I’m always amazed when I read that the Republicans still call themselves the party of Lincoln. Republicans haven’t been the party of Lincoln since 1948 when a Democratic president, Harry Truman, racially integrated the U.S. military through Executive Order 9981. Soon the party of the South was looking for a new party. First they tried Dixiecrats headlined by avowed racist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. He captured four Southern states in his failed presidential bid in 1948.
After President Lyndon Johnson, 50 years ago, passed the Civil Rights Act then the Voting Rights Act, he famously said after the former “We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.” Turned out to be much longer.
The conversion from Southern Democrats to Republicans caught fire. The capstone was Ronald Reagan beginning his first campaign for president in Philadelphia, Miss., a white-supremacist and Ku Klux Klan stronghold, using the phrase “states’ rights.”
Lincoln freed the slaves but it was President Johnson who gave all men and women of color the right to vote, swept away Jim Crow laws, provided dignity and allowed the nation to begin living up to our creed that all are created equal, hardly the siren call of today’s Republican Party.
