Southern Strategy - Roots of The Southern Strategy

Roots of The Southern Strategy

Lyndon Johnson was concerned that his endorsement of Civil Rights legislation would endanger his party in the South. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters who had long been beyond the reach of the Republican Party.

Huey Newton, Shirley Chisholm, Andrew Young, and Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts had replaced Martin Luther King Jr. as some of the most prominent black leaders. By this point, King had won the Nobel Peace Prize and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His death was followed by rioting by African Americans in inner-city areas in major cities throughout the country. King’s policy of non-violence had already been challenged by other African-American leaders such as John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The notion of Black Power advocated by SNCC leaders was quite effective in altering the mood of African-Americans. This attitude did much to raise the expectations of African Americans and also raised racial tensions. Journalists reporting about the demonstrations against the Vietnam War often featured young people engaging in violence or burning draft cards and American flags. There were also many young adults engaged in the drug culture and "free love" (sexual promiscuity), in what was called the "hippie" counter-culture. These actions scandalized many Americans and created a concern about law and order.

With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched parties in 1964, Richard Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states' rights and "law and order." Many liberals accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his "states' rights" and "law and order" stands.

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated the Southern strategy. With a much more explicit attack on integration and black civil rights, Wallace won all of Goldwater's states (except South Carolina), as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina's electoral votes. Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, while Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey's only southern state was Texas. Writer Jeffrey Hart who worked on the Nixon campaign as a speechwriter says that Nixon did not have a "Southern Strategy" but "Border State Strategy" as the campaign ceded the Deep South to George Wallace and that the press merely call it a "Southern Strategy" as they are "very lazy".

In the 1972 election, by contrast, Nixon won every state in the Union except Massachusetts, winning more than 70 percent of the popular vote in most of the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina) and 61% of the national vote. He won over 65 percent of the votes in the other states of the former Confederacy. Nixon won 36% of the black vote nationwide. Despite his appeal to Southern whites, Nixon parlayed a wide perception as a moderate into wins in other states. He was able to appear moderate to most Americans because the Southern strategy referred to integration obliquely through references to states' rights and busing. This tactic was later described by liberals in the media as "dog-whistle politics."