Those where two I thought of in seconds. I don't know the names of most of the people who were in congress back then (or even now) but if I actually bothered looking up all the people who voted against it and checked all their voting records I'm sure I'd find more.
You pick two liberals from deep southern states obviously conflicted by their history and political situation.
Because for the most part they were the one's who voted against it. Members of congress from the west coast or the north from either party didn't vote against it.
If you wanted to say it wasn't a Republican vs. Democrat thing in but a southern vs non-southern thing back in 1964 the Dems just happened to have most of the southern seats, then you would have a good argument. (About the vote at least, not perhaps to the extent you think more broadly, there was plenty of racism in the north, or just about anywhere in the country)
But that's not what you said, you said it was a conservative vs. liberal thing, and it wasn't.
Why would you think any African American would vote for a party that tried so hard to prevent their freedom?
Hard to say exactly but they do. To the extent its about party at all the Democrats were the part of the South during the Civil War, the party of the KKK (and not just in the south - "In the early 1920s, the two states with the highest per capita Klan membership were Indiana and Oregon. " - time.com ), the party of segregation, of Jim Crow etc. They where the party that segregated the military (under Woodrow Wilson, a progressive not a conservative).
The black vote started to shift away from Republicans towards Democrats with FDR. FDR was popular, and a lot of groups votes shifted to him, but many other groups' votes shifted back, not so much with black Americans, despite some clear signs of racism from FDR
1 - Japanese interment - Well that was a different group...
2 - Inviting the American athletes from the 1936 olympics to the white house but NOT inviting Jesse Owens.
and more that I'll go in to in my next post |
