Why Does David Barton's History Of The Fight For Racial Equality Always End In The Mid-1960s? (RWW)

[inanna]

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Thursday, 1/8/2015 2:03 pm

As we have noted before, David Barton's telling of the history of the fight for racial equality in America always mysteriously seems to stop right around the mid-1960s, right before the rise of the GOP's "Southern Strategy." Barton has written books and produced DVDs that claim to "set the record straight" on the role that both major political parties played in ending slavery, passing civil rights laws, and pushing for equality but his materials always portray Democrats are the enemies of black equality and conveniently never seem to make it beyond 1964.

<snip>

In 1968, George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate against Nixon and Humphrey, on an explicitly segregationist platform. Humphrey had been the main champion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Senate; Nixon, while no civil rights activist, rejected an overtly racist platform. Feeling abandoned by both parties, Southern white racists flocked to Wallace's cause, winning him the Deep South states of Ark., La., Miss., Ala. and Ga.

Political analyst and Nixon campaigner Kevin Phillips, analyzing 1948-1968 voting trends, viewed these rebellious Southern voters as ripe for Republican picking. In The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, 1969), he correctly predicted that the Republican party would shift its national base to the South by appealing to whites' disaffection with liberal democratic racial and welfare policies. President Nixon shrewdly played this "Southern strategy" by promoting affirmative action in employment, a "wedge" issue that later Republicans would exploit to split the Democratic coalition of white working class and black voters.

Barton, of course, completely ignores this basic history and instead blames it all on miseducation; specifically the idea that Democrats refuse to allow schools to teach the real history that it was Democrats who started the Ku Klux Klan, opposed civil rights laws, supported slavery, and defended segregation.

Link: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/why-does-david-bartons-history-fight-racial-equality-always-end-mid-1960s

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. Because propaganda is propaganda. n/t

[Mrdie]

2. Marx supported Lincoln against the Confederacy

Obviously this must mean that Marxists 100+ years later support Republican Presidents as well.

I wonder how Barton would explain the fact that Dixiecrat politicians in the 1940s-60s almost always held conservative viewpoints and many (including their most notable, Strom Thurmond) went over to the Republicans?

It's also funny because you're far more likely to find critics of Lincoln and Confederate apologists among self-described conservatives than among liberals.