Different time. Republicans werenothing like today

Different time. Republicans werenothing like today's and the southern Dems were the party of segregation.

That all changed by '65, and the parties mostly reversed in their support for civil rights. think I exaggerate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

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In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote .[

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In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to a strategy by Republican Party candidates of gaining political support in the Southern United States by appealing to racism against African Americans.[1][2][3]

During the 1950s and 1960s, the African-American Civil Rights Movement achieved significant progress in its push for desegregation in the Southern United States. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in particular, largely dismantled the system of Jim Crow laws that had enforced legal (or de jure) segregation in the South since the end of Reconstruction Era.

During this period, Republican politicians such as Presidential candidate Richard Nixon worked to attract southern white conservative voters (most of whom had traditionally supported the Democratic Party) to the Republican Party,[4] and Senator Barry Goldwater won the five formerly Confederate states of the Deep South: (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) in the 1964 presidential election.

In the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon won Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, all former Confederate states, contributing to the electoral realignment that saw many white, southern voters shift allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party during this period.

In academia, the term "southern strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the south, which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white southerners' racial resentments in order to gain their support.[5] This top-down narrative of the southern strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed southern politics following the civil rights era.[6][7]

This view has been questioned by historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and Joseph Crespino, who have presented an alternative, "bottom up" narrative, which Lassiter has called the "suburban strategy."

This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South,[8] but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of de facto segregation in the suburbs, rather of overt resistance to racial integration, and that the story of In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote .[this backlash is a national, rather than a strictly southern one.[9][10][11][12]

The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South," particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, has made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the South in later years.[4] 13][14

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