WI: Nixon won the black vote in 1960

Then he would have been elected President.

Without a doubt. In 1960, it was JFK's call to Coretta King and his efforts to get MLK out of prison that shifted the black vote to Democrats. This could easily not have happened and without it, JFK probably would have lost since in 1960, the black vote tended to be Republican. It almost certainly would have shifted enough votes in Illinois to give Nixon an electoral college win.
 
POD: Nixon decides to make the call as VP his would be more powerful but I wonder if EIsenhower would allow it. In this scenario would a Nixon civil rights act pass and would it be stronger than otl?
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Without a doubt. In 1960, it was JFK's call to Coretta King and his efforts to get MLK out of prison that shifted the black vote to Democrats. This could easily not have happened and without it, JFK probably would have lost since in 1960, the black vote tended to be Republican. It almost certainly would have shifted enough votes in Illinois to give Nixon an electoral college win.
Agreed that Nixon wins in 1960 had he won the Black vote. However, didn't Blacks begin voting Democratic (at least outside of the Southern U.S., where they generally couldn't vote during this time) in the 1930s?
 
POD: Nixon decides to make the call as VP his would be more powerful but I wonder if EIsenhower would allow it. In this scenario would a Nixon civil rights act pass and would it be stronger than otl?

Ike signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act and used federal troops to enforce civil rights in Little Rock.

Not sure when a second CRA happens. If Nixon gets shot in Dallas like JFK, President Lodge might push the law through in his memory.
 
It's probably unrealistic to expect Nixon to win a majority of the black vote--or even the 40% of it that Ike won in 1956. First of all, Eisenhower in 1956 was a lot more popular than Nixon in 1960 with *the American electorate as a whole,* not just African Americans. Second, in 1956 there was a black protest vote against Stevenson for his "moderate" approach to civil rights--even Harlem's Congressman Adam Clayton Powell urged black voters to support Ike. (Though cynics suggested it might have something to do with Powell's own income tax problems...)

African Americans, one should remember, were not (and are not) one-issue voters, and there was a recession in 1960--a mild one, to be sure, but even "mild" recessions tended to be more severe where blacks were concerned.
 
An interesting point about that graph: blacks who voted for Perot in 1992 were universally defections from the Democrats (there was a swing towards Bush in 1992 among black voters).
 
. . . (there was a swing towards Bush in 1992 among black voters).
Don't see a swing towards Bush. I just see baseline of slow, steady increase since low ebb of '84.

Seeing that Ronnie Reagan was none too popular among African-American voters.

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And the tectonic shift was Goldwater in 1964.
 
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...americans-start-voting-so-heavily-democratic/

This graph is party affiliation among African-American voters.

Both somewhat similar and different from the previous graph.
 
Is it possible that Nixon adopted the southern strategy in 1968 to punish blacks for voting against him in 1960?

No. Not even slightly. There was no retreat on any element of civil rights enforcement during the Nixon administration. White supremacy in the South had been overthrown for good.

The "Southern strategy" was about appealing to white Southerners on all the other issues on which they tended to differ from the increasingly liberal national Democratic Party. Until 1948, conservative white Southerners voted for liberal northern Democrats in Presidential elections, and elected Democrat Senators and Representatives who caucused with liberal Northern Democrats, and in return northern Democrats helped protect white supremacy in the South. That bargain was broken in 1948, and by 1968, white supremacy was ended. There was nothing to keep conservative white Southerners Democrat, except habit and institutional inertia. Nixon (especially in 1972) used those other issues to appeal to conservative white Southerners. The takeover of the Democrats by their left wing that year was the big opportunity for Nixon. Republicans spoke of the Democrats as the party of "Acid, amnesty, and abortion", not of civil rights.
 
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133

' . . . Later that year [1970], President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. . . '
So, yes, Dick Nixon did the right thing. Maybe not as proactively as he good be. Nixon pandered. He appealed to the worse of the South. He made public statements which seemed to support racist sentiment,* and then seemed to quietly work for desegregation.*

But in how many areas of the South did white families pull their kids out of the regular schools and put them in schools which were technically 'private'?

Certainly seems like there would be political space where an elected official calls for all our kids, black and white, rich and poor, having access to a quality education.

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*Absolutely, Nixon is a contradiction in many ways.
 
Civil Rights quickly morphed into a series of identity based entitlement policies that were rejected in both the North and the South. People in Boston didn't want kids of the ghetto getting bused into their kids school just as much as Southerners didn't want it. Affirmative Action remains controversial and unpopular (at least amongst whites) today. Crime and white flight obviously became huge issues, with most local governments in northern cities changing their tune (Giuliani in NYC for instance).

Let's not criticize the evil racist South for things the North doesn't support either.
 
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