A frequently repeated maxim holds that folks are "entitled to his or her own opinions, but not to his or her own facts." Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, has probably said that himself more than once.
So why would he tell the New York Times that "when L.B.J. passed the voting rights bill into law, he said, 'I think I just gave the South to the Republicans for a long time.' Those words were prophetic. The old Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party. Where’d they go? They went to the Republican Party"?
Warnock was repeating a myth that is part and parcel of the mainstream media's long-standing narrative falsely portraying the GOP as a reactionary tool of white supremacy. That narrative is at the heart of the familiar allegation that Republican proposals or conservative Supreme Court decisions of the current day are always a "return to the Jim Crow era."
(By the way, since Democrats were entirely responsible for Jim Crow, I've long wondered why Republicans would even remotely want to bring back a Democrat tool of oppression, but that's a topic for another day.)
Warnock has a PhD, so he's not ignorant, and, given the famous church he led prior to his election to the Senate in 2020, he must be especially knowledgeable about the conditions that led then-President Lyndon B. Johnson (AKA LBJ), a Texas Democrat, and a Democratic majority in Congress to approve both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But the facts of history make Warnock's claim to the New York Times demonstrably false, as Just Facts Daily (JFD) recently made abundantly clear. Two of the multiple facts brought forth by JFD are especially revealing of how removed from reality Warnock's statement is:
- Among the 21 Democrat Senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only one of them (Strom Thurmond) became a Republican, while the other 20 stayed as lifelong Democrats.
- Prominent segregationists like George Wallace, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, and Orval Faubus were Democrats who never switched to the Republican Party.
So Warnock was literally wrong about 20 of the 21 Dixiecrat senators who voted against the most important civil rights legislation of modern American history. Those 20 were what was known in that era as "Yellow Dog Democrats" (look it up), who never forsook the party of the Confederacy and Jim Crow.
But wait, it gets worse for Warnock, because JFD also points out:
- Over the opposition of former Dixiecrats who returned to the Democratic Party, Congress passed and LBJ signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 with 80% of Congressional Republicans and 65% of Democrats voting for it.
- A year later, Congress passed and LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with 81% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats voting for it.
- From 1958 to 1999, the portion of white Southerners who said they would be willing to vote for a black president increased from 8% to 95%, and Southern whites began switching en masse to the Republican Party as they became more financially prosperous and as Democrats shifted left on issues like gun control and taxpayer-funded abortions up through birth.
Those points ring especially true with this author, who was born in 1950 in an Oklahoma that was one of those Solid South Democratic states. I vividly recall in 1966 as a Teen Age Republican (TAR) officer culling through party registrations for the state's 77 counties and finding one in Oklahoma's Little Dixie region that had more than 7,000 registered Democrats and barely 100 Republicans, the youngest of whom was 67!
The Sooner State in those days was dominated by Democrats like then-Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who ardently opposed both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. Even before those landmark measures, however, Oklahoma elected its first GOP governor, Henry Bellmon, in 1962. Bellmon was the first Republican ever elected in a statewide contest, and his GOP successor, Dewey Bartlett, was only the second in 1966. But Bartlett lost his re-election bid in 1970 and was still the state's lone Republican elected in a statewide contest when voters sent him to the Senate in 1972.
In fact, it would be more than four decades (2008) before Oklahoma Republicans managed to elect a majority in both the state House and Senate. The state has certainly been a solid red one since that time, but it is ludicrous to contend it was because of the legislation that became law in the mid-1960s.
There are also these facts, as described by JFD:
- Despite the strong inverse association between declining racism and Republican gains in the South, certain Democrats, journalists, and scholars alleged that Southern whites switched parties because Republicans engaged in a “Southern Strategy” of courting racism.
- In reality, the main demographic of Southerners who supported segregation were poor whites who continued to vote for Democrats at roughly the same rate for decades.
Something else Warnock told the Times was not commented on by JFD, but it bears consideration in this space. Warnock described himself as a "Matthew 25 Christian." To clarify, he said that "for me, the acid test of one’s faith is the depth of your commitment to the people who are on the margins."
He then sailed off into this long soliloquoy about his faith, including this passage:
"Part of the obligation of a person of faith is to ask yourself: “What are you actually worshiping? What are you actually committed to?” Are you committed to the poor? Are you committed to the despised and the rejected? Would Jesus agree with the actions of ICE in this moment, in which we’re seeing organized cruelty on our streets, masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, separating families, terrorizing whole communities of people, whether they’re documented or not, whether they are citizens or not? What is it in the Gospel, I would ask my colleagues, that says that this is right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
Warnock is preaching the liberal Social Gospel salvation of works that has brought ruin throughout the major Protestant denominations in America, other than the Southern Baptist (and even there the left's Woke movement is a destructive factor).
The Gospel of Jesus Christ consists of salvation by grace, as described by Paul the Apostle at Romans 10:9: "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
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