Modern conservatives are oddly fond of pointing out that it was Democrats who were the party of racism and racists until half a century ago.
There’s always an implied “Aha!” whenever a conservative mentions this, as though they think it’s some little-known quirk of history that Democrats try to keep hidden because it’s so embarrassing.
It’s not, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and Republicans were the face of (Progressive) Reconstruction and voting rights for blacks after the Civil War. Because of this, the South became solidly Democratic (Conservative) and stayed that way until World War II.
But starting around World War II, Southern whites who wanted to keep Jim Crow intact had plenty of reasons to steadily desert the Democratic Party and join the GOP.
Democrat Eleanor Roosevelt championed the civil right of African American singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall. Democrat FDR signed the nondiscrimination order for the national defense industry. FDR's successor, Democrat Harry Truman, integrated the military.
And racist white Southerners gradually began defecting to the Republican Party. By the early 60s they began defecting en masse during the fight over the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
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