re: #498 Dark_Falcon

en.wikipedia.org

The Lily-White Movement was an anti-civil-rights movement within the Republican Party in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement was a response to the political and socioeconomic gains made by African-Americans following the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which eliminated slavery. Black leaders gained increasing influence in the party by organizing blacks as an important voting bloc. Conservative white groups attempted to eliminate this influence and recover white voters who had defected to the Democratic Party.
The term Lily-White Movement is generally attributed to Texas Republican leader Norris Wright Cuney who used the term in an 1888 Republican convention to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust blacks from positions of Texas party leadership and incite riots to divide the party.[1] The term came to be used nationally to describe this ongoing movement as it further developed in the early 20th century.[2] Localized movements began immediately after the war but by the beginning of the 20th century the effort had become national.
According to author and professor Michael K. Fauntroy,
“The lily white movement is one of the darkest and underexamined eras of US Republicanism.”[3]
This movement is largely credited with driving blacks out of the Republican party during the early 20th century, setting the stage for their eventual support of the Democrats.

[…]

Downfall of black Republicans

By the beginning of the 20th century black political influence was in freefall. During the first three decades of the 20th century blacks were excluded from the U.S. Congress.[10] As the 1920s came the movement had largely succeeded in establishing almost total white supremacy in the party. Numerous events point to this fact such as the barring of black leaders from the Virginia Republican Congressional Convention in 1922.[11]
One of the Black and Tan partisans who continued to hold appointed office was the customs inspector and later comptroller of customs, Walter L. Cohen of New Orleans, who obtained appointments from four Republican presidents and continued in office through the Calvin Coolidge administration.[12]
During the NAACP national convention in 1926, the delegates expressed their disappointment with the party.
Our political salvation and our social survival lie in our absolute independence of party allegiance in politics and the casting of our vote for our friends and against our enemies whoever they may be and whatever party labels they carry.[13]
An interesting historical irony is that, though strengthening the Republican Party in the South was a major motivation of the movement, the party faded to near irrelevance in the South during the early 20th century despite the movement’s success.

So in one (and only one) respect he’s correct - it wasn’t some sudden switch, it took decades. The GOP turned its back to blacks in late 19th-early 20th century. Certainly at that time Dem Party’s back was turned too, as it was long before that. It took several decades for the Dems to slowly begin turning towards blacks, with the conservatives fleeing to the GOP, which stood its newfound racist ground. The Southern Strategy thus was not so much a change of course as an amplification of the pre-existing course.