The Great White Switch made black advancement the excuse for renewed white backlash.

Evidence

The “Great White Switch,” the change in partisan voting patterns among southern whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party, was under way, and the 1966 midterm elections saw Republicans make significant gains. President Johnson later famously lamented, “I don’t think I lost that election. I think the Negroes lost it.” Ronald Reagan won the governor’s seat in California. In response to a question about his landslide victory and white resentment, Reagan simply said: “The people seem to have shown that maybe we have moved too fast.” In this perverted sense, black people were the reason white people were racist. Their demands to be free and bitter denunciation of white supremacy made white people angry, reactionary, and more racist than ever. No wonder young black people called for black power. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Directly gives the historical roots of the book’s central thesis that black electoral loyalty to Democrats is a trap — southern whites punished Democrats for civil rights, so post-1960s party realignment runs on white grievance.
• DEFINE: Concretely defines the ‘Great White Switch’ as the southern white partisan migration Democrats-to-Republicans.