Fifty years after the Southern Manifesto,� conservatives� are still trying to convince African-Americans that economic empowerment and� states rights� are� not code words for racial attitudes held� long ago.

Fifty years ago this month, southern Democrats issued the Southern Manifesto. Though the document appealed to time-honored traditions� — states rights, local empowerment and democratic values� — it represented the nadir of modern southern politics.
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The manifesto was issued as a response to Brown vs.� Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision in which our highest court ruled that separate but equal — the law of the land since Plessy vs. Ferguson� — was inherently unconstitutional.
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The Brown decision, whatever its judicial merits, spelled doom for segregation polices that had become enshrined as “Jim Crow” laws, depriving African-American citizens of their most fundamental civil and political rights. Thurmond and his followers basically thumbed their noses at the federal government and the Supreme Court� — and they did it in the name of tradition, state’s rights and individual choice.
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The rest, as they say, is history. Eisenhower forced desegregation in Little Rock. Massive resistance became the stated policy of many southern states, and Martin Luther King, Jr. became a genuine American hero for shepherding a civil rights movement that rightly celebrated in 1964-1965 the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.
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During all of this two major realignments occurred. First, the same Democratic Party that had historically opposed civil rights had under Lyndon Johnson’s leadership become its champion. And conservatives and Republicans, who had long been relatively receptive to black empowerment, suddenly found themselves identified with conservative southerners who opposed desegregation. Politically, it was something of a draw. Republicans got southern support that helped propel Nixon and Reagan, not to mention both Bushes, into the White House. Democrats, however, can now count on the black vote almost as assuredly as they can the law of gravity, which support in our divided nation may yet work in favor of Ms. Clinton.
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All the while, the tragedy that has been the African American experience has been allowed to continue, which issue will be explored in due course. But first an historical retrospective.
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Much of this modern history is at least somewhat known to many Americans, but what is less well known is that in the 1880s and 1890s great progress was being made in the south on civil rights for former slaves. Black Americans in the south used the same facilities as whites, frequented the same restaurants and held public office at a variety of levels. Many white southern leaders were prepared to support the political empowerment of blacks, including the white governor in Mississippi who was a progressive force in southern politics.
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Had this process continued� — had it won the day� — there would have been no civil rights movement required, no Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and no legacy of Jim Crow. Black Americans would have been assimilated into mainstream economic and political processes, and the culture of victim-hood that threatens to destroy so many lives might have been rejected.
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Alas, reactionary forces mobilized with the withdrawal of federal troops from the south in 1877. Lynchings, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan all materialized as white supremacists began to react to the progress made by African-Americans. When reactionary forces prevailed and the nation abandoned its efforts to bring blacks into the mainstream, America experienced one of its greatest political and cultural tragedies.
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The 1950s marked a watershed. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the right man at the right time. He was courageous, charismatic, well educated and shrewd. He won the civil rights struggle for two reasons: his cause was just, and he understood strategically and tactically how to achieve his goals. King chose his enemies carefully and his words wisely.
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In Bull Connor he got his poster boy for unenlightened racist leadership. In his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, he laid out his own manifesto of civil rights. He buttressed his case using the very weapons of his opponents. They argued for the tradition of the South; King countered with the traditions of Christianity; they argued for states rights, but King countered with the human rights underscored in the Declaration of Independence; opponents accused him of extremism, but the nation witnessed peaceful civil rights marchers being attacked with fire hoses and vicious dogs. In fact, it could be argued that King’s was a conservative movement rooted firmly in Constitutional law and peaceful protest. Indeed, King even warned his followers that the law required that they be jailed� — and he accepted this as the price of illuminating the injustices African-Americans had been forced to shoulder for generations.
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But, alas, things fall apart, and the center does not hold, as Yeats wrote. By the mid 1960s, radicals with far-reaching agendas beyond civil rights began to hijack the civil rights movement. Economic empowerment required more than legislation passed in Washington D.C., and people were instantly impatient. Black power or separation became the rallying cries of radical blacks who still felt the sting of discrimination and who became pawns of leftists whose agenda went well beyond giving blacks their rightful place as full citizens in American life. These leftists were not interested in correcting the system; they sought to overthrow it. Their enemy was not Bull Connor, but capitalism, free enterprise and institutions that had made America the greatest and most generous power on earth. They pushed the Democratic Party and the civil rights movement so far to the left that both began to lose touch with the mission of King and the dream he articulated so ably.
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To this day, we see the repercussions of these geological political shifts. It has been forty years since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed, but a significant percentage of blacks continue to embrace the notion that the system is maliciously aligned against them. The National Urban League’s State of Black America report is long on racial disparities, but short on innovative solutions for addressing them.
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Even as black leadership has emerged in virtually every major city in the nation, the black community as a whole has been inoculated with the victim virus. Consequently, we see a community that celebrated the exoneration of O. J. Simpson, as if he were a hero rather than a murderer; we witness charlatans like Al Sharpton emerging as “legitimate” voices of black concerns; we see respectable and talented blacks like Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice and Colin Powell denigrated for standing apart from victim politics; we hear baseless charges of conspiracy tossed around recklessly� — Katrina was a plot against blacks in New Orleans, for example.
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And all the while, the Democratic Party has helped foster these attitudes because its own political future and fortunes are entwined with keeping blacks angry. Remarkably, even in cities that are governed totally by Democratic blacks, responsibility for failures in education, government and emergency response are somehow laid at the feet of a white power structure. Meanwhile, young blacks are being exposed relentlessly to the Hip Hop culture of violence, sex and drugs� — a culture that celebrates grievances and glorifies destructive behaviors that already cripple much of the black population. I would be so bold as to paraphrase Ms. Clinton: it is not conservatives and Republicans who are the new plantation owners, but rather entertainment and Democratic political elites who make their careers and fortunes distorting reality.
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The good news in America today is that more and more African-Americans are joining the mainstream, but the bad news is that it is a culturally and economically fragmented community. Even as economic indicators point upward, the forces of division and hatred are growing stronger. The message is simple but devastatingly harmful: every problem in the black community is the fault of “the man”� — an American system incapable of justice. This message is harmful, demoralizing and false, but it works in pockets of African-American culture where children and teenagers are brainwashed with the same relentless efficiency as Muslim children in the Middle East.
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Republicans and conservatives have a problem, however. They have the right message, but not the right messenger. The party has not shown the capacity to go into the inner cities of America and preach the gospel of empowerment, pride and education. Jack Kemp might well have been the only major modern Republican leader in recent years who was as comfortable in a black church as he was in a corporate board room.
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And has the political landscape changed enough to allow Republicans to aggressively seek out African-American votes without alienating white voters who, while not overtly racist, might consider political efforts directed at blacks as a form of pandering.
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This is where the white supremacy movements of the past did so much harm to conservative politics. There are core issues around which whites and blacks can and should rally: economic empowerment, local empowerment, states rights, cultural renovation, school choice, the sanctity of unborn life, etc.
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Fifty years later, conservatives and Republicans are still trying to convince African-Americans that these causes are not code words for racial attitudes held half a century ago, that many Americans sincerely believe that the path to empowerment now longer lies in Washington, D.C. or Jesse Jackson, that our nation, already tested by so many issues domestic and foreign, still offers opportunities that will benefit their children if they do the hard work of preparation.
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The next Republican presidential candidate might consider the declaration of a new manifesto, one that takes the message of empowerment, economic prosperity and political liberation directly into the heart of the African-American community. It is not a message that will be instantly greeted with applause, but it might earn respect if done the right way, if not forgotten once the votes are counted, if delivered with the right passion and sincerity. The legacy of the manifesto of 1956 needs to be overcome, and conservatives today are better placed than the Democrats to deliver on that promise.