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In the 1950s and 1960s, the South experienced unprecedented social upheaval as the civil rights movement surged forward. There was extreme backlash from white Southerners who felt that their supremacy was being threatened. It was also at this time that the Democratic South collapsed, and the Republican party gained traction. Republican leaders used anti-civil rights messaging to attract these white Southerners whose racial resentment towards African Americans had been brought to a boiling point by the ensuing civil rights movement. After a certain point, Republicans began using coded language to relay to their Southern constituents their hesitation to push for social change. However, there are those who refute this claim and say that racial incitement had nothing to do with the growth of a Republican South. In this article I will explain the Southern Strategy: how Republicans transformed the Southern political landscape mainly by appealing to racially motivated white voters.
To best understand the Southern Strategy, a general understanding of the two major political parties of the United States is needed. In his book The Two-Party South, Alexander P. Lamis explains that from Reconstruction up until the early 1960s, the South was dominated by the Democratic party (3). The Republican party, on the other hand, was the party of the North— the socially liberal party of Lincoln. Although breaks in the “Solid South” did occur a few times before the ‘50s and ‘60s, Republicans enjoyed few electoral victories until this time. This alignment of the collapse of the Democratic South alongside the civil rights movement demonstrates the role that racial upheaval played in the political realignment of Southerners.
An understanding of the national climate during the civil rights movement is also key in understanding the Southern Strategy. This national struggle to end discrimination against African Americans was a source of incredible social and political turbulence—especially for the South. Key Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) and Baker v. Carr (1962) upended years of white supremacy. Governors and Congressmen fervently passed legislation to protect all-white institutions, and racist Southerners put their visceral hatred towards the federal government and African Americans on public display. At this point, the South was still dominated by Democrats and consequently this racially fueled hatred was aimed at the Republican party of the North. As Joseph Aistrup points out in his book The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South, it was a Republican court that ruled in favor of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and a Republican President who sent the troops to Little Rock Arkansas to forcibly integrate the Central High School (7). Southern Republicans needed a plan to transform themselves from the Party of Lincoln to one that supported the needs of the white southerner.
As early as 1956, Republican Congressmen and Senators from Southern states picked up on growing racial tensions and transitioned from a gradualist to a more segregationist perspective on the issue of social change. This would allow them to separate themselves from the civil rights movement and garner support from Southerners for whom race was their primary issue. One after another, Senators and House representatives from states like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina won races using race-baiting rhetoric. In 1960, the Republican National Convention launched “Operation Dixie”; a national plan to recruit members who ran on “states rights” platforms that pushed against the civil rights effort. However, campaigns could no longer openly run against the civil rights issue for fear of appearing racist to the broader American electorate. Republican politicians consequently would veil their desire to push back against the civil rights Movement in coded words like “the fight for states rights.” Barry Goldwater showed how using these political dog-whistles to appeal to racists could be advantageous when he swept the deep South in the presidential election of 1964. The use of code language continued in the campaigns of Nixon and Reagan, becoming increasingly abstract in order to not appear explicitly racist. Nixon’s very own chief political strategist, Lee Atwater, described this strategy aptly in a damning 1981 interview. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘[n-word]’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract…” (Atwater, 1981). Since that election of 1964, the South has voted overwhelmingly Republican in Presidential elections with few exceptions.
There are some who would argue that the realignment of white, Southern voters from the Democratic party to the Republican party is not due to the incitement of racial tensions. This perspective (which even one of its central supporters, history professor Matthew Lassiter, admits is going against academic consensus) claims that Southerners mainly swapped party affiliation because of an appeal to “traditional conservative values” used in the ‘70s and ‘80s by Republican politicians like Reagan and Bush. However, this claim underscores the vast importance of race in American politics and is historically inaccurate. In his book Nut Country: rights-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy, Edward Miller explains that Southern districts and states began flipping red far earlier than the 70s; as early as 1954 Republican politicians employed race-baiting rhetoric to win over voters.
Interestingly, in my research for this article I have found that the majority of opposition to the Southern Strategy theory does not come from academics. It is rather conservative media pundits and members of heavily partisan think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation that are trying to push this narrative. Yet, historical evidence, including confessions from those who actually participated in the strategy, shows that racial polarization did indeed play a major role in the realignment of Southern voters in this country. To deny this fact is to deny a well documented piece of our country’s history.
