Doug McAdam is the Ray Lyman Wilbur professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a former director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Karina Kloos is a scholar of political sociology and social movements at Stanford University, where she is a Ph.D. candidate. This article is adapted from their recent book, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America (Oxford University Press).

Americans are justly proud of their historic achievements in advancing civil rights. But behind all the nostalgia of recent months, it’s not too hard to detect notes of melancholy.

In the past few years, we’ve celebrated the 50th anniversaries of many seminal events and landmark achievements of the civil rights movement, from the nonviolent direct action campaign waged in Birmingham, Alabama, to the March on Washington and Freedom Summer. An award-winning play devoted to Lyndon Johnson’s shrewd stewardship of the Civil Rights Act ran on Broadway for most of 2014. And next year, we will commemorate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which restored to Southern blacks the franchise that had been unconstitutionally denied them during the Jim Crow era. These are all, certainly, accomplishments to celebrate.


But the legacy of the all these landmarks is much more complicated and tinged with—make that drenched in—irony than the conventional story of courage and triumph lets on. It is time to state the obvious. Forget about weak explanations for today’s deep political divisions like “the culture of Washington,” gerrymandering or the rise of cable TV: The civil rights movement, while a victory on many levels, was also the origin of our present morass. It spawned a powerful national “white resistance” countermovement that decisively altered the racial geography of American politics, pushing the national Democratic and Republican parties off center and toward their ideological margins, undermining the centrist policy convergence of the postwar period and setting the parties on the divisive course they remain on today. Many will blame today’s unprecedented political polarization on recent events, such as the rise of the Tea Party or Obama’s election in 2008, but they will be wrong. The seeds of America’s dysfunction were planted 50 years ago. And the ugly politics of race had everything to do with it.

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We all know that the political parties were different at the start of the 1960s than they are today. Geographically rooted in the South, the Democrats were a strange coalition of northern racial liberals and southern segregationists. The Republican Party was centered in the Midwest and Northeast and was, in the aggregate, far more racially liberal than the Democrats.

Consider the pattern of partisan voting on the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first piece of civil rights legislation to come out of Congress since the end of Reconstruction in 1876. While Democrats were predictably divided in their response to the bill, the Republican congressional delegation secured its passage.

Congressional Voting on the 1957 Civil Rights Act YES NO House Democrats 118 107 Senate Democrats 29 18 House Republicans 167 19 Senate Republicans 43 0 Source: govtrack.us

But if the GOP was the more liberal party on matters of race as the 1960s dawned, it didn’t retain this distinction for very long. A second table—adapted from Edward Carmine and James Stimson’s 1989 book, Issue Evolution—shows the partisan distribution of racial “liberals” and “conservatives” in the Senate during two sessions of Congress, the 85th (1957-1959) and 89th (1965-1967). In just 8 years, the number of liberal Republicans in Congress fell by 75 percent and the number of conservative Republicans quintupled. The policy preferences of the two parties essentially flipped. As Democrats moved sharply left on matters of race, the GOP delegation moved even more dramatically in the opposite direction.

Racial Liberalism of the 85th and 89th Congresses 85th Congress (1957-59) 89th Congress (1965-67) Liberal Democrats 21 Liberal Democrats 45 Liberal Republicans 42 Liberal Republicans 10 Conservative Democrats 27 Conservative Democrats 21 Conservative Republicans 4 Conservative Republicans 22 Source: Camine and Stimson (1989)

What happened?

President John F. Kennedy, like Harry Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt before him, took office in 1961 determined to accommodate the Southern wing of his party, which was crucial to his re-election chances in 1964. Ultimately, however, the power and energy of the civil rights movement forced his hand, and, at the time of his death Kennedy was clearly perceived as siding with the movement. Many Dixiecrats, outraged by what they saw as federal complicity in the attack on the Southern “way of life,” were poised to abandon Kennedy and the Democrats.

But in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death, the prospects for anything other than a resounding Democratic victory in 1964 seemed remote. The outpouring of grief and sympathy for the martyred president was like nothing the country had ever seen before. Correctly divining the mood of the country, President Lyndon Baines Johnson hitched his own electoral prospects to the fallen president, in essence dedicating the balance of his term to the realization of Kennedy’s legislative program. Hence Johnson’s sustained and effective advocacy of what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Johnson was hardly blind to the serious political risk he was taking, and in the end his efforts to hold his fractious party together came to naught. In 1964, disaffected white Southerners did the unthinkable and cast their votes for the once despised Party of Lincoln. As shown in the 1964 electoral map below, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina joined Barry Goldwater’s home state of Arizona as the only states to buck Johnson’s landslide triumph that November.

In 1956, Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson 457 electoral votes to 73. Eisenhower took 57.4 percent of the popular vote.

In 1964, Johnson beat Goldwater 486 electoral votes to 52, taking 61.1 percent of the popular vote.

Compare the 1964 map to its 1956 counterpart, showing Dwight Eisenhower’s equally lopsided win in the earlier year. In 1956 the “solid South” holds true to its historic allegiance to the Democratic Party, even in the face of Eisenhower’s sweep of the rest of the country. Eight years later, the South is out of step with the nation once again, this time in a way that no one could have imagined in 1956. The votes of the Deep South now belonged to the Republican Party and, more tellingly, to its conservative, anti-civil rights candidate, Goldwater.

Perhaps the magnitude of LBJ’s stunning triumph in 1964 obscured this change for most Americans, because numerous commentators have attributed the geographical shift in party loyalty largely to Richard Nixon’s aggressive courtship of the white South in his successful 1968 bid for the White House. But it was well under way by 1968—and more than that, just as the Democratic Party moved leftward in the early 1960s under pressure from the civil rights movement, by the mid-1960s, the GOP’s ideological center of gravity was shifting right to accommodate the growing number of whites angered and frightened by the assertiveness of black protesters.

The shift was not just limited to the South: By the middle of the decade the southern segregationist resistance to the civil rights struggle had morphed, as the mainstream media proclaimed, into a nationwide “white backlash” movement. No figure was more crucial to the spread of the movement than Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a Democrat, who burst on to the national scene in 1963, first by demanding “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” during his inaugural address and a few months later by physically blocking two African-American students—the first in the school’s history—from attending the University of Alabama. Overnight, Wallace became not only a hero to the white South, but also the most potent symbol of racial resistance in the country.

When Wallace challenged Johnson in the 1964 Wisconsin presidential primary, he captured a third of the vote, to everyone’s shock. In Indiana, he again polled 30 percent. For his final act, he nearly upset Johnson in Maryland, publicly attributing his narrow defeat to “the nigger voting bloc.”

Though Johnson’s nomination was never in danger, the fact that at the height of LBJ’s popularity, an unrepentant segregationist could attract the support of between thirty 30 and 50 percent of registered Democratic voters in three Northern states was nothing short of a revelation to political strategists in both parties. Seeing an opportunity, an increasing number of Republicans began to embrace more conservative racial politics designed to appeal to Wallace supporters throughout the country. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so,” said Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for California governor, in which he also decried welfare and opposed government efforts to encourage neighborhood integration.

By the 1966 midterms, Democratic candidates all over the country were finding that openly courting the black vote had sent many of their white constituents fleeing into the GOP’s waiting arms. Conservative Republicans made significant electoral gains that year, thanks to mass defections from the traditional New Deal Democratic coalition that had allowed that party to dominate presidential politics since 1932. Chief among these defectors were the white urban ethnic groups of the industrial North. In 1960, Kennedy captured 75 percent of the vote in traditional Polish and other Eastern European precincts in Illinois. By 1966, the Democratic share there was down to 53 percent. And in Ohio’s 1966 gubernatorial race the Democratic share of the Polish vote dropped 39 percentage points from Johnson’s 1964 totals, and a whopping 45 points from what Kennedy earned in 1960.

It’s not hard to understand what happened. Worried by racial unrest in their cities—“urban disorders,” they called it—and the threat of open-housing marches in their neighborhoods, these groups were no longer willing, en masse, to support a party that had come to be identified with an urban black underclass that they saw as pushing too fast for racial change.

Events between 1966 and 1968—the full flowering of the black power movement, combined with the growing use of inflammatory “law and order” rhetoric by white politicians—accelerated the racial polarization already evident in 1966, vaulting two candidates who understood the changing nature of American racial politics into the national spotlight.

Nixon, the Republican nominee, was thought to have been washed up as a serious contender when he was soundly beaten in the 1962 California gubernatorial race. And yet, here he was six years later, running for president on what he explicitly termed his “Southern strategy.” The Democrats had lost much of the South in 1964, but Nixon now believed that the entire region was up for grabs—and he sought to take advantage.

If Nixon’s candidacy was surprising, George Wallace’s third party challenge as an Independent was anything but. Four years of growing racial polarization had made Wallace an even more formidable candidate in 1968. He was a hero to the white South—but many forget that Wallace also enjoyed considerable support throughout the country, especially among the embattled white working class of the industrial North.

Standing in the way of Nixon and Wallace was the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who, as Johnson’s vice president, was tainted by the administration’s prosecution of the war in Vietnam and the growing unpopularity of the various social programs spawned by Johnson’s War on Poverty. He was also a wholehearted supporter of the civil rights movement. On the eve of the election, it seemed as if Humphrey’s best chance might come from Nixon and Wallace splitting the white Southern vote.

It didn’t quite work out that way. As the 1968 electoral map reveals, Nixon and Wallace did indeed wind up splitting the South, with Wallace prevailing in the Deep South and Nixon capturing most of the border states, but the division was not enough to save Humphrey.

In 1968, Nixon won with 301 electoral votes, while Humphrey took 191 and Wallace won 45.

In the popular vote, Nixon edged Humphrey by the narrowest of margins, 43.4 to 42.7 percent. As Republican leaders looked to the future, however, they weren’t focused on that slim gap, but rather the whopping 57 percent majority represented by the combined votes cast for Nixon and Wallace. Republican strategists believed this figure represented a dominant conservative majority that could ensure GOP control of the White House for years to come. Nixon and the Republicans had claimed the lion’s share of the South’s electoral votes for the first time in history. In a scant eight years, the Party of Lincoln had gone from being the more racially liberal of the two major parties to something more closely resembling a coalition of white racial conservatives, with the South as its natural geographic home, at least when it came to presidential politics.

In short, the essence of today’s GOP—overwhelming white and disproportionately Southern—was evident by the late 1960s. This is not, of course, the whole of the story. The evolution of the party and the broader racial geography of American politics would continue in fits and starts over the next 45 years. But unquestionably it was the civil rights movement, and white resistance to it, that put the Republican Party on its demographic and ideological trajectory. The following two tables underscore just how far the GOP has moved from its broadly centrist, racially liberal, geographically diverse base in the postwar period to the ideologically extreme, overwhelming white and disproportionately Southern party it is today.

In fact, it’s impossible to understand the modern Republican Party without understanding the white backlash of the 1960s. One of the central sources of continuity linking the Republican Party that emerged under Nixon in the late ’60s and early ’70s with the GOP of today is a sustained politics of racial reaction.

These politics were on full display in the 2012 Republican primaries, a half a century later, with the candidates seemingly trying to outdo one another in impugning the poor and African-Americans in particular. Newt Gingrich accused Obama of being a “food-stamp president” and opined that, “poor people should want paychecks, not handouts.” Rick Santorum was even more explicit when he offered up the following quote: “I don’t want to make black peoples’ lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”

Even Mitt Romney played the race card, blaming his defeat on the policy “gifts” that Obama had bestowed on the very “dependent” segments of the population he had alluded to in his notorious “47 percent” video. “Especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and young people,” he clarified, going into considerable detail about how specific policies benefited each group, thus effectively “buying” their votes.

The imprint of race and racism on today’s GOP is not only a matter of rhetoric. It was also reflected in the party’s transparent efforts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters in the run-up to the 2012 election. Throughout the country, Republican legislators and other officials sought to enact new laws or modify established voting procedures that, in virtually all instances, would have made it harder for poor and minority voters to exercise the franchise. From the beginning of 2011 through September of 2012, according to data reported by the Brennan Center at New York University, at least 180 bills restricting voting rights were introduced in 41 states. Ultimately, 25 new laws and two executive actions were adopted in 19 states, ostensibly to reduce voter fraud, although voter fraud has been a non-issue in the United States for decades. In total, these states represented 231 electoral votes, or 85 percent of the total needed to win the presidency.

On occasion, Republicans have owned up to the real aim of the new restrictions on voting. After orchestrating the passage of Pennsylvania’s especially restrictive voter ID law in 2012, Mike Turzai, the GOP leader of the state’s House of Representatives, couldn’t help but boast a bit. Said Turzai, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania. Done.” Then there was the adviser to Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, who defended the governor’s decree drastically limiting early voting, by saying that “we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine.” Most recently, a Republican official in North Carolina was forced to resign after touting ID cards as a way to reduce voting by “a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything.” But these rare admissions merely confirm what was already clear to any neutral observer. “The point,” as journalist Elizabeth Drew noted, was simply “to make it more difficult for constituent groups of the Democratic Party—blacks, Hispanics, low-income elderly and students—to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.”

Stark as the racial politics of today’s GOP are, they’re just a continuation of views that have their roots in the 1960s. So even as we celebrate the civil rights movement and its string of remarkable campaigns and policy triumphs, we would do well to remember that today’s polarized America, and enduring racial divisions are also legacies of that very same struggle.