Occasionally It has been asked why Blacks are not loyal to the political party that fought for their freedom. Why would they abandon the Party of Lincoln. In truth they did not. In 1876 the Party of Lincoln abandon the last of the freed slaves to the Jim Crow Democrats and to a hundred years of hidden slavery. Only Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina still lived under the occupying Union Forces of the era of Reconstruction. The Republicans were prepared to bargain away the freedom of the former slaves to hold on to power.
In 1856 when the GOP was born, It was an alliance between the remnants of the Wigs who had the money of Big Business and the Abolitionist who had the zeal of Religion to gather the votes. After the Civil War ended the Abolitionist movement died out because they believed they had won the struggle and Slavery had been banished from the land.
The Party of Business (High tariffs, land Grants for RailRoads, and other help need from government.) was losing their foot soldiers to bring in the vote. They held power by using another tactic called “waving the bloody shirt”. The poor whites of the northern states had paid dearly in lives and blood to save the Union and they not going to let Democrats forget that.. It was a political tradition that lasted even to the present day. In the South it was the poor southern whites that waved the Rebel Flag and made Democrats the Party of Power. Blacks lost all pretense of true Freedom and the die was cast.
Republican hold on the vote was not as secure in the north as Democrats were in the South because of the corruption in the Grant administration and a suspicion of the wealth being accumulated by some movers in the Republican Party. During the election of 1876 the Republican, Rutherford B Hayes was trailing. They needed the votes of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina to win the Election by one vote. A promise to remove the rest of the Union Troops from the South and a rigged Commission to determine which of the disputed votes would be counted gave them a one vote Landslide.
The Republicans forever lost Black votes (there were none in the South) and Democrats became the Party of Social Justice. When Truman began integration of the Armed Services after World War II the Movement began . Kennedy supported programs that Dr. King brought to the heart of the Nation and the World and President Johnson turned into the Law of the land.. The Politics of the South were changing. The Democrats were about to enter a new age of Power.
But the Republications had a new surprise. The Vietnam War had split the Democratic Party and the Republicans created a new alliance with the White Conservative Churches.
Nixon and Harry Dent knew that if you gave poor southern Whites a reason to abandon the Party of their birth now dominated by Blacks, they could create a new Solid South for themselves. It worked for a generation. The Question is What Now?
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