The Washington Post runs a tribute. More at Booker Rising and La Shawn Barber.
Mrs King's passing, and Thomas Sowell's call for Republicans to reassess their attitude towards African-American voters set me thinking about a passage in Stephen Ambrose's biography of Richard Nixon.
In 1960, when Nixon was running against JFK, the Democrats couldn't take black support for granted. Not, at least, in the way they do today:
Nixon had counted on a sizable vote from Negroes who were fundamentalists and because of his strong support of civil rights over the years. He had good relations with King, better than Kennedy did; King had voted for the Republicans in 1956, and in 1960 King's father had endorsed Nixon.
But according to Ambrose, Nixon blew his chances when he was slow to respond to King's arrest during a civil rights protest in Georgia in October 1960. Kennedy was much more assertive:
...Martin Luther King Sr, angered by Nixon's silence and moved by Kennedy's intervention, said: "I've got a suitcase of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr Kennedy and dump them in his lap." The story was widely ignored by the white press, but it made headlines in the Negro newspapers... The episode hurt Nixon badly. In 1956 [Adlai] Stevenson had won about 60 per cent of the Negro vote; in 1960 Kennedy won about 80 per cent.
So, nearly half a century later, how to make up all that lost ground? Thomas Sowell's advice is as uncompromising as ever:
When Republicans from time to time try to reach out to blacks, they tend to do so ineptly, if not ridiculously. For reasons unknown, they seem to want to appeal to black voters in the same ways that Democrats appeal to black voters, by adopting a liberal stance.
Why would anyone who wants liberalism go for a Republican imitation when they can get the real thing from Democrats? Republicans do not have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the votes of liberal blacks.
Nor are they likely to win a majority of the black vote as a whole any time soon. But if Republicans can get just a fourth or a fifth of the black vote nationwide, that can shift the balance of power decisively in their favour.
It is not rocket science to see that whatever chances the Republicans have of making inroads into the black vote are likely to be better among more conservative blacks.
...Back in 1997, when black Republican Congressman J.C. Watts denounced people like Jesse Jackson and then D.C. mayor Marion Barry as "race-hustling poverty pimps," House Speaker Newt Gingrich took it upon himself to apologize to Jesse Jackson.
To apologize for what another man said is to treat that man as if he were your child or your servant. Gingrich then added further insult by inviting Jesse Jackson to join him in his box for the Clinton inauguration for his second term as president.Pulling the rug out from under your friends, in order to appease your enemies, may seem like clever politics to some people. But what could possibly have led Republicans to think that pro-Jesse Jackson blacks were ever going to vote for them?
I wonder if Sowell's strategy would really work? Maybe there'll be some answers in John McWhorter's latest book, Winning The Race, which I've just started reading (review to follow in the Washington Times) I'm a big fan of McWhorter. If anyone can come up with a solution, he's the man.
So true. Once the Republicans got into office, the fell into the old Democrat ways of doing things. They were elected to CHANGE things, not for more of the same.
Posted by: staghounds | Tuesday, February 07, 2006 at 05:16 PM