Rand Paul fails history at Howard University

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How the parties switched sides on race

“There are several major shifts in the parties,”  says University of North Carolina associate professor and historian Blair L.M. Kelley. “The first major shift happens when the Republican Party decides that it doesn’t care about white supremacy in the south,” by the late 19th century. “So yes, the Democratic Party was the party of segregation. They [southern Democrats] had disenfranchised blacks almost completely. But the Republicans during that time began their retreat from questions of race as a national party.”

They even formed groups like the “Lily White Republicans, starting in the 1880s and 1890s,” Kelley said, to try and drive newly-enfranchised blacks — who were indeed getting elected, including to Congress, as Republicans — out of the party and make Republicanism respectable in the south.

And while Rand Paul thought he was mesmerizing (rather than condescending to) his audience with the breathtaking revelation (!) that Republicans founded the NAACP (the audience actually laughed out loud, because, yeah. Students at an historically black college know that…) here again, he misses the arc of history, and how in the case of the GOP, it didn’t always bend toward justice.

“By the 1920s, the NAACP has a convention where they say, ‘we don’t know who we can vote for, because Republicans have retreated so far on issues of race,'” Kelley said, and the legacy of the Democrats included President Woodrow Wilson, an openly racist man who premiered “Birth of a Nation” in the White House and refused to push for an anti-lynching law despite spasms of racial violence across the American south after World War I.

As much as it might disappoint Senator Paul, African-Americans didn’t begin to migrate to the Democratic Party to commune with Klansmen. As early as the 1930s, significant numbers of black Americans began moving to the Democratic Party because they preferred their policies.

“FDR’s presidency represented the first major shift” in that direction,” Kelley says. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, first elected in 1932, “was trying to balance southern Democrats with white Democrats in the north. Blacks, as they began to move north in the Great Migration, were voting for FDR and his policies that provided relief from the Depression. And in the wake of his presidency, we see blacks who are able to get past the poll taxes and the grandfather clauses and literacy tests in the south, founding political organizations and registering as Democrats. It’s tiny numbers of people at first, but it is a shift.”

Kelley says that despite FDR’s reluctance to tackle civil rights, his economic policies made a significant impact on African-Americans. But more importantly, FDR’s inclusion of black Americans in the New Deal mattered more than the economic relief. “To many, he’s the first president since [Ulysses S.] Grant who sees the humanity of African-Americans,” Kelley said.

That’s important, because it belies another, more insidious, insinuation in Paul’s (and other Republicans’) presumption about the reasons black Americans prefer the modern Democratic Party. Paul said on Wednesday: “I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African-Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.” And he added that today, “Democrats still promise unlimited federal assistance and Republicans promise free markets, low taxes, and less regulations that we believe will create more jobs. The Democrat promise is tangible and puts food on the table, but too often doesn’t lead to jobs or meaningful success.”

It’s a classier version of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” sneer or Reagan’s “welfare queens,” but it still implies that government dependency, and a desire to live forever on the dole, and not a preference for Democrats’ overall policy agenda, is what keeps African-Americans voting  Democratic (and it is “Democratic,” not “Democrat.” Just a style point for those on the right who are trying to appeal to black voters…”

But back to the history.

“You have another shift around JFK,” Kelley says, referring to John Kennedy’s election in 1960. “You still have large numbers of blacks who are voting Republican,” she says, “but larger numbers who are not.” Kelley says Kennedy’s phone call to Coretta Scott King to express his concern about her Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s jailing in Birmingham, Alabama, was the spark that moved more black voters into the Democratic column. “This gesture toward King reverberates throughout black churches across the country, and cements a movement toward the Democratic Party that centers around the civil rights policies of FDR, Harry Truman, Kennedy and finally Lyndon Johnson.”

“At the same time,” she says, “you have this opposite effect, with white segregationists in the south moving away from the Democratic party. In 1954, they’re opposing Truman’s attempts to begin just an inquiry around civil rights. And you also have in the 1960s a movement of white southern Democrats toward [Barry] Goldwater in response to what they feel is Johnson’s betrayal of southern segregationist policies. So by the time Reagan speaks in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1980, you have this implicit attempt to reach out to white southerners who feel betrayed by the Democratic Party.”

Kelley says the reversal of racial politics between the two parties took decades to complete, and that it may not even have been fully realized until Barack Obama became president.

“I would argue that you don’t have a full and complete shift” of Democratic and Republican racial loyalties, “until maybe this past election cycle, where you have southern states that now have a full Republican legislature and local elected officials,” she says. “So you have North Carolina, which had not had a Republican legislature and governor since reconstruction,” now fully controlled by Republicans.

“Of course the parties are representing very different of issues today,” Kelley adds, “but to so say they’re the same parties today that they were during the 19th century just doesn’t make any sense.”

Not even as a pitch for wooing black college students (or probably more to the point, white college students and suburban independents who watch Rand Paul talking to black college students on CSPAN) into the GOP.

Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @TheReidReport.