Why conservatives want to rewrite civil rights history

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Recently, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said some things that surprised me. And they should surprise you as well. In an interview with Human Events, a conservative website, Barbour discussed growing up in an integrated, tolerant and inclusive South. In his opinion, it was the “old Democrats who had fought for segregation so hard.” Speaking of the change in party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in the South, Barbour continued.

“The people that led the change of parties in the South, just as I mentioned earlier, was my generation. My generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to an integrated college. Never thought twice about it. It was the old Democrats who had fought for segregation so hard. By my time, people realized that was the past. It was indefensible, wasn’t going to be that way anymore.”

Barbour— who is being touted as the most prominent Republican and the face of the GOP— is head of the Republican Governors Association. In reality, Barbour was born under Jim Crow segregation and attended segregated public schools. He attended college with only a handful of black students. And he sent his children to Manchester Academy, one of the “segregation academies” established so that white parents could avoid sending their daughters to integrated schools, where they would undoubtedly date black boys. Manchester Academy did not integrate until 1996, when it admitted its first African-American student.

And while Barbour would have you believe that the Republican Party is such a dominant force in the South today because of its support of integration. But the reality is that the GOP inherited the segregationist mantle from the Dixiecrats. After President Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts into law, the Democrats would lose the South for generations. Moreover, beginning with Nixon, the GOP employed a “Southern Strategy” to attract segregationist sympathizers and other disaffected whites from the Democratic Party. All of the talk about taxes, small government, welfare and the like were code for hating black folks.

WATCH RACHEL MADDOW ON HALEY BARBOUR AND REPUBLICANS:
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As chief architect of the Southern Strategy, the late Lee Atwater explained how it worked: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N****r, n****r, n****r,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘n****r’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

But Governor Barbour is not alone in his attempt to rewrite American history and re-brand his party. The Republicans and the conservative movement smell blood, an opportunity to seize power from the Democrats and turn the nation into one big frightening Tea Party. Polls show that 71 percent of people believe President Bush created the current economic problems. At the same time, the public is so frustrated by the economic recession that they are inclined to vote against the party in power, which happens to be the Democrats, rather than vote for the Republicans. A bad economy is giving the president a 43 percent approval rating, and Republicans are licking their chops.

Further, the Democrats suffer from an enthusiasm gap. Some elements of the Democratic base, including young people, women, blacks and Latinos, may feel abandoned and slighted by the White House. They could sit out the midterm elections if the Obama team fails to change its policy, direction and attitude and energize the base. And it seems that are not Democrats are failing to articulate a narrative of their successes in areas such as health care and financial reform (however watered down the final product), and the economic stimulus package (however insufficient in lifting the country out of what increasingly looks like a second depression).

Meanwhile, the GOP is crafting their narrative, all based on lies and fabrications. After all, they have an image problem regarding race that will preclude them picking up moderate white voters who fled the party in droves, as well as black and Latino voters who are forever lost to them. The Republican Party’s only hope is to re-brand themselves, change their sheets, clean up their image and rewrite history to make it look as if they are the good guys on race and segregation.Shifting demographics suggest that in the long term, the GOP is a dying party. The U.S. is poised to become a majority-minority nation in the next 40 years, and already children of color are nearly half of the babies born in the U.S. But as recent polls suggest, the GOP is headed in the other direction, seemingly as a backlash against increased diversity and inclusion in America. The Republican “base” is a racist base, and one which is in denial about racism—at least ignorant of the country’s civil rights history—and living in an alternate reality:

* The Republicans are an increasingly a white conservative, Christian and Southern party. According to a recent Gallup poll, 9 in 10 Republicans are white and religious. In a Daily Kos poll, Fox News viewers were mostly white Southern Republicans.

* Southerners are 12 percent more likely to support the tea party—the engine driving the excitement among the GOP base—and conservatives 28 percent more likely than liberals. In another survey, 82 percent of Republicans support the Tea Party, and 87 percent of Democrats oppose it.

WATCH ‘MORNING JOE’ COVERAGE OF BARBOUR AND REVISIONISM:
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* A University of Washington poll found that among strong supporters of the tea party, only 35 percent agreed that blacks are hardworking, compared with 55 percent of strong tea party opponents. Similarly, 45 percent of the tea-party supporters believed blacks were intelligent, as opposed to 59 percent of the anti-tea party respondents. And while 41 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed blacks were trustworthy, 57 percent of the tea-party opponents. The survey also found that “those who are racially resentful, who believe the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks, are 36 percent more likely to support the tea party than those who are not.” Further, 30 percent agreed Obama was born in a foreign country, and 92 percent believed he is a socialist.

* According to a New York Times poll from this past April, ,a href=”http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/04/exploring_race_in_the_nyt_tea_party_poll.html”>73 percent of Tea Party supporters thought that blacks and whites have equal opportunity, despite the exorbitantly high unemployment rates in communities of color. And 52 percent believed the problems of black people are overblown. The Tea Party supporters gave Obama an 88 percent disapproval rating and Bush a 57 percent approval rating, although Obama inherited the economic crisis from Bush.

* In a Time magazine poll, 46 percent of Republicans think Obama is Muslim. A Pew survey had the number at about a third of Republicans (and 1 in 5 Americans overall), which is still substantial, considering then-candidate Obama’s Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy during the 2008 campaign. Moreover, over 60 percent of Republicans had an unfavorable view of Islam, as opposed to 25 percent of Democrats. Similarly, 52 percent of Republicans surveyed by Newsweek said Obama “probably” or “definitely sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” And nearly 60 percent of GOP supporters said “Obama favors the interests of Muslim Americans over other groups of Americans.” Only 9 percent of Democrats believed the president favors Muslims, and 62 percent of independents believe Obama has been evenhanded.

Perhaps the most visible attempt by Republicans to rewrite history is that of the megalomaniacal Fox News jester and snake oil salesman, Glenn Beck. Beck is part of an effort to characterize blacks as the primary purveyors of racism, and whites their victims. Similarly, we saw this with Republican attacks on ACORN, and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s hit job on former USDA official Shirley Sherrod. And in the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah Palin denigrated and downplayed the civil rights movement by making fun of community organizing.

Beck also hates community organizing. He called President Obama a racist who hates white people, and characterized former green jobs czar Van Jones as a black nationalist and a communist, leading to Jones’ ouster.

In his recent “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial—on the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s march on Washington and his “I Have A Dream speech— Beck claimed to inherit Dr. King’s legacy. Beck’s claims are outrageous, given Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence, and Beck’s affiliation with the National Rifle Association, militias and white supremacist groups. As Ben Jealous of the NAACP aptly noted, “Dr. King never had to ask anyone to leave their signs and guns at home,” adding that “To say to your followers, don’t bring your signs — it’s like saying don’t open your mouth.”

Beck even had Dr. King’s niece, the horridly right-wing opportunist and freak show Alveda King, on hand at the rally. Alveda King, who is estranged from the King family, is homophobic and anti-choice. She compared gay marriage to genocide, and claimed Planned Parenthood has a eugenics agenda. And she once condemned Coretta Scott King, yet claims to be the heir to the King legacy as she exploits that glorious legacy for personal gain.

In some states, Republicans are not just rewriting history, they are literally rewriting the textbooks. For example, in March the Republican controlled Texas Board of Education approved a curriculum change that mandates a conservative, white-Christian bias in the teaching of social science. People of color were removed from the books. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Latino civil rights groups were stricken in the heavily Latino state, although Justice Thurgood Marshall was allowed to remain. And conservatives failed to remove all references to hip-hop music from the history texts and replace it with country music. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” said board member Mary Helen Berlanga. “They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she added. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

And Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law banning ethnic studies in the public schools, and classes that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Schools that fail to comply will lose their state funding.

Another component of Republican racial revisionism is the remaking of the black Republican, and the myth of the rise of the black Republican. The Republican Party wants to claim African-American giants such as Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, as if these historical figures would support the regressive, anti-civil rights policy platform of the modern-day GOP. This year, the Republicans have trotted out over 30 black candidates for federal office. But these candidates, many of whom are tea party supporters and anti-Obama right-wingers, are in the mold of Clarence Thomas, J.C. Watts and Ken Blackwell. These are not the black Republicans of the Reconstruction era, who numbered 1,500 nationwide and included a governor and a lieutenant governor, state legislators and members of Congress and the Senate. But the party of Lincoln was a long time ago. And in any case, in the face of skepticism and charges of pure symbolism, only a few of these black Tea Partiers are actually expected to win.

In addition, GOP “rising stars” of Indian heritage such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and South Carolina GOP gubernatorial nominee Nikki Haley have found the path to victory by appealing to Southern reactionaries who generally prejudiced against President Obama, people of color and foreigners. So, these candidates convert to Christianity, change their names to sound more Anglo-American, and position themselves as white candidates with a tan—even as they endure being called “raghead.” One’s soul is a high price to pay for acceptance in a political party built on white nationalism.

Often it is said that history is written from the vantage point of the conquerors. Well, the Republicans lost the 2008 election, yet they act as if they were the victors. And their defeat did not stop them from attempting to rewrite history at this moment.

The question is whether the GOP can count on the public’s short-term memory and succeed in this deception. The key is for Obama supporters to realize the threat of Republican tea party control to civil rights, the economy and social programs, and show up in big numbers on Election Day.