The Big Switch Dbq

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My first year of college I took the class, American History from 1877. We reached the point in the semester where we began to discuss the Civil Right Movement, this was the first time I had heard of “The Big Switch”. This is the argument that during the Civil Rights Movement the Democrats and Republicans switched sides. While the entire class took the professors words to heart, I myself could not understand how the left and right could stand up and cross the isle. How could this happen? Did the political party of Abraham Lincoln shift into today’s Democrats? Did the party who supported slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow become your modern day Republicans? No, a switch of that magnitude does not happen. A football team does not play the first …show more content…

Johnson, a Democrat himself, looked at the Democratic southern states and saw a great injustice being done. Not for the reason most people today would have a problem with, but because he found a way to benefit from giving black people their basic American rights. To quote the former President, “I’ll have those niggers voting democratic for the next 200 years”. There is some speculation whether or not he said this but it however not even debatable that he enjoyed his use of the “N” word, going as far as to call the Civil Rights Acts, “The Nigger Bill” (MSNBC Johnson). Yes, the Democratic party gave universal suffrage to the African American community but also enacted laws that would begin to diminish the very fabric of their lives. Since the time of Civil Rights movement which made tremendous strides for the African American community, the subsequent laws enacted afterwards by the democratic party have hurt a vast majority of African Americans in Americas inner cities. The education system has been severely damaged, there has been an explosion of drugs in a majority of major cities, also the single parent household has risen from 25 percent during the 1960’s to 75 percent by todays statistics. Two major elements to consider here being education and family, without which, a majority of people would have a severe disadvantage. Fast forward to the twenty first century and the evidence of this is showing. While there are many successful African American men and women in America, the inner city communities are still in a large part impoverished. How could this be and who is to

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