The Republican Party’s Race Problem and Strom Thurmond’s Legacy
The Republican Partys Race Problem and Strom Thurmonds Legacy
Sep 22, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
What went wrong for the party of civil rights? Why do they have so few African-American supporters? A new book argues that Strom Thurmond reshaped the Republican Party and the South with his support of segregationand left the party with a poisonous legacy on race relations that continues to this day.
By Jordan Michael Smith.
Just 2 percent of delegates were African-Americans at the Republican National Convention. At the DNC, blacks comprised more than a quarter of the delegate count. Many conservatives remain mystified by their inability gain support among African-Americans. After all, the GOP is the party of civil rights.
At least that was the contention earlier this year of Kevin Williamson, an editor at flagship conservative magazine National Review. In a May cover story, Williamson contended that Democrats, not Republicans, have always been the party of civil rights. [T]he Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century, Williamson wrote.
The essay was widely condemned as ahistorical and simply bizarre. Williamson disputed the debate-ending fact that Southern Democrats transferred to the Republican Party primarily because it was retrograde on racial issues. More honest conservatives, among them National Reviews Ramesh Ponnuru, have written candidly of conservatives failure to grapple with the history. But Williamsons is still the dominant view on the right wing.
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