Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 23 2002 (IPS) — With Friday’s deft removal of incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and his replacement by Senator Bill Frist, the Republican Party appears to have averted a prolonged ordeal over the fact that its top Congressional leader yearned for a return to racial segregation.

But what remains unclear is whether the two-week controversy, in which Lott transformed himself virtually overnight from white supremacist to supporter of Democratic positions on affirmative action, in an effort to save his job, will have much impact on the overwhelmingly white and increasingly southern base of the national Republican Party.

While Frist’s public persona – tall, handsome, smart, only 50 years old, a surgeon who volunteers his medical skills in Africa – is vastly more appealing than Lott’s, his voting record, including on issues of interest to racial minorities, is virtually the same as his predecessor.

Indeed, groups that track voting in Congress have given Frist a failing grade on civil rights and related legislation since he first entered Congress in 1995, the same grade as most southern Republicans in Congress.

It doesn’t help much that Frist is from Tennessee, a state that, although north of Mississippi, remains an integral part of the South. Indeed, southern Republicans dominate virtually all leadership positions in the Party, both in Congress, where Texan Tom DeLay will become Majority Leader in the House of Representatives next month, and in the administration led by fellow-Texan, George W. Bush.

The white southern domination of the Republican Party is the culmination of a process that began with the presidential candidacy of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Although Goldwater, who voted against the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, was crushed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a historic landslide, Republicans like Richard Nixon couldn’t help but notice that he defeated Johnson in the Deep South, the first non-Democrat to do so since Strom Thurmond – whose praise by Lott on the occasion of his 100th birthday two weeks ago landed the Majority Leader in so much trouble – split from the Democratic Party and ran as the segregationist States’ Rights Party presidential candidate in 1948.

White southerners had been solidly anti-Republican since even before the 1861-1865 Civil War, when the Republicans, led by President Abraham Lincoln, were identified with the campaign to abolish slavery.

As a result, Democrats enjoyed a virtually solid lock on the South since the withdrawal of Union troops from the region in 1877. When whites regained control of local and state governments, they enacted laws, which, among other things, made it extremely difficult for blacks to even exercise the right to vote, let alone hold office.

That changed gradually only after Thurmond split from the Democrats in 1948 to protest proposed anti-lynching laws and President Harry Truman’s efforts to integrate the armed forces and inter-state highways in the South. Thurmond subsequently became a Republican and won a South Carolina Senate seat.

The 1960s were the real turning point. Led by Johnson, northern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans who were still true to Lincoln’s heritage, pushed through Congress laws that led to a dramatic expansion of federal authority in the South and the re-enfranchisement of southern blacks.

Johnson, himself a Texan, is reported to have told his press secretary, Bill Moyers, after signing the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, ”Bill, I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

It was Nixon who saw in the white backlash against the civil rights movement an opportunity to break the Democratic hold on the South by, in the words of former Virginia Republican Sen. Linwood Holton, ”lur(ing) white racists into a coalition with the party’s traditional business constituency”.

What became known as the ”southern strategy” became the way Republicans sought and usually won the White House, from Nixon’s victory in 1968 through even George W. Bush’s defeat of Vice President Al Gore in 2000.

While national Republican candidates, beginning with Nixon, virtually never made explicitly racist appeals, they developed code words and symbols, such as ”law and order”, ”states’ rights”, and opposition to ”affirmative action”, which were designed precisely to appeal to white racists, both in the north and the south.

Ronald Reagan opened his presidential campaign in 1980 by voicing support for states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where a local police chief led a mob in the murder of three civil-rights workers in 1964. At the time, Reagan denied that he was against civil rights.

Eight years later, George Bush Sr. ran a remarkably effective ad reminding voters of the rape of a white woman by a black convict who had been furloughed under a programme backed by his opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. He insisted, however, that the ad had nothing to do with race.

In 2000, George W. Bush maintained that he was a ”different” kind of Republican, a notion that was bolstered by his commitment to make Colin Powell his secretary of state and the prominent position given Condolleezza Rice among his advisers.

But when in a difficult spot, as when he was challenged by Sen. John McCain in the South Carolina primary, Bush did not hesitate to play the race card by, for example, speaking at Bob Jones University, a Christian fundamentalist facility that until very recently banned interracial dating.

And while McCain, a moderate Republican, came out strongly against South Carolina’s retention of the Confederate battle standard on the state flag due to its association with slavery, Bush equivocated, arguing that South Carolina voters decide, an all-too-familiar wink at ”states’ rights”.

”Sound bites pitched toward the racist right have been the dirty little secret of the Republican Party for four decades,” noted Joseph Crespino, a history professor at George Mason University, in a recent New York Times column. ”The history of racial appeals won’t go away, even if the Republicans replace Mr. Lott,” he wrote before Friday’s resignation.

”Lott’s resignation, while welcome, fails to address the deep-rooted segregationist mentality of what the Republicans have become,” said Salih Booker, director of Africa Action. ”Frist presents a nicer image, but Republican policies remain anti-black.