What does one say in an obituary about the true legacy of a man who did more in his lifetime to polarize American politics on the basis of race than any South Carolinian since Coleman Blease? Apparently nothing! Harry Dent’s true legacy, the Republican “Southern Strategy”, employed seemingly innocuous coded terminology to cloak the racist politics of the era in a polite vocabulary. Terms such as “states rights,” “strict constructionist” and “law and order” were used in the strategy to clearly convey to discontented racist white Democrats that the Republican Party would keep African Americans in their place at a time when the Democratic Party was becoming more open to desegregation and equal justice.
Racist white Democrats abandoned their party to African Americans and to whites who supported their equality. Once these former Democrats had joined the ranks of the Republicans they were duped into believing that the interests of those who controlled the Republican agenda were the same interests as their own. This is the cruel irony of the Southern Strategy. Millions of working class white people were duped into voting against their own interests by wealthy Republicans who convinced them that voting with the Democrats would create giveaway programs for welfare mothers and others who didn’t deserve support. The truth of the matter was that during the Nixon Administration the welfare went to the Republicans who controlled the military industrial complex and who were profiting from the war in Vietnam.
Instead of telling the whole truth about Harry Dent in the article they published about his death, the Post and Courier chose to highlight how he allegedly helped resolve the 1969 Charleston Hospital Strike, never mentioning nor explaining his infamous Republican Southern Strategy. How ironic that Harry Dent’s obituary should cloak his true legacy and the racist reality of the irreparable harm that he did with a depiction of Dent as a civil rights hero.
Charlie Smith, Charleston
