The only quibble I have, or slight point of ‘correction’ that I would add is that during Reconstruction and up until 1900, all the blacks that were elected to Congress, including the first black senator from Mississippi, were Republicans. The Democrats in the South were too busy beating blacks, terrorizing and hanging blacks through paramilitary groups even more openly violent that the KKK— the White League, the Red Shirts, various “rifle clubs.” From 1876-1900 the white democrats “worked” hard until no blacks were voting and they had completely repressed the black vote.
There really weren’t many blacks in the North and the northerners of both parties didn’t feel much of threat. Democratic Senator from South Carolina Ben Tillman bragged openly in 1900 on the senate floor that the black vote was not repressed completely and Northerners should worry because “they”, the southern whites, are taking better care of their negroes that northerners are (an obviously false statement and veiled threat).
Tillman was a Red Shirt leader in 1876 who lead a group to to execute a black politician on his knees, giving the man her worked for a win by repressing blacks literally at the polls through threats. “The Red Shirts used violence and fraud to create Democratic majorities that did not exist, and give Hampton the election…” The result was the 1896 Plessy agreement that gave the Democrats the ‘separate but equal,’ a federal policy that existed until 1954 Brown v. Board when it was reversed and ruled unconstitutional.
This happened throughout the South to create the “Solid South,” a Democratic voting block of whites that succeeded in repressing the black vote completely. In the South there were 55 counties alone that were 75 percent to 99 percent black. To repress that black vote is thus no easy trick, but the Democrats did it. In fact, no black would enter federal service as an elected official until 1928 when a black Republican won in a congressional district in Chicago created because of the Great Migration.
LBJ, a Texan, a “Solid South” Democrat who should have been relied on to side with his racist klansmen Democrats, like Senator Strum Thurmond of South Carolina who ‘inherited’ Tillman’s Senate seat, in spirit as well, betrayed his party. He betrayed the “solid south”. Texas vote to quit the United States to join the Confederate States of America. So this type of betrayal by him was deeply felt in Texas and the South.
As a direct result of that betrayal—LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964—all the Southern Democrats like Thurmond quit en masse the Democratic Party they had worked to keep solid racist for almost one hundred years. They took their racism, their klans and rifle clubs to the Republican Party. They stormed out under deep disloyalty.
Only then, did the modern era of politics start.
If LBJ didn’t betray “his people,” Solid South Democrats, by signing the civil rights act and voting rights act the next year, and instead said “I cannot sign this bill and must stand with my Democratic friends like Senator Thurmond,” you would be a Republican, as would I, as would most likely Obama and most blacks down South. And Trump would be playing golf right now with the Democratic South Carolina Senator who inherited his seat from Thurmond and Tillman, Democratic Senator Lindsey Graham.
But your point in general is well taken and your opinion definitely insightful and necessary as usual. I’m just learning about and thinking about American history now and still upset about learning this facts I’m sharing. But the evil of Reagan you describe was of course no better when seen in this different light.
