"Lily White and Hard Right": The Mississippi Republican Party and Black Voting, 1965-1980 (Essay‪)‬

IN 2005 THE U.S. SENATE APPROVED A HIGHLY PUBLICIZED APOLOGY for its failure to pass antilynching legislation in the twentieth century. The symbolic resolution had the cosponsorship of eighty senators, and those who refused to back the measure attracted criticism. The two senators who received the most attention for their failure to cosponsor were Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran from Mississippi, the state with the most notorious record of lynchings of African Americans. Criticism in particular focused on Cochran, the senior senator, who had a history of winning elections with more black support than his fellow Republicans. Cochran publicly defended his refusal after receiving editorial censure. In comments to black Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, also a Mississippian, Cochran said that he was "not in the business of apologizing for what someone else did or didn't do," even though he had previously cosponsored bills apologizing for the federal government's treatment of American Indians and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. (1) Cochran's longtime lack of racial demagoguery or even use of racially coded appeals to white voters sets him apart from other Mississippi Republicans such as his colleague Trent Lott, who lost his post as Senate majority leader in 2002 after making a positive comment about Strom Thurmond's 1948 campaign for president. Cochran would also never have uttered a comment like that of Governor Kirk Fordice, who in 1991 openly supported repealing the Voting Rights Act and criticized the movie Mississippi Burning for its depiction of the 1964 Freedom Summer murders. (2) Cochran did not want to be seen as opposing successful civil rights legislation or as being tied to the state's brutal history of Jim Crow. Yet Cochran's refusal to support even a symbolic apology showed the importance of the votes of racially conservative whites. By 2005 the Mississippi Republican Party had long abandoned its interracial nineteenth-century beginnings and instead reaped the benefits of what Earl Black and Merle Black have dubbed the "Great White Switch" of southern white voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Indeed, well before the 1991 election of Kirk Fordice as Mississippi's first modern Republican governor, the Mississippi GOP had firmly become "lily white and hard right," to use the words of Gilbert E. "Gil" Carmichael, the party's gubernatorial candidate in the 1970s. (3)