Race and the GOP: The Road to Perdition

The Republican Party was born in 1854, largely to oppose expanding slavery and, for many of its founders, to abolish it. By 1860, the party’s platform declared the African slave trade a “crime against humanity and a burning shame” and called attempts to extend slavery westward “a dangerous political heresy.”

“Opposition to slavery was the party’s soul,” according to historian Fergus M. Bordewich, who has written extensively about America’s first century. “Republicans considered slavery morally repugnant, economically backward, degrading to the basic principles of free labor, and fundamentally anti-American.”

Among the most prominent party founders was U.S. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.)

“Stevens was one of the most effective political abolitionists in the U.S.,” Bordewich said in an interview. “He viscerally loathed slavery, harbored no color prejudice, and was a passionate leveler, who argued tirelessly for racial equality and refused to be buried in a racially segregated cemetery.”

During the Civil War, Stevens zealously emphasized prosecuting the conflict. Afterward, he strongly advocated radical Southern Reconstruction.

Now, his legacy is being honored.

On May 1, the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy, an interpretive museum and education center, will open. It is in Lancaster, Pa., Stevens’s final hometown and an Underground Railroad hub.

Smith was Stevens’s mixed-race housekeeper and collaborator. The state-of-the-art center is in Stevens’s home and adjoining law office, enhanced by 25,000 square feet of modern exhibition galleries.

In the 1850s, “Lancaster County was on the front line of the antislavery fight,” said Robin Sarratt, president & CEO of LancasterHistory. “From his Lancaster home, Stevens became a powerful voice andunyielding champion of both freedom and equality, the non-profit history organization developing the Stevens and Smith Center. More Americans should know his legacy’s impact on our lives today.”

Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones in the 2012 film “Lincoln,” engineered passage of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, and supported the 14th in the U.S. House, but he died before the 15th amendment passed.

President Ulysses S. Grant had done his best to use the U.S. military and government attorneys to preserve political rights gained by Black Southerners by these amendments. However, in the contested 1876 presidential election, pitting Democrat Samuel Tilden against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, the Gilded Age plutocrats and robber barons who by then controlled the Republican Party participated in a great betrayal.

“By 1876, the idealistic Republican Party that came into office under Abraham Lincoln had become the party of big money and power,” Bordewich said. “The new Republican party essentially abandoned — sold out — the rights of Black Americans as it ingratiated itself with corporate titans.”

To gain the White House, Republican leaders ended federal military Southern Reconstruction, giving racist “Redeemer” Democrats free rein to reassert power. They did so, frequently using terror.

Hayes, like Grant and most other Republicans, “had come to accept … that the use of the military to protect Black Southerners was no longer politically possible,” Bordewich writes in his forthcoming book, “Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future.“

“Too much politics, too little attention to business, is the bane of that part of the country,” Hayes wrote to a friend of the South.

In the following years, despite this stain on Thaddeus Stevens’s legacy, most Black Southerners remained loyal Republicans, partly thanks to patronage when the party controlled the White House.

However, in the 1932 presidential election, Black Republicans began deserting to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. That desertion accelerated in the early and mid-1960s, especially after the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts passed.

In their wake, South Carolina political strategist Lee Atwater helped develop the “Southern Strategy,” adding a strain of renewed racism to pragmatism. Using code words, Atwater and others suggested Southern Republicans “hunt where the ducks are” — meaning that when white, conservative, racist Southern Democrats left the party due to Civil Rights movement-driven party integration, Republicans should woo them.

Incrementally, the strategy worked. In 1964, despite his landslide defeat by Lyndon Johnson, Republican Barry Goldwater, who opposed civil rights legislation, carried Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.

The new Republican Party was emerging as a mirror image of the previous century’s Democratic Party — as “the white man’s party.”

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘[N word, N word, N word],’ Atwater said in a 1981 recorded interview acquired by James Carter IV and later published in The Nation magazine. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘[N word]’ — that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights.”

In 1968, Richard Nixon’s campaign refined the Southern Strategy, adding new code words like “law and order.” This culminated in Nixon’s election, which, along with independent candidate George Wallace, swept the South east of Texas. In 1972, the strategy carried Jesse Helms of North Carolina to the U.S. Senate.

Symbolically, in 1976, candidate Ronald Reagan began his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. The Republicans’ long slide into racism was no longer just a nod and a wink.

By 2024, with Trump’s second administration, the gloves came off. Backed by MAGA supporters, he targeted Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in government, public and private education and the private sector, including law firms. The new code word became “wokeism.”

Now, references to slavery, racism and Black accomplishment have been removed from National Parks, the Smithsonian and other government venues. Witness recent crude, racist chats by South Florida College Republicans.

“Donald Trump’s Republican party is now dismantling at breakneck speed what remains of the enlightened heritage bequeathed to it by Thaddeus Stevens and its other founders,” said Bordewich. “Indeed, Stevens would be unable to recognize today’s Republican Party, which has aggressively repudiated what he most deeply believed in. Fortunately, at least, the new museum dedicated to him in Lancaster will more permanently anchor his memory and his significance as one of the most forward-looking political men our country has ever produced.”

Mark I. Pinsky, a Durham, N.C.-based journalist and author, has covered Southern politics since 1972.

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