer:
... with that period between 1865 to an extent and then through, I mean, 1876, we're even seeing a waning of it. But you still have Black elected officials until the 1880s, even into the 1890s. But there is an effort, as Kellie was saying, not only to systematically strip Black men of the right to vote, but to back that up with violence, so that even if you had found an institutional mechanism as a Black man in the South to vote, there would have been consequences from the Klan and from other white power organizations.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
I think that's absolutely true. You really get... 1901 is the last Black elected official in office, and after that, you go about 25 years before there's another one, and Oscar De Priest in the North, in Illinois becomes the next Black elected official. But in the South, it's nearly impossible. I mean, they don't get Black elected officials again almost for another century. So when you think about just how suppressive the Democratic Party was for Republican voters in the South, it was nearly impossible to be able to cast a vote that even mattered. Even if your vote was allowed to somehow sneak its way through, it's not going to matter in any way. It's not going to turn the tide for the people who want to hold onto that power.
Nicole Hemmer:
If I could just underscore the pragmatic point too, in that same period, in the 1890s, you also have Black people in the West and in the South where they still have the right to vote, voting for populists, that they see that the Populist Party could potentially be a place where they could make an alliance with poor white southerners, even with Northern laborers. That is broken by racism, that the populists abandoned the Black vote by the mid to late 1890s. But again, they're looking for the institutions where they might be able to successfully use their power and they're going to find all of the different institutional levers to pull.
Eric Ward:
I think the one lesson to draw from what we just heard, which I think all of us should understand, is that after every sense of progress, and I don't mean just for Black America, I think I want to make the argument that when Black America has advanced rights, historically it seems to have advanced for everyone in society, and that's unique in terms of social movement struggles. They typically deliver for a very prescribed constituency, but after every Black advancement of universal rights in this country comes a backlash, and the backlash tends to hold a longer period of time than the period of change that preceded it.
I think that's a pattern we will continue to see, and it's important to note that what I heard is there are some ways to measure that. One is the number of federally elected officials. Does it grow? Does it shrink? Does it stay constant? Seems to tell us something about the state of society.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah, and so there's the backlash after Reconstruction, and certainly this story we're telling here about Southern realignment is building towards a big second half of the 20th century backlash as well. So yes, the defining feature of American politics, as we've talked about on this show, might be backlash, but we've spent a good amount of time here talking about Blacks in the South and their allegiance to the Republican Party. Can we flip to the other side and talk a little bit about the democratic hold on white southerners? And Kellie, is it just as simple as that is the party of segregation and preserving white rights? And then moreover, I kind of am interested in hearing your thoughts on... It does feel like the first few decades of the 20th century are the era of the southern white democratic giant politician, right? They're the defining force in elected politics in many ways, those southern white Democrats.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, I would say one of the solidifying factors was white supremacy and racism. There are white Northern Democrats, and I do think that there's a stronger labor conversation that comes into that. But for the most part, when you are thinking about how and why white southerners are voting in the Democratic Party, it is because they see this as one of the most powerful tools in suppressing Black empowerment. And so as time sort of evolves, these entrenched white southern voters are not just Democrats, they're Dixiecrats. They are a very specific kind of political power that is antagonistic to all advancement and empowerment to Black people.
So when FDR is trying to put forth all of his programs in the Great Depression, white southerners are 10 toes down about, "Wait, not sharecroppers, wait, not domestic workers. Wait, we're not going to include anyone who might be Black and might be advantaged by some of these big government programs."
And you start to see how the tension over government intervention and government programs that are meant to elevate all people create an even deeper divide in terms of who gets what and how much. But yeah, for decades, that is how white southerners or white Democrats purported themselves as being a party that was, I would say, maybe pro-government, but not in favor of Black people getting any of those benefits.
Jody Avrigan:
Inclusive government. Yeah.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah.
Nicole Hemmer:
That's what's so interesting about the Democratic Party in the South. In the late 19th and early 20th century, you have these bourbon Democrats who are all for government investment just so long as it doesn't help Black people. They wanted to help white people. I think that gets really interesting as Kellie's talking about the New Deal, that it often keeps Black people from getting the full benefits of the New Deal programs. But Black Americans are not abandoning the New Deal because of that. They're looking around in the period of the Great Depression. They've just seen in the 1920s that Republican presidents are not interested in helping them economically or helping anyone economically except for very wealthy people and corporations.
And then they see FDR come along, who is somebody who is progressive and has done a lot of work to connect with Black leaders and to bring them into his circle. And that doesn't mean that Black Americans are going to get the full benefits of the New Deal, but they are going to get benefits of the New Deal. And having to choose between a Republican Party that's not helping at all and a Democratic Party that's helping some, they say, "Okay, I get that this is a party full of white supremacists and Ku Klux Klanners, and this is the best option for us right now."
Jody Avrigan:
Eric, I mean, so much of what Nikki and Kellie just laid out gets to what you think about, which is sort of what is the vehicle for change and where does opportunity present itself for people? I mean, what I'm hearing, we've talked about it, is that there's some citizens who see expanded opportunity as a zero-sum game and others who, to what you were saying earlier, just realize that the pie can grow.
Eric Ward:
That's right. I mean, this has been the pattern in America. Recently, about two years ago, I had the privilege of being a co-producer on a documentary called White With Fear, which aired on PBS. And for those who haven't seen it, it. Examines the recent decades of American racial politics, partly through people who were close to the political machinery within the GOP itself, and also people who witnessed or participated in efforts to turn white racial anxiety into votes, media, audience, and political power.
I think what we see heading into the southern strategy is a pragmatic realignment in the north and in the south. Typically, you have to remember, previous to that period, the idea of an America that is grounded in white supremacy, the idea that Black people are inherently inferior are nothing more than a tool of labor, there's no competing narrative to that. It is how almost everyone understands America inside and outside.
Along comes the Civil War, the abolitionist period, reconstruction, and not only does it begin to change structure, it begins to introduce another story, the idea of even if segregated, a multiracial America, and that also forces the realignment. You begin to see extra non-party type organizations like the Klan begin to take broader root. It's why in the state of Oregon where I reside, we had the largest Klan membership in the 1920s and '30s, only bested by Indiana, two states not in the South.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Nikki, your home state.
Nicole Hemmer:
I know.
Eric Ward:
Your home state, Nikki.
Nicole Hemmer:
We're really representing here.
Eric Ward:
And again, in Indiana and in Oregon, the Klan were also seen as we got public education, some of the strongest public education systems in the country, in Oregon, not because of progressives, but because of the Klan's hatred of Catholics and Jews in the state of Oregon. They didn't like private schools, and so they advocated for a public school system in order to challenge it. So you're seeing this reconfiguration of attempts by those who are holding white anxiety to build infrastructure, to try to organize this racial resentment even outside of the political parties. Much more of this is pragmatic than we give credit to.
Jody Avrigan:
Okay. Can we advance the story a little bit? We mentioned FDR. Let's talk about the New Deal and how that alienates and also brings other people into the political fold, but then also move it into the '40s and then into the '50s. We're obviously hurdling towards a moment of realignment in 1964, but I think one of the real lessons here is that the arc of this story starts much earlier than just LBJ and the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s. It starts really in many ways with the New Deal and the kind of realignment in the '40s and the Democratic Party. We've done an episode about the military in 1948, and there we talked a little bit about the kind of interesting and very tenuous balance that the Democratic Party had to have between southern Democrats and Northern Democrats. But Nikki, can you remind us of that and how it played into New Deal politics?
Nicole Hemmer:
The New Deal Coalition was an impossible coalition. It was a coalition that included white southern segregationists and Black people. Maybe they could get along economically a little bit, but we've already talked about how that was compromised as well, for five to 10 years, but it breaks down very quickly. And you see that immediately after World War II, when Harry Truman, who is a Democrat, is seeing the violence against returning Black soldiers. We've talked before about to secure these rights, which was an analysis of the gap between the promise of civil rights to Black Americans and how the US was living up to that.
And so there is a stronger... They want to put a stronger civil rights plank into the 1948 Democratic Party platform. You have Hubert Humphrey, who I think now... We think about the Hubert Humphrey of 1968, who is not exactly a profile in courage, but in 1948, he gives a speech at the Democratic National Convention that is one of the best speeches where he's talking about bringing this party, which again is too contradictory to exist into the bright sunlight of a new future in which it will secure rights for Black people. And what do white southerners do? They immediately flee the party. They set up what's known as the Dixiecrats.
Jody Avrigan:
This is Strom Thurmond storms out of the convention hall, right?
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Strom Storms.
Nicole Hemmer:
Yes. Yes. Excellent headline, Jody.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah, there you go. I should have been a New York Post headline writer in 1948.
Nicole Hemmer:
But you can already see there is a sense among white Democrats that we are going to take our ball and go home if you advance one inch on Black civil rights. And for the next '48, '58, '64, 16 years, that is going to be the fight that is tearing the Democratic Party apart because you cannot reconcile the coalition.
Eric Ward:
Again, that is so accurate. But I think the piece that's worth slowing down on is this piece. We typically jump too quickly from FDR to Nixon, and we've already heard about the extraordinary contradictions within the New Deal Coalition. People had tangible transactional alliances, but they did not have the same vision of democracy. Southern Democrats could support an activist federal government when it meant farm programs, infrastructure, economic relief. But those politicians were determined, determined, determined that Washington not interfere with Jim Crow.
And for me, that became the modern crux as I understand of the civil rights movement, was that tension. It was the question around federal power for what and federal power for whom? And that becomes incredibly important. But I think there's also something else that happens as maybe as late as the 1930s, but I'm going to look at you all to fill in the blank, but it often gets overlooked, and that is conservative southern Democrats begin regularly joining Republicans in Congress to stop further New Deal reforms.
Once they had begun to benefit from it, they immediately began to close the door, and it's where we get historically the first conservative coalition. So the point that I think sticks with me in this period, and then I'm going to be quiet, is we should remember that 25 to 30 years before the thing we know as the Southern Strategy, you already have Democrats from the segregated South and economic conservatives around the country finding common ground around resistance to expanding the federal government because there is both internal pressure and outside pressure in post World War II to make real the idea that government was for everyone. And therein lied the complication. And there I believe is where we begin to hear the term federal overreach.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Oh yeah. I mean, you see the break clearly when Joe Wilson gets into office and segregates all of the federal offices. And then Truman gets in office and he desegregates the military. I mean, it doesn't just lead to, or it does exactly what you say it does, Eric, is that progress leads to violent backlash. I mean, we've done a couple episodes about Black soldiers that have returned from war and been in uniform and been attacked and assaulted because how dare you wear the uniform or how dare you think that you are equal to other white soldiers. But you start to see a shift at the federal government in terms of intervention that I think helps shape some of the strategy in the long freedom struggle because people now believe, okay, the greatest way to intervention is actually not changing hearts and minds, it's changing the law.
It's changing the law at the top down at the federal level that forces people to have to bend the knee. So when you've got someone like Eisenhower coming in and sending troops into the south, which troops had not been sent into the south since reconstruction in the Civil War saying, "Desegregate your schools now with all deliberate speed," it creates a new framework for how people realize they're going to have to strategize to maintain their power.
Nicole Hemmer:
I'm so glad that you mentioned Eisenhower, Kellie, because Eisenhower, when he is running in 1952, incredibly popular celebrity candidate, he has a southern strategy. Part of his strategy is to rebuild the Republican Party in the South. Now, it's not necessarily to lean quite so hard into the white supremacy as the Nixonian southern strategy would be, but it's not that. But part of it was that we just needed a party infrastructure, and it's possible that that could have worked some in the 1950s, except for exactly what you're saying, that Eisenhower, even though he wasn't necessarily a hero leader on Black civil rights, he had to adapt to a Black civil rights movement that was pushing him in the direction of protecting Black rights.
And so you have, first of all, his appointment of Earl Warren as the Supreme Court justice who gets the court to a nine-zero ruling in Brown v. Board, who gets Brown v. Board two on the table, and then you get Little Rock. And once you get Little Rock, no-
Kellie Carter Jackson:
It's a wrap.
Nicole Hemmer:
... white Democrat southerner is going to vote for Eisenhower's Republican Party. The problem is their alternative in the 1960s is going to be John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Party. Now they're just like, "Where's our home?"
Jody Avrigan:
That's right.
Eric Ward:
And we forget how shocking this must have all felt. Remember, most people are still waking up in an America every day where they fundamentally believe that Black people are inferior in every way, unless you're Black in America. Again, it was the natural order of things, and no one saw this coming. There were fears, but no one saw the big leap of Eisenhower federalizing troops to defend desegregation. Unless we think this was just folks were doing it because it was the right thing, which would be phenomenal, that's not how it played out. The truth is things had changed. It was a symbol or a signal of how much things had changed and how much pressure Eisenhower was under from Black political power.
Look, the great migration that occurred in the early 1900s moved millions of Black Americans out of the South, particularly into northern and western cities where many could actually vote. And Black voters became increasingly important to Democratic positions and politicians outside the South. The truth is that Black political power was pressuring the federal government itself. And I think the story of Eisenhower is a significant one. It's the story of LBJ where it becomes very clear that not only are Black Americans pushing for desegregation in the narrative of a multiracial America, but an increasing number of white Americans are also beginning to join that moral call. And that is what sets up the story for the Southern Strategy.
Jody Avrigan:
So I want to ask a question about this particular window that we were just talking about, which is the beginning of the civil rights movement, the late '40s into the early '50s, before we get into the '60s when I think the real political shift starts to happen in a slightly cleaner way. But you look at some of the numbers and in the '50s, it seems like maybe saying it's Republican versus Democrat is less clean than actually it's really a northern and southern thing at this point. And in the South, I think broadly speaking, both Democrats and Republicans oppose the civil rights movement and in the North, people tend to support the civil rights movement. So I don't know, should we just pick a slightly different lens, South versus North than Republican Democrat for this era?
Eric Ward:
I've long argued at least since Barack Obama's first election to the United States presidency that the real fight happening in America is not around Black and white. It's not between rich and poor. It's not even amongst immigrants and non-immigrants. It is between northern whites and southern whites hotly debating who is an American and what will America look like. That has been the fundamental question. And when you look at voting records, the truth is individuals like Barack Obama, Democrats, regularly used to win a large, almost majoritarian block of the white vote outside of the South. And if you are a party competing against the Democratic Party, you understand that you have to try to compensate for that. And the Southern strategy was an attempt to compensate against that phenomenon.
Nicole Hemmer:
And Jody, what you're describing is that the parties that we've been talking about in the mid 20th century were ideologically mixed. That's part of the reasons you have so much bipartisanship, which should be a warning to people who fetishize bipartisanship, which is you get bipartisanship sometimes because both parties have white racists in them and both parties have people who would like to support Black civil rights in this era. So it is very mixed. And this is why you need a Southern strategy because as we're about to talk about the Civil Rights Act, but there is this moment when white southerners say, and to a certain extent white northerners will get there, but say, "This party is no longer going to represent my racial and therefore my economic and political interests and I need a new home." And the Republican Party who's been out of power in Congress for a very long time is like, "Oh."
Jody Avrigan:
Here we go.
Nicole Hemmer:
As Barry Goldwater would say, "Let's go hunting where the ducks are."
Jody Avrigan:
Yes.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Come on over. The water's fine.
Nicole Hemmer:
The segregated waters.
Jody Avrigan:
Let's talk about 1964. Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about 1964 and the Civil Rights Act. We've done episodes about this. We're going to not do it justice and just sum it up very quickly. But Kellie, you could talk a little bit about the politics of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but should just remember that we're here in a month where we're having conversations about democracy expanding. Tell us about that moment.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
So the Civil Right Act of 1964 is monumental in that it is the first real federal dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. And so all of the physical infrastructure of Jim Crow, your white only, your Black only, your ability to be able to borrow someone from a restaurant or prevent someone from going to a school or prevent someone from participating in these public spaces, all of that is shattered. And it's fair to say white southerners lose their mind. And it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. It's a long process of integration and actually not just taking down those signs, but actually living out what it means to have an inclusive or egalitarian society. It becomes, I think, a real call to action for white southerners who adamantly do not believe that this legislation is legal, that this legislation is moral. They feel as though they are facing their own resurgence of reconstruction at the loss of their white power.
You see this not just among white men, you see this a lot among white southern women who are leading the efforts of school segregation and really see the loss of their own power by not being able to control where their children go to school or who sits next to their child in school. White women had a lot of power over the educational system and that's lost with integration, not just Brown v. Board, but the Civil Rights Act makes that even more cemented. And so it becomes the start of a wave because a lot of the civil rights leaders of the time are like, "Oh, we're just getting started. Wait till we get this, wait till we get that, wait till we get the vote." And so people start realizing, all right, what is going to be our counter sort of punch to this big legislative act?
Jody Avrigan:
You can read a whole Robert Caro book to try and understand this question I'm about to ask, but LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act 1964. And I take your point, Kellie, that it's a long time to implement the effects of that and reckon with the effects of that. But he famously seems to understand the political implications of this. And he tells Bill Moyers, who is then a special assistant to him and later become a journalist. But Moyers recalls that LBJ upon signing the Civil Rights Act says, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." Now we are going to talk next episode about really how that happens. And it's not just about them delivering it, but the Republican Party receiving the delivery. But Nikki, I mean, LBJ seems to understand the implications here. Why does he take this act?
Nicole Hemmer:
Well, first of all, LBJ is a white southerner, so he understands white southern Democrats really well. Lyndon Johnson was, I think it's fair to say, morally persuaded that this was the right thing to do. He had made his decision, I think, well before this, not just based on his life experiences, but in 1955, white southern members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto and there's only a few who don't sign it, and LBJ is one who doesn't sign it, who doesn't sign up for massive resistance. So he sees the writing on the wall in the '50s and the early '60s. And in some way, it's almost kind of an accident of history, this 1964 election where Lyndon Johnson is the Democratic Party nominee and Barry Goldwater is the Republican nominee. Because if you look at the votes for the Civil Rights Act and later the Voting Rights Act, a higher percentage of Republicans vote for each of those than Democrats.
It doesn't come as a surprise. Those white southern Democrats have a controlling interest in the party in the Senate, but Dwight Eisenhower had sent those troops down to the South. There is an alternative history where the Republican Party stays the party of Black civil rights and they have a pro-Black civil rights candidate in 1964, but that's not what happens. Instead, despite the composition of the two parties, you have a Democratic presidential candidate who signed the Civil Rights Act and a Republican presidential candidate who was against it. And that sets the stage going forward.
And then white southern Democrats are going to have to figure out where their political home is. And we will talk next episode about the Southern Strategy and how the Republican Party wins them over and what a big victory this is for the Republicans. But before you think about it as a big victory for the Republicans, think about the fact that it was a historic political defeat for white Democrats. Black Americans won the fight for the Democratic Party and they forced white southern Democrats out and made them find a new political home. I think when we talk about the Southern Strategy, we don't talk enough about that victory.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
That's a different way to put it. That's a different way to put it. Yeah.
Jody Avrigan:
Eric, yeah, final word of this episode and then we will pick up that story that Nikki just laid out.
Eric Ward:
It's going to be an important conversation to pick up. This is such interesting... It doesn't happen overnight. I believe Goldwater carries five Southern states in '64. I think that's right, in that election in the deep south. He gets crushed nationally and it becomes a signal that something is moving, that these things are shifting. The last thing I would just say is LBJ is an interesting character, morally driven and pragmatically resistant, thinks this will be a disaster. And I think LBJ is where the two streams around civil rights and economics in America really begin to collide.
We should remember LBJ does not label this moment the great civil rights crusade. He calls it the great society. And with that comes discussions around Medicare, Medicaid, federal education programs, even the strengthening of voting rights on top of it. So the Democratic Party is increasingly also identified with an enlarged federal social state and enlarged federal responsibility for racial equality.
And those two things aren't identical, but now politically they can be attacked together. Big government, welfare, loss of law and order, the loss of local control, the loss of state's rights. And that's where I think you can start seeing the raw material that later political strategists become extremely skilled at putting together.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Absolutely.
Jody Avrigan:
We will pick up all of that next episode. This has been really fascinating. And folks, you don't need to read that Robert Caro book because the three of them just kind of got you there in terms of what you need to know about this story.
Nicole Hemmer:
But if you have two months to read a book-
Jody Avrigan:
Go for it.
Eric Ward:
It is a great read.
Jody Avrigan:
Go for it. Yes, it is. All right. Well, anyway, that is where we are going to leave it for part one here, but Eric Ward, you will be back next episode, but thank you so much for doing this.
Eric Ward:
Appreciate it.
Jody Avrigan:
Nicole Hemmer, thanks to you as always.
Nicole Hemmer:
Thank you, Jody.
Jody Avrigan:
And Kellie Carter Jackson, thanks to you.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
My pleasure.
Alex Lovit:
We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to hear more, keep an eye on This Day's feed later this week for part two. And in part three, Jody Avrigan and I will really get into the big themes. Come back next Tuesday for the last episode in the series before we get back to our regular show. Reminder to listeners in the Washington DC area, our live podcast taping with This Day is on Monday, October 19th, featuring special guest, the Reverend Dr. William Barber II. Check the show notes for a link to buy tickets.
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Teo Clyburn, Jasmine Olari, and Darla Minich. Special thanks to Sarah Murphy for helping to coordinate this partnership.
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