How did the Party of Lincoln become the Party of Trump?
On September 22, 1862, Republican President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in states that had seceded from the union on January 1, 1863. In 1865, he pushed to ratify the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamationv
The first black senators, Hiram Rhodes Revels (1870-1871) and Blanche K. Bruce (1875-1881), were both Republicans from Mississippi.
In 1912, my own great great grandfather, John H. Dickerson, was a black Republican who served as chairman of the Florida State Republican Convention.
By 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover used the so-called “lily-white” movement to purge blacks from the GOP, and black voters slowly began to grow disillusioned with the party. Still, Hoover won the black vote in the 1928 and 1932 presidential elections.
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8734&context=annals-of-iowa
The official U.S. House of Representatives website (currently under the administration of Republican Speaker Paul Ryan) provides some background on the realignment of the parties that began in the 1920s.
In 1930, the @NAACP led a successful campaign to block Republican President Herbert Hoover’s nomination of racist Judge John J. Parker to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1936, Democrats won the black vote for the first time in a U.S. presidential election. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt won 71% of the black vote, while Republican Alf Landon of Kansas got 28% of the black vote. (photo from “The Loneliness of the Black Republican” by @LeahRigueur)
In the 1930s and 1940s, black votes were still up for grabs. Despite voting for FDR in 1936 and beyond, the majority of blacks did not identify as Democrats during his administration.
Even in 1936, prominent black Republicans, including Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens and heavyweight boxer Joe Louis, campaigned for GOP presidential nominee Alf Landon. (see Rigeur, pgs. 19-20)
The party realignment became crystal clear by 1964 when Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater of Arizona voted against the bipartisan bill.
https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/civil-rights-1964/senate-roll-call.html
In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson allegedly told an aide after signing the Civil Right Act that Democrats would lose the south for a generation. Johnson won a landslide that year, but Republicans won the “Deep South” for the first time in nearly 100 years.
https://www.270towin.com/1964_Election/
As the white south moved from Democrat to Republican, no Democratic candidate would ever win the majority of the white vote in any presidential election after Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
By 1968, Nixon used the GOP’s “southern strategy” and “suburban strategy” to get whites to vote Republican. As Lee Atwater would explain the strategy later, you start by saying “nigger” and “busing” and you end up saying “tax cuts” to mean the same thing.
https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
In 1976, when Republican Ronald Reagan ran for president, he appealed to white racial resentment by spreading lies and misinformation about an African-American “welfare queen” in Chicago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjeD5exDrDQ
In 1980, when Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination, he kicked off his campaign by going to the notorious Mississippi town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. He told the white crowd: “I believe in state’s rights.”
In 1988, Republican nominee George Bush used the image of “Willie Horton” to exploit white fear of black crime. Bush’s campaign manager Lee Atwater said, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”
In 1990, North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms used white hands in a TV ad to convince white voters that black Democratic Senate candidate Harvey Gantt would give “racial quotas” to unqualified blacks over qualified whites.
In 1992, Republican Pat Buchanan warned the GOP convention about “radical feminism,” “homosexual rights,” and rioting blacks in Los Angeles and urged them to “take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO2wzdOCqr8
In 1996, Bill Clinton won Louisiana, becoming the last Democratic presidential nominee to win any state in the “Deep South” (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina).
https://www.270towin.com/1996_Election/
In 2002, Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi praised Strom Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 campaign, even though Thurmond never publicly repudiated segregation: ”When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it.”
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4547616/trent-lott-tribute-strom-thurmond
In 2005, former Klansman and former Democratic Senate leader Robert Byrd apologized for his racist past: “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times…and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105_pf.html
In 2011, Donald Trump begins a 5 1/2 year campaign to question the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, suggesting Obama was secretly born in Kenya instead of the U.S. state of Hawaii.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBT78Q0rbSo
In 2012, Republican presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls America’s first black president, Barack Obama, a “food stamp president.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcyX8blbu0
In 2016, despite years of lying about President Obama’s birth certificate, describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers and calling for Muslims to be banned from entering the US, Donald Trump wins 57% of the white vote.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls/national/president
