Goldwater’s states-rights platform won him the Deep South in 1964

Evidence

In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, won the Republican Party’s nomination for president. Goldwater allowed that there were “some rights that are clearly protected by valid laws and are therefore ‘civil rights.’ ” But he lamented that “states’ rights” were “disappearing under the piling sands of absolutism” and called Brown v. Board of Education an “unconstitutional trespass into the legislative sphere of government.” “I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence, of course,” Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative, “to preserve their rightful powers over education.” Though he lost the general election in a landslide, Goldwater won the Deep South (except for Florida), where white people flocked to the candidate who stood against the constitutional demands of the Black freedom movement. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 647

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘states’ rights as nullification rebranded’ thread connects to the earlier filibuster/concurrent-majority mechanism and to the reader’s framing of origin-story infrastructure.