You’re correct of course. I mean the modern Republican Party, and I know you’re a historian. So I meant the Democrat Party before 1964 when many of the Southerners left the party and went to the Republican Party in the South. The black Americans were of course all Republicans from the late 1860s to 1930, after first federally elected black American of the 20th century was elected as a member of the Republican Party in 1928 in Chicago. The ambitious black American got permission from Democrat party leader in Chicago to run against him in 1930 (or was it 32?) winning the first win for a black man in the Democrat party. The Solid South remained all racist democrats, from 1840 to 1964, firm in their supremacist beliefs. The Republican Party I believe was started explicitly to end slavery in 1840 or so as a result of three factions joining together. The Republicans as we know them today did not actually start being transformed until the 1960s when the Southern Democract faction that rebelled, with Strum as their spiritual leader, left in the mid sixties. Before that, the GOP was still moderately the part of civil rights, if only tepidly, and President Ike passed the Civil Rights Bill as a Republican as a nod to Lincoln’s abolitionists parties roots. Most people today are not aware that Nixon was one of the more pro-active civil rights members as VP under Ike in the 1950s. Or they don’t want to deal with their past. Even today, Democrats in the northeast can’t bear the thought that their party was complicit with the solid South racist democrats until the early 1960s, actively and constantly repressing anti-lynching legislation and the black vote in the 1930s and 1940s. Who wants to remember that white Democrats in the one party run South were the ones who were doing all the lynching? It certainly puts a blood red stain on he modern Northern and Western Democrats who stood by not stopping any of the politically motivated murders of innocent black men for from 1876-1950. How have these blue coast Democrats, who were left behind when the racist Southerners who broke off and joined the GOP in 1964, able to explain their century long complicity in “standing by and standing down” during that hundred year stretch? Not once have I heard them explain or apologize for their silent complicity. Not once.