Zell Miller knows race-baiting lifted GOP

• Originally published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution September 22, 2004 

Copyright 2004 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

By: Cynthia Tucker

Zell Miller wants you to believe that he is dispensing a dose of discipline to his beloved Democratic Party --- pointing out the foibles and foolishness that have led to its loss of the South. Miller claims he only wants the Democrats to regain their traditional values before it's too late.

Miller is a hypocrite. As a historian, he knows exactly why the Democratic Party is teetering in the South: It's precisely because the Democrats set aside a century and a half of ugly traditions that it has lost so many rural white Southerners. Miller knows better than most; he was once one of those rural white Southerners who embraced those ugly traditions.

Running for Congress in 1964, Miller dismissed the Civil Rights Act as neither "constitutionally acceptable [n]or fundamentally proper as an approach to the solution of racial problems in America." Even back then, he denounced the Democratic presidential nominee, declaring that Lyndon Johnson "is a Southerner who sold his birthright for a mess of dark pottage." From 1968-71, Miller served as executive secretary to Gov. Lester Maddox, who remained an unrepentant segregationist until the day he died.

In most Southern states, including Georgia, the Democratic Party was so racist that it didn't allow black citizens to vote in its primaries. That's why so many members of the black intelligentsia --- including men such as longtime Atlanta Daily News publisher C.A. Scott --- were Republicans. Indeed, nationwide, many blacks voted for the GOP. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower got nearly 40 percent of the black vote.

Black voters' allegiance to the Democratic Party began to take root in 1960, when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy made a simple gesture: He called Coretta Scott King to offer reassurance after her husband, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was shunted off to Reidsville State Prison following a lunch counter sit-in. That year, 68 percent of black voters went Democratic.

White Southerners' allegiance to the GOP began in much the same way --- over civil rights. The ascension of the Republican Party in the South can be traced to Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, which included a states' rights platform that rejected desegregation.

In their landmark book "The Rise of Southern Republicans," political scientists Earl and Merle Black wrote: "With Goldwater's campaign, the [Republican] Party attracted many racist Southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. . . . Gradually, a new Southern politics emerged in which blacks and liberal to moderate whites anchored the Democratic Party, while many conservatives and some moderate whites formed a growing Republican Party that owed little to Abraham Lincoln but much to Goldwater and even more to Reagan."

The GOP has built a Southern base by accommodating racists. That doesn't mean most Republican politicians are racists themselves. But they don't hesitate to pander to a constituency that is still uncomfortable with the social changes ushered in by the civil rights movement.

Whether it's denouncing fictional welfare queens, saluting the Confederate battle flag or showing up to speak at Bob Jones University, the GOP knows how to race-bait. Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear a lawsuit against affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan in 2003, President Bush held a news conference to announce his opposition to those policies. He didn't hope to influence the case (and didn't). That was just a sop to his reactionary supporters.

The GOP still has a problem: Its potential is limited. As the nation grows browner, more and more voters will be drawn to the all-inclusive ideals espoused by the Democrats. Meanwhile, Miller, who embraced progressive ideals midcareer, seems to be moving back to his narrow-minded roots. An old mossback like that couldn't be happy in the Democratic Party.
 
* Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays.