The death this year of two Southern jurists, both Republican appointees, dramatically points up just how much of the civil rights high ground Republicans have given up in the past few decades.
As we head into the last presidential election of the 20th century, the GOP nominee, whoever it is, can expect to receive only from 10 to 15 percent of the black vote, despite the enormous role Republicans have played in ending discrimination as recently as the 1960s, when the party's senators rallied to help pass landmark civil rights legislation.Political misconceptions are not unusual. For instance, many black voters revere John F. Kennedy because he said the right things when in fact he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to their cause. Lyndon Johnson made a far stronger contribution to civil rights.
In reality, few men in history, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, have done more to advance the cause of equality than federal judges John Minor Wisdom of Louisiana and Frank M. Johnson of Alabama, both appointed by a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Their courageous decisions -- too many to list -- from both the district and appeals courts helped blacks win true freedom for the first time since the Civil War. These rulings desegregated public schools and colleges, parks, libraries, museums, restrooms, restaurants, airports, depots and most other public places and consistently reversed discrimination and oppression in all walks of life and in every institution.
It was Johnson, who died last month at the age of 80, who upheld Martin Luther King's right to lead a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, stating that the right to march is commensurate with the enormous wrongs that have been committed. When state courts refused to act forcefully in the case of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights worker murdered for riding in a car with a black man, Johnson used federal charges to send the killers to jail.
Wisdom, sitting on the appeals court bench in New Orleans, led three of his other colleagues, two of whom also were Republicans, in one significant civil rights decision after another in the Democrat-controlled South.
The erosion of African-American support for Republicans began with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 in the height of the Depression, when everyone was suffering, particularly blacks. With his wife leading the way, the patrician Roosevelt appeared at least to care more for the plight of minorities. Again, in reality, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Always mindful of his political base, which included the then solidly Democratic South, Roosevelt paid lip service to equality for the benefit of northern liberals while winking at his party's white southern leaders and their unreconstructed racist policies. He did nothing to stop the disenfranchising and humiliation of blacks.
It actually was Roosevelt's 1940 Republican presidential opponent, Wendell L. Willkie, who was a strong civil rights advocate, pleading unsuccessfully with him to desegregate the armed forces. Black men, Willkie argued, should not be sent off to war as second-class citizens. It was Willkie who also argued with Hollywood moguls about the way blacks were portrayed in films and urged them to give blacks more and better parts.
Through most of those turbulent years, southern Democrats held sway in the Senate and blocked every effort to pass legislation bringing even a smidgen of equality to the South. Even when the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of public schools in the mid-1950s, southern Democratic governors stood in the way.
Black animosity toward the party solidified when Sen. Barry Goldwater, who was to be the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, was convinced to vote against the landmark civil rights act of that year despite his own personal support for anti-discrimination efforts in his home state of Arizona.
Largely on the basis of Goldwater's politically expedient stance, Southern whites began to turn to the Republicans and, for the first time since Reconstruction, the South had two political parties.
Consistent Republican congressional opposition to policies like busing, welfare, one-man-one-vote and the war on poverty, no matter how correct in retrospect, have continued to persuade blacks that their best interests lie with the Democrats.
In his home state of Texas, Gov. George W. Bush has made some inroads on the Democratic hold on the black vote. Other GOP candidates like Sen. John McCain have reached out to African Americans.
But if the party is to broaden its base and its appeal, it should do everything in its power to model its positions on the records of Judges Wisdom and Johnson and market that history with pride.