9.4: The Civil Rights Movement as a Counter-Project

The mid-20th century Civil Rights Movement represented a massive, organized challenge to the state’s White-supremacist racial projects. Landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 were transformative victories that redefined the state’s relationship to race, moving from an enforcer of segregation to a (theoretical) guarantor of formal equality. However, this shift was neither complete nor permanent.

As political behavior in the United States is deeply racialized, a phenomenon rooted in the political realignment following the Civil Rights Movement, actual strategies based on race emerged. The Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights under President Lyndon B. Johnson, culminating in the VRA of 1965, triggered a dramatic partisan shift. Johnson himself reportedly remarked, “We have lost the South for a generation.” This “Great Alignment” saw White southern conservatives, who had reliably voted Democratic since the Civil War, gradually migrate to the Republican Party, which adopted a “Southern Strategy” that used coded racial appeals to win their votes (Edsall and Edsall 1991). Conversely, Black voters, who had historically supported the Party of Lincoln, shifted their allegiance almost unanimously to the Democratic Party, where they remain its most loyal voting bloc. BIPOC communities, having historically been excluded from opportunity and targeted by state violence, are more likely to support an activist government that provides a social safety net and protects civil rights (Dawson 1994).