The “ideological” change claimed is pure crap. I’ve seen the argument made by moonbats that the Republicans were the “liberal” party and the Democrats “Conservative.” There were different ideological factions in the parties from jump street. Some of your more infamous Southern racist Democrats were left-wingers (such as Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Theodore Bilbo, not to mention Woodrow Wilson) and the party was effectively captured by the left in 1896. Conversely, the Republicans had scores of Conservatives supportive of Civil Rights (even a prominent Conservative GOP Congressman from Tennessee, who served a stint as RNC Chairman in the 1940s, was pro-Civil Rights in opposition to the likes of Albert Gore, Sr.).
This revisionist history crap has GOT to stop. Even the usage of the “Southern Strategy”, which was not about getting the racist White Democrat pols into the GOP, but about marginalizing the George Wallace types. The Democrats themselves owned the Southern vote (of the most virulent sort) from Reconstruction until virtually 1980, with remnants of it in 1992 & 1996, yet they are not called to account for what it entailed.
Connecting the dots is important, including letting Black voters know they’ve been pawns of the Democrat establishment going back to the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s.
And almost everytime you point those things out to blacks, especially those who consider themselves “educated” on these kinds of things, they will always counter with how many of the former Dixiecrats became Republicans....You cannot convince them otherwise, it is a waste of time upfront.
Where you can score points is by talking about how today’s Democratic is operating, then you can open up their minds a bit more, where then you can throw in the party history without them dismissing it out of hand...At least, that has been my experience.
Besides back in the 50s, a Texas Democrat was likely to be way more conservative than a northeastern Republican. It was only in the 60s, with Goldwater, and the subsequent radicalization of the Democratic Party, that both parties really split off into separate Conservative vs Liberal camps.