A Brief History of Race in American Politics

Racist rhetoric is nothing new in American politics

Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace standing against desegregation while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach at the University of Alabama in 1963. By Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine — Rotated, perspective corrected, histogram adjusted, and cropped version of Image: Governor George Wallace stands defiant at the University of Alabama.jpg, Public Domain, Wikimedia.org

I’m old enough to remember the days when Democrats still thought our presidential candidates could win in the South.

When I was working for Mike Dukakis in 1988, I vividly remember the image of George Wallace sitting in a wheelchair endorsing my candidate for president. It seemed so incongruous, the former governor who once proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” endorsing the ethnic northeastern liberal Dukakis, but they were both Democrats so that’s how things were.

Back when I was in college, the electoral voting bloc of southern states was still referred to as the “Solid South.” I remember back then a friend of my sister’s asked me why the South was so Democratic. “Republicans were the party of emancipation,” I answered, to which she responded, “I knew it had something to do with race.”

As indeed it did. Race, of course, is our nation’s “original sin,” as theologian Jim Wallis labeled it. We are not the only country to institutionalize racism. Indeed, the “in-group/out-group” fears that can lead to racism are hard-wired into us as humans.