I recall being confused in hearing this phrase in the mid-90s when Newt Gingrich teamed up with evangelical leaders announce the Contract with American and the Silent Majority was kicked around. It was confusing of course. Here were two dominant and abrasive Southern conservative MAGAs telling us their contract with America and telling us they represented the Silent Majority. They are as you point out the vocally obstreperous white minority. I didn’t want a part of them then and recall being chilled by them. They’ve only gotten angrier since.
But it’s not hard to locate in some specific times and places in American history the Silenced Majority. For example, in Lowndes county and WIlcox counties in Alabama in 1960, black eligible voters outnumbered white eligible voters by a margin of two to one and three to one respectively. Yet, However, But—those counties had ZERO black registered voters and the white voters exceeded 100 percent of the white population, at 117 percent and 112 percent respectively. How the number of white registered voters exceeds the number of eligible voters is a deep mystery. It smacks of cheating, though there might be some rational explanation. But NO rationality exists in explaining how ALL the black American eligible voters were not registered and did not vote—not a single one.
The answer is cheating. White male southern conservative MAGA cheating. These Americans who had the legal right to vote since 1870 could not exercise their right thanks to state wide cheating by the conservative MAGA party that silenced their voices, their vote. The Supreme Court made this possible when they voted in the 1890 Mississippi decision to allow the state to rewrite their constitution to give the white conservative MAGA Democrats the ability to disenfranchise black voters through means like poll taxes and other mechanisms, most of which appear in your article today with the same intent under a different name or mechanism. Each white MAGA controlled Southern state followed the precedent and made new constitution without language of federal bias but with the “sole intent” to disenfranchise black American voters. Governor Tillman in 1895 said that quote when meeting with his constitutional party leaders to rewrite it, turning a democracy into an autocracy by cheating, by eliminating the other party, of which black Americans compose a majority of.
That’s how you get to Alabama disenfranchising 184,000 of the 187,000 registered in 1900. The white MAGAs silenced the majority in those counties, by issuing a new state constitution in 1902 that stripped away the voices of black Americans, alienating their essential right to vote, the voice in a democracy. Those white MAGA counties voted for JFK and he won the state, taking in all the MAGA conservative votes to win the electoral votes, putting him just over the edge to win the election and the presidency. His party cheated in Alabama for 62 years since 1902 when it was made a one-party state, an autocracy, where the majority—the vast majority—of black Americans were disenfranchised and became the Silenced Majority.