White backlash reframed black demands as the cause of racism.

Evidence

King stood at the crossroads of a massive realignment of sentiment and strategy. 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

• DEFINE: Glaude’s parsing of the ‘Great White Switch’ is the factual bedrock the reader’s stated reading goal needs: this realignment is squarely the ‘trap’ — Democrats banking black votes while courtship of white resentment defines the electoral landscape.
• XREF: connects to: White backlash developed nationally, not as a southern import to the North. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 37