Word: backlasher
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...commonly accepted-if ill-defined-name for this reversal of sentiment is, of course, "white backlash," a catchall term that accommodates every shade of reaction from out-and-out bigotry through unexpected fear to sorrowful inaction. In whatever guise, backlash now threatens not only to overshadow most other issues in many parts of the nation at the polls next month but also to negate some of the signal achievements for which the U.S. Negro has striven so hard...
...Gallup poll reported massive "resistance of whites to measures for improving the lot of Negroes," noted that 52% of them think the Administration is pushing integration "too fast"-as against only 32% when the first survey was conducted in 1962. Pollster Lou Harris warned that "the white backlash could be the decisive issue on Nov. 8" and could "tear the Democratic Party apart at the seams in the North...
...rained all day that Wednesday in Maryland. Just one long, steady drench. Suburbs of Washington, D.C., got six or seven inches, and Baltimore got nearly four. But the news that morning befitted a soggy newspaper. The Democrats of Maryland had chosen a backlash candidate -- a sixtime loser -- run for governor in November. George P. Mahoney had only one plank in his platform -- rocksolid opposition to any open-housing law. And Mahoney had somehow eked out a 154-vote victory over liberal Carlton Sickles...
...they would have nothing to do with Mahoney. Hyman Pressman, Baltimore City Comptroller, and Independent candidate for governor, screamed that Mahoney's "hate-mongering campaign" had disgraced Maryland and the Democratic Party. President Johnson noted in a news conference that he was disturbed at the power of the white backlash that seemed to have won the primary for Mahoney. Democrats bolted the Party in Maryland much as Republicans left Goldwater on his sinking ship...
...racist won by some sort of fluke, or to say Sickles was whipped by white backlash is just too simple. Maryland is an odd state. It is half-Northern, half-Southern; half-urban, half-rural. The Eastern Shore seems like another world to the suburbanites of Montgomery and Prince Georges counties. The Shore and the southern counties below Washington are solid Dixie. Mahoney won all of these in the primary (except Miles' home county). But why was everyone so surprised? Wallace took 11 of the 12 in 1964. After the election too many people wouldn't look at a plain...