Conservatism, History, and the African American Vote

The below is bumped from an earlier discussion thread.  Many conservatives have trouble understanding the depth of the majority of the African American community's alienation from conservatism as a political movement.  Conservatives wonder how some African American voters can have many opinions on the right but vote for candidates on the left when they are faced with a conservative Republican vs. a liberal Democrat.  The answer has much to do with history and how that history is remembered.  The public coming out party for modern conservatism that was the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign and how the Goldwater campaign appeared  to the African American community might be a good place to begin

The conservative case that Goldwaterites opposed the great civil rights acts for benign reasons butts up against two big obstacles in convincing the African American community.

1. Why should African Americans care about the professed principles of people who would have preserved a system that made a mockery of every maxim that was spoken of in Fourth of July celebrations ("no taxation without representation", "one man one vote", "give me liberty or give me death") as it applied to southern blacks?

2. Many people who voted for southern white segragationists for the worst reasons suddenly started voting Republican in presidential reasons around the time the GOP nominated a Senator who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You can argue that it was because the Jim Crow system was no loger tenable and that the interparty competition for southern whites switched to issues like national defense, crime, taxes, abortion, whatever. There is a lot of truth to that argument, but African Americans can clearly see white southerners moving from the Democratic party to the faction of the Republican Party that was most opposed to the key civil rights law.

So if it seems like many black people assume that conservative Republicans are their natural enemies, they have their reasons.

That is not the whole story of course since one can hardly explain the conservative side's unpopularity with African Americans based totally on an almost fifty year old campaign.  The Goldwater campaign and related events did much damage to political conservatism's name among African Americans, but much has also happened to keep the antipathy alive these many years later. 

I'll have some more ideas a little later.