Atlanta-based New York Times reporter Richard Fausset hinted that the late President Jimmy Carter was a victim of Republican racism in “After Jimmy Carter Won the Presidency, Democrats Lost the South -- Mr. Carter witnessed a shift from what had been a solidly Democratic South to one that Republicans, supported by white voters and particularly evangelicals, came to dominate.”
On the day he was sworn in as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, an ambitious white peanut farmer from rural Sumter County, announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The declaration landed like the carefully calculated bomb it was intended to be in the South of 1971 -- and landed Mr. Carter on the cover of Time magazine, along with the blurb, “Dixie whistles a different tune.”
But in his ensuing half-century of public life, Mr. Carter, the one-term Democratic president who died Sunday at 100, would be forced to listen rather helplessly as Republicans mostly called the tune in his native South, supported by white voters who were uncomfortable with the Democrats’ embrace of racial inclusion and abortion rights, and were attracted to the small-government, low-tax promises of the party of Ronald Reagan.
Indeed, after Mr. Carter’s ascension to the White House, the states of the old Confederacy would go on to become, with a few exceptions, a crucial base of support for Republican presidential candidates. Much of that support came from Mr. Carter’s fellow Southern evangelicals, who turned sharply away from him and the Democrats during his presidential term. They became one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs and remain so to this day.
Fausset soft-pedaled the Jim Crow South run by Democrats.
That was part of a shift that had begun in the early 1960s, as Republicans found a way to chip and then blast away at what had been a solidly Democratic South since the end of Reconstruction. Southerners’ fealty to the party had been based on their appreciation for Roosevelt’s New Deal, and their bitterness over the 19th century Republicanism of Lincoln that helped erode the region’s strict racial hierarchies.
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At the same time, Mr. Carter’s career helped define a template for Democratic success at the state level, one characterized by careful centrism and the rhetoric of inclusion….
All along, Mr. Carter remained a moral beacon for Southern progressives with his long, faith-fueled, good works-focused post-presidency.
You can be a centrist....and a beacon for "progressives"?
Fausset even made excuses for Carter running the type of gubernatorial campaign for which non-Democrats would be excoriated as racist, since Carter was after all focused on the greater good.
In his 1970 run for governor, however, he made a calculated play for the votes of less enlightened Georgia whites. “In 1970, Carter’s campaign was pretty tawdry,” said Randall Ballmer, a Carter biographer. That year, Mr. Carter adopted the campaign slogan of the segregationist Alabama politician George Wallace; praised Lester Maddox, the rabid segregationist he succeeded as governor; and courted Roy V. Harris, a former president of the Citizens’ Councils of America.
Those actions were, apparently, tawdry means to an end. “You won’t like my campaign,” Mr. Carter had warned Vernon Jordan, the president of the National Urban League, “but you will like my administration.”
After downplaying Carter’s “tawdry” campaign appeals to race, Fausset implied Reagan used racist appeals to get elected.
At the same time, Republicans were casting a net for white Southerners who were uneasy with integration. As he campaigned for president, Mr. Reagan visited the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, near where three civil rights workers had been slain 16 years earlier, and gave a speech extolling states’ rights.
Reagan did visit the Neshoba County Fair, a common stomping ground for politicians, on August 3, 1980, but stuck to talking about Carter’s failures, with one line about states’ rights. (Strangely, back in 1980 the Times covered Reagan's appearance without mentioning the murdered civil rights workers.) Reagan then went to New York and spoke to the National Urban League.
Undaunted by such ignored facts, Fausset pressed the point.
It was just one expression of the Republicans’ “Southern strategy” to peel white voters away from the Democratic Party, using race as the tool. Mr. Reagan ended up sweeping the South that year in the Electoral College, with the exception of Georgia.
The Democrats had for previous decades used race both as a political tool and one of violence during their stretch of one-party rule in Southern states. More Republicans (as a percentage of the party’s membership in Congress) voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats. The Klan was founded by Democrats, and the longest-serving member of the Senate, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, was a Democrat.
Fausset’s praise of Carter upon his death contrasted mightily to how Fausset (then with the Los Angeles Times) treated Ronald Reagan’s June 2004 passing, in a story headlined “Blacks, gays remember Reagan with bitterness, saying he neglected the poor and lacked leadership as the AIDS epidemic exploded.”
