movement challenged the South’s racial status quo and inspired a national political climate in which Southern Democratic senators could no longer kill civil rights legislation. Led by President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, overwhelming majorities of northern Democrats and northern Republicans united to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Landmark federal intervention reformed Southern race relations and helped destabilize the traditional one-party system. In the fullness of time the Democratic party’s supremacy gave way to genuinely competitive two-party politics.[21]
Charles S. Bullock and Mark J. Rozell similarly summarized these developments in The New Politics of the Old South: An Introduction to Southern Politics:
When V. O. Key (1949) published Southern Politics, the region was solidly Democratic. No Republican had been elected U.S. senator or governor in decades, and a generation had passed since a republican collected a single Electoral College vote. For most of a century after Reconstruction, the South provided the foundation on which the national Democratic Party rested. When the party was in eclipse in the rest of the country, little more than the Southern foundation could be seen. During periods of Democratic control of the presidency and Congress, as in the New Deal era, the South made a major contribution. After the 2004 election, the Democratic Party in the South had been reduced to its weakest position in more than 130 years. Today Republicans win the bulk of the white vote, dominate the South’s presidential and congressional elections and control half the state legislative chambers.[22]
Furthermore, they note, the South’s racial situation evolved dramatically.
Key’s South had an electorate in which Republicans were rare and blacks even scarcer. While he observed that “in its grand outlines the politics of the South revolves around the position of the Negro,” it was not a commentary on black political influence, which was non-existent, but rather an acknowledgment that the region expended much political capital to keep African Americans away from the levers of power. Since implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black votes have become the mainstay of the Democratic Party—the vote without which few Democrats can win statewide. The votes cast by African Americans have helped elect a black governor (Virginia’s Douglas Wilder), eighteen members of Congress, and hundreds of legislators and local officials.
Partisan change and black mobilization have not been continuous but have come at different paces in various locales and for different offices. Nonetheless, the changes have been massive.[23]
Black and Black have also noted how these developments impacted the national party system:
The collapse of the solid Democratic South and the emergence of Southern Republicanism, first in presidential politics and later in elections for Congress, have established a new reality for America: two permanently competitive national political parties. Not since Democrats battled Whigs before the Civil War has there been such a thoroughly nationalized two-party system.[24]
Stanley P. Berard forecasts important consequences not only for Southern politics but also for our national future:
The particular mix of constituency perspectives offered by “the newest Southern politics” gives a measure of diversity to both the Republican caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, even if that diversity does not show itself clearly in aggregated roll call votes. The prospect that biracial coalitions will continue to provide a base for electing some numbers of white Southern Democrats has implications not only for the diversity of representation in Congress but also for partisan control. Understanding Southern politics continues to be an essential element of anticipating and explaining change in Congress.[25]
Black Empowerment: A central factor in this reconfiguration of Southern politics, of course, has been increasing black participation and empowerment. In a recent survey statement, John A. Clark cited the transformational role played by African Americans in the region’s politics over the past few decades:
The political implications of these trends also have reshaped the South from what it was at the time of Key’s work. Most notable, perhaps are the increases in black elected officials (almost all of them Democrats) and the development of a competitive (and sometimes dominant) Republican Party. Both were almost nonexistent in Key’s time, especially in the Deep South states. Today African Americans and Republicans have all but crowded out the formerly dominant white Democrats in many areas.[26]
The most direct and comprehensive research on black participation was Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990, by Chandler Davidson, Bernard Grofman, and a top-notch team of experts from several practices and disciplines. According to their chapter on black and white voter registration, written by political scientist James E. Alt, there has been a remarkable transformation of the Southern electorate:
Consequently, it may safely be said that the Voting Rights Act transformed the basis of the Southern electoral system, inasmuch as it was the vehicle for destroying the institutional barriers to black registration. . Between 1972 and 1988, a pattern of racial mobilization and countermobilization, now possibly in decline, produced a reasonably stable system characterized by a ubiquitous but eroding white numerical registration advantage. The decline in this advantage raised the very real possibility of convergence in white and black registration rates as a percentage of eligible white and black voters, respectively, sometime in the 1990s. If and when that happens, the transformation of the Southern registration system that the act began will be complete.[27]
Additionally, the Alabama chapter, by practitioners Peyton McCrary, Jerome A. Gray, Edward Still, and Huey L. Perry, provided especially interesting results affirming gains in the Heart of Dixie through litigated provisions of the VRA (1994):
As long as at-large elections were in place, white majorities voting as a bloc were able to prevent black citizens enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act from winning local office. Most changes from at-large to district elections in Alabama resulted either from litigation or, to a lesser degree, objections by the Department of Justice. Although lawsuits won by the department played a key role in eliminating at-large elections in various black-belt counties, most of the changes were due to litigation by private attorneys. These changes substantially increased minority representation on local governing bodies, both rural and urban. Indeed, black representation in our sample has now reached the level of proportional representation in Alabama.[28]
Chandler and Davidson concluded that the VRA had indeed accomplished a “Second Reconstruction”:
When we began this research, we thought it would demonstrate the success of the Voting Rights Act in changing minority representation in the South. In particular, we anticipated that many Southern jurisdictions, with a substantial black population and a history of very limited black officeholding would have adopted district or mixed plans as a result of litigation, leading to large gains in minority representation. This is exactly what we found.[29]
Bullock and Rozell provided additional assessment of black registration:
Shortly after implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black registration jumped. Only 29 percent of the region’s voting-age blacks were registered in 1962; six years later the figure exceeded 60 percent. The most pronounced changes came in states that had been most repressive with the share of age-eligible blacks registered rising from 19 to 52 percent in Alabama and from 7 to 60 percent in Mississippi. In recent years registration and turnout rates among blacks have almost equaled those of whites.[30]
They also showed the VRA’s impact on Southern state legislatures:
In addition to helping elect white Democrats, the black electorate has also contributed to a growing number of African American office-holders. Figure 1.4 shows the increase