How The Democrats Lost Dixie, Interlude: How Reagan and Thurmond Sought To Weaken the Voting Rights Act in the 1980s

 

 

Author's Note: I originally planned to publish this article after first dealing with Jimmy Carter's administration and the circumstances that led to Reagan's defeating him in 1980. However recent hearings before the Supreme Court have led me to a renewed sense of urgency.

The narrative that is held by most progressives is that both parties held the Voting Rights Act sacrosanct even as Congress fell under control of the Republicans in the mid-1990s. As this article will illustrate there were Republicans in Congress who wanted it gone as early as Reagan's first term and the only reason it held was a series of events that caused its opponents to pull back despite their virulent opposition to it. It's also clear that the only reason it appeared to have a bipartisan appeal every time it was renewed may have been part of the GOP's long game and a blindness held by members of the Democratic Party and some minority members of that party. It is important, now more than ever, that the truth be clear if the Democrats ever hope to learn from their mistakes.

 

After Ronald Reagan's landslide victory gave the GOP a Senate majority for the first time since 1954, conservatives like Strom Thurmond rejoiced. He would be named President pro tempore of the Senate and more importantly was in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee. More importantly Thurmond believed sincerely Reagan's victory was a vindication of the states' rights politics that had defined his career. Considering that Reagan had invoked the phrase during several campaign stops in the South, a younger generation of southern Republicans were celebrating Thurmond as a kind of John the Baptist of the party. Indeed the soon to be minority leader of the House Trent Lott actually said: "if we had elected this man thirty years ago, we wouldn't be in this mess.

During the lame duck session of Congress leading up to the new term Thurmond talked about amending the Voting Rights Act, repeating arguments he had made in the 1960s. He and Jesse Helms pushed a measure that would bar the Justice department from ordering busing as a remedy for racial imbalances. (Carter would veto it after it narrowly passed.) This preening, however, would create political turmoil and jeopardize an election strategy both Thurmond and Reagan had mapped out during Reagan's run for the White House.

As mapped out by his then campaign strategist John Sears, it was not essential that Reagan win a significant number of black votes so much as not be perceived as 'anti-black'. Such an image would jeopardize his support among moderate Republicans and college-educated swing state voters. The danger was dramatized in a special congressional election in Mississippi in July of 1981. Reports of Thurmond and Reagan rolling back the Voting Rights act led to massive black turn out that not only elected a Democrat but squelching the recent Republican trend in the state. Just as important was the knowledge that Thurmond's reactionary image could sap his power and effectiveness as Judiciary chairman. While his aides would try to persuade Thurmond to roll back his positions. Thurmond saw no need to change it.

Thurmond chose to rewrite history something he had done multiple times. In 1974 he told a Washington Post reporter that he'd never been a segregationist. In his reelection campaign in 1978 he said that he was 'against discrimination. When I was governor, the law said the races should be separate…But now the law is different, customs are different, public opinion has changed and so it’s a completely different situation." (A variation of this line was essentially used by John Roberts in voting to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013.)

The issue came up in 1982 when portions of the Voting Rights Act were scheduled to expire. Debate over reauthorization began a few months into the Reagan presidency. Every single newspaper article on the subject noted the opinions of Chairman Thurmond who from the start believed if it should be extended it should be on a nationwide basis. After the House overwhelming passed a strengthen version that October Thurmond, joined by two conservative committee members, sent a letter to Reagan dispelling reports he would not give the legislation fair consideration.

In a meeting with Republican leadership the White House made it clear that it wanted to avoid accusations that the GOP sought to weaken the Voting Rights Act. As one Republican strategist put it more bluntly the administration needed it "just strong enough so that we won't be called racists (italics mine)

Reagan was politically savvy if nothing else and he knew that his cumulative image on issues that were important to African-Americans had caused distrust and bitterness within the minority community. He knew that if he were to go after voting rights it would be the clearest sign to those people who had voted for him that he was everything the minority community said he was.

The most high-profile mishap occurred in January of 1982 when Reagan overturned the policy banning tax exemption for racially discriminatory public schools. The uproar and the administration quick backtrack would put Reagan on the defensive. Thurmond was in similar trouble in his home state and his home county of Edgefield.

In 1980 a federal judge from that state who Thurmond had nominated to the bench, sided with black plaintiffs who had charged the Edgefield County Council's at large voting process diluted black voting strength. Five days after the ruling, however, the Supreme Court issued a decision in a voting rights case that caused Chapman to vacate his order. In Mobile v. Bolden the court ruled 6-3 that it was not enough for plaintiffs to show a voting plan had a discriminatory effect on elections; they must prove that a voting plan was 'conceived or operated as a purposeful device to further racial discrimination.'

This decision was at the heart of the debate in 1982: Should Congress endorse the 'intent' standard in Mobile or return to the 'effects' standard that was case law before it?

Thurmond would take an approach that was grandfatherly, courteous and polite compared to the viciousness that had been his approach when running as a Dixiecrat or filibustering against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This courteous would become part of his legend. However he could not get out of the way of his past in the town that had made him. When the African-American head of the Edgefield County Democratic Party testified before his committee he asked no questions. Instead he read a statement in which he renounced his connection to it, talked about the glorious past of his country and then attacked the Democratic congressman who represented it now for not defending Edgefield's honor. He closed by minimizing the importance of the Edgefield case and excused himself from the remainder of the questioning.

In May of 1982 Senator Bob Dole worked out a compromise on the language of Section 2 and proposed a 25 year extension of Section 5. Thurmond voted against it in committee but joined all but one of his members – Helms – in sending it to the floor. He made the decision that Reagan did that there was no political advantage to be gained in playing the heavy.

Thurmond's apparent modification of his racial views was based on pragmatism: the African-American population made a larger part of both the population and registered voters in South Carolina then North Carolina. Helms was willing to write off the black vote and focus on unifying the white vote. Thurmond could not afford to be so cavalier.

What is striking is that despite that moderate tone, the reapportionment battles in the South that made up the remainder of the 20^th century were often marked by an alliance of white Republicans and black democrats who worked together to concentrate the black population in one district to help ensure the election of a black representative. In the process, surrounding districts became 'whiter' more conservative and more likely to elect Republican candidates. The process would create loopholes through which harder edges conservatives, particularly in the South.  In the long run, the biggest losers in the voting rights revolution were not conservative ideologues but rather moderate white Democrats.

And Reagan's aides had seen how this played out. In memos they noted that  this was a reversal of how Democrats had done things when they had been in power 'to help elect liberal Democrats in the North and conservative Democrats in the South." And despite the success of the Voting Rights Act it did not eliminate race as a factor in Southern politics; it merely transformed the dynamics. By the end of the 1980s a survey of South Carolina politics showed that the GOP held a 61 to 7 percent loyalty among young white voters. The Democratic party in South Carolina at the end of the 20^th century for all intents and purposes looked in size and composition not unlike the Republican organization at the start.

All of this proves that perhaps the only reason that portions of the Voting Rights Act were renewed for the next thirty years may have been because the GOP believed that they could still gain political advantage from it. None of the hardline conservatives that were elected in the South felt that different from the way Thurmond and his ancestors had been about racial affairs; they just thought that there was no political cover to gain from it.  And more important as long as Republicans such as Reagan and both Bushes were appointing increasingly conservative justices to the Supreme Court, there is a strong possibility they were playing the long game. Considering that no Justice would ever face a ballot for the decisions that they made, they could keep their hands clean and just bide their time. There had been signs that this was happening during George W. Bush's second term. By Obama's they were willing to pull the trigger.

Note: Much of this article has been taken from Joseph Crespino's Strom Thurmond's America which was published in 2012, the year before the Shelby decision.