The Former Confederacy & Modern American Politics, Part Eleven

A Supreme Court decision in the early 1970s (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education) allowed courts to use the busing of students to help with desegregation of schools.* It was an explosive issue. In the fall of 1972, I remember talking with one of the professors of my college who was originally from either Tennessee or North Carolina, I just can't remember now. He mentioned how busing in his home state had caused tempers to boil over. 

Watergate, the presidential pardon of Nixon, a slow economy and the loss of Vietnam left President Gerald Ford highly vulnerable when he chose to seek a presidential term of his own. Remember, Ford had not faced voters on a national level; but rather, he had been appointed as vice president and then assumed the presidency when Nixon resigned. Former governor of California Ronald Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. Interestingly, Reagan was a former Democrat and Ford counted many congressional Democrats as some of his closest friends (he had long served in the House of Representatives). Reagan had established himself as a prominent conservative in the 1964 election, when he spoke openly on behalf of conservative Republican Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. At the Republican Convention, Ford eked out a first ballot win over Reagan, but in the former Confederate states, he carried a majority of delegates only in Florida and Mississippi. Meanwhile, in the Democratic race for the nomination, a Southerner, former Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter, won the nomination against several well known Democrats, "perhaps" because he was not a Washington insider. Being affiliated with Washington after the Nixon administration scandals was a negative to some voters. So now we had a moderate Georgia Democrat versus a moderately conservative Michigan Republican. How would the former Confederate states vote?

Jimmy Carter carried all of the former Confederate states, except Virginia, which he lost to Ford by only about 1 percentage point, although Carter only carried Mississippi by slightly less than 2%, while in states like Texas, Florida and Louisiana, even though Carter won pretty comfortably, Ford drew more votes than might have been expected. Overall, Carter won the popular vote nationwide by about 2% and he won the electoral vote 297 to 239, as 1 Republican elector from the state of Washington voted for Ronald Reagan, not Gerald Ford.

In the Senate, Democrats won the race in Tennessee, while all other party affiliations in the former Confederate states remained the same. In the House, the only changes were in Virginia, where Republicans gained 1 seat, giving them a 6 to 4 edge in the state's congressional delegation, and in Texas, Democrats gained 2 seats, making the delegation 22 Democrats and 2 Republicans. In governors, the only change in party was that Democrats retook the governorship in North Carolina.

* Remember, prior to the mid 1950s, there were legally mandated separate schools for white children and black children in the southern states, while much the same was true in the northern and western states, although not by law in those areas, but rather by practice. When desegregation of schools (and other facilities) was ordered, the problem of separate schools remained, as most of American neighborhoods were heavily segregated. So, generally speaking, former "legal" black schools remained black schools, because the schools were in black neighborhoods, just as former "white schools" remained essentially white, as they were located in white neighborhoods. Underlying that whole situation was that funding for legal "black schools" was less than for legal "white schools," which essentially did not change when desegregation became the law of the land, because of the segregation of neighborhoods, and because of the racial divide in school administrative systems and state legislatures, which were overwhelmingly white, and which provided school funding. Busing took children from their own neighborhood, and away from their local white or black school, to a school in another neighborhood to try to achieve some racial balance, with the idea being that funding and care of schools and supplies would then "even out." Make no mistake about it, busing was highly controversial among both white and black parents and students, but among people already holding racial animus, it inflamed ill feelings even more. Many white parents put their children into religious or other private schools, where they had to pay separately for their child's education. Most black Americans did not have the financial resources to pay for private schooling, thus they had to keep their children in public schools (funded by taxes), so in many communities with fairly large black populations, the public school systems became overwhelmingly black. This began to affect more and more cities in the northern and some western states, as black Americans migrated to other areas for economic opportunity; often, to northern industrial areas.    

WORD HISTORY:
Ball-There are a couple of words of this spelling in English, but this is the word for "a round object," and which is related to "balloon."^ The word goes back to Indo European "bhel," which had the notion of "swell, bloat out, to bulge." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "balluz," which meant, "swollen or bloated object;" thus later actually, "round object." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "bealla," meaning, "round object." This was reinforced by the related Old Norse form "bollr," which meant "ball," brought to England by Danes and Norwegians, often collectively called "Danes." The word then became "balle," before the modern form. Other Germanic languages have: German and Low German "Ball," West Frisian and Dutch "bal," Danish "bold," Norwegian "ball," Swedish "boll," Icelandic "bolti."  

^ "Balloon" is a borrowing by English from Italian, but the Italian was derived from a Latin form borrowed from Germanic.