Current Events > Why did Black People switch over to Democrats in the 30's when the parties

(+) Yeah! (+)

didn't switch until the 60's? Why align with a party who was still in bed with the KKK and leave the party of Emancipation?

I know the answer but I wonder if anyone on CE does hmmm....
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Back in the civil war era, the republicans were the abolitionists, while the democrats were like "slavery 5ever! YOLO!". idk when they switched and when black people mostly flocked to democratic party >_>
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The parties didn't switch
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The FDR coalition was never really one of social causes.

A lot of immigrants and minorities who were affected by the Depression were won over by the New Deal.

FDR also payed lip service to civil rights causes though they were not something he pursued in office.

Even then (unless my memory is off) black Americans still didn't vote quite in the numbers they do now until LBJ
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On_The_Edge posted...

The parties didn't switch

Yes they did the Dixiecrats all jumped to the republican party in like the 1950s or sixties.
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The Democrats of the 30s, at least up north, were a party of the working class and organized labor. Black people were largely working class. Unions were one of the few areas of integration in American Society, though they were not perfect by any means.

Also the Communist Party made a concerted effort to organize black workers in the south during this time. There's a book called Hammer And Hoe that goes into that pretty well.
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1. The parties didn't "switch"
2. Dems were gonna start more social services than Republicans were.
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Sephiroth1288 posted...

1. The parties didn't "switch"
2. Dems were gonna start more social services than Republicans were.

The parties did switch, at least on the matter of civil rights.

As someone mentioned all the southern Dixiecrats jumped ship around when the Civil Rights movement took off
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Doom_Art posted...

As someone mentioned all the southern Dixiecrats jumped ship around when the Civil Rights movement took off

It was a much longer transition than that. Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and ran on a ticket with a Senator from Tennessee.
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Doom_Art posted...

The parties did switch, at least on the matter of civil rights.

Which president sent Federal troops to Arkansas to make the local government allow black kids into school at the time you claim they "switched"?

Doom_Art posted...

As someone mentioned all the southern Dixiecrats jumped ship around when the Civil Rights movement took off

Wrong again. The Dixiecrats dissolved before the civil rights movement.
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When the parties switched it wasn't all at once, the party switch took place over several years until the civil rights act.
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Did the dems offer any programs that appealed to minority communities ?
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Because black people aren't a hivemind and make decisions based on their personal experience.
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To my understanding, the public works projects of the New Deal weren't racially exclusionary and paid fair wages. That was all really. FDR was otherwise pretty racist, and Truman was former klansman, though he shifted the party to a more civil-rights oriented position, leading to the '48 Democrat-Dixiecrat rift.

The Republicans remained the more universally liberal party into the 1960s, after which it split between the Libertarian and Rockefeller types - still pretty liberal though, just not radical.
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Democrats have always been horrible