John Hall Buchanan Jr.: The Change of a Deep South Republican
The 1964 election was overall a loss for the Republican Party. Barry Goldwater only won six states in the presidential election and the GOP sustained significant losses in the House and minor losses in the Senate. However, it didn’t go badly everywhere for them. For the first time since Reconstruction the Republican candidate won in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina and did so for the first time ever in Georgia. This was due almost exclusively to Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and President Johnson’s signing of it. Goldwater also had coattails in the region, with the GOP picking up a seat in Mississippi (Democrats were lucky the GOP ran only one candidate for Congress that year) and Georgia as well has having a Senate party flip in South Carolina, which would be followed by a House flip in 1965. However, in no state was the impact greater than in Alabama, which went from a House delegation that was 8-0 Democrat to 5-3 Republican. This election didn’t win the GOP the Deep South, but it made them an option. One of the new Congressmen was John Hall Buchanan Jr. (1928-2018), a pastor from Birmingham, one of the most segregated cities in the nation and a hotbed of civil rights activism. Although he would start as a conservative opposed to civil rights legislation, he would not stay this way.
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