I appreciate the history lesson, but I assure you, I don't need it. I'm well aware of the racial history of the two major parties. At the risk of nitpicking, though, I will address your assertion that the 60’s civil rights bills passed with a “smattering” of Northern Democrat support. Actually, it was quite a bit more than a smattering. Only two non-Southern Democrats in the entire Congress (House & Senate combined) voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I suppose you could claim it was three if you count Senator Byrd, from the border state of West Virginia. He was the only Democrat Senator to oppose the bill other than the Southerners (and Byrd considered himself a Southerner). In the House, Congressmen Baring (Nevada) and Lesinski (Michigan) voted no, and they were the only non-Southern Dems to vote that way. Baring was a very conservative Dem who voted with the GOP almost all the time. Lesinski represented a white area in Detroit, and his constituents were terrified that if the civil rights bill passed, blacks would flood into their neighborhoods. They did, by the way, running pretty much all the whites out over the next few years.
Outside the South, far more Republicans voted no than Dems. And every Republican from the South voted no, except for the two Kentucky senators. It's just that there were more Dems than Republicans from the South back then, and nearly all the Southern Dems voted no.
Incidentally, there were legitimate reasons to vote against all three major civil rights bills from the 60s.
But that's quibbling over history. My main point was that it's pointless to make a big deal out of this history, or about MLK being a Republican. About thirty years ago when I was a college kid, I became very interested in politics. I would even go to the library and read the great debates from old Congressional Records. Things like the debate after Pearl Harbor or the debate over the League of Nations.
It was during this time that I saw a discussion on one of the Sunday political shows about a GOP plan to win over the black vote. One of the tactics they discussed was “reminding” blacks of all of the history you mentioned. It made sense to me then, because I was still a naive college kid. Yeah, remind the blacks that the GOP opposed slavery and supported civil rights, and that the Dems supported slavery and Jim Crow, and surely they'll wake up. But guess what? Shortly after that, I stumbled across a speech by a GOP congressman named Robsion in the Congressional Record from 1935. He was wailing over the fact that blacks had switched to the Dems, having fallen in love with the New Deal. He went on and on about slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, racist Democrats, and so on, until black Democrat Arthur Mitchell showed up. Mitchell basically told him that blacks didn't give a damn about that. They liked the New Deal, and even if the Dem party was full of racists they were still gonna vote for them. And remember, this was at a time when outright KKK guys like Bilbo and Ellender were in Congress.
The same thing happened in the 60s when the Great Society lured away the remaining few blacks who were still Republicans. In states like Mississippi, where the Democrats had used every means available to maintain segregation and to keep blacks from voting, the blacks still registered as Democrats the moment federal registrars showed up after the Voting Rights Act passed.
So it's an exercise in futility to remind blacks about the respective party histories. They switched to the Democratic Party at a time when they didn't need to be reminded. They had seen Democrat racism first hand. The marchers at Selma went and registered as Democrats immediately after being beaten and hosed by Democrats who were trying to keep them from registering.
Why did they do this? Were they stupid? Well, not really. They knew that the Southern Dems were an aberration in the party after 1932, and that if they could manage to register they'd eventually take the party away from the whites and move it to the left, which is what they did. That's why Obama’s the nominee tonight.
So reminding blacks of all this history is pointless. They take it as a matter of pride that they ousted all those segregationists and took the party away from them. We've been reminding blacks that the Dems once housed racists since poor naive Congressman Robsion ranted about it on the House floor in 1935 and our share of the black vote continues to decline. We're like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Okay, yeah, we've told blacks 3,478 times that the Dems were once racist and that MLK was a Republican, but if we do it just once more it'll work. Lucy won't pull the football away this next time.
Sorry, but it's pointless. Let's honor those brave black conservatives who support us, and stop begging to those who don't.
I also remember reading the letter from the Senate Majority Leader to the Republican Minority leader, thanking him for delivering the votes needed for passage. Or maybe it was from Johnson, I don't recall.
Anyway, even granting your point that blacks who knew the history still joined the Dems, I don't believe it means that the history is irrelevant or should not be taught. You are comparing a largely uneducated, lower class group of 50 years ago that followed the lead of its left-wing elite and who wanted the government benefits that the Democrats promised, to today's black middle class. The assimilated portion of the Black community might be open to argument on the pros and cons of the welfare state for Blacks, so long as they trust the GOP not to be a haven for racists. They now have 50 years of experience about what Democrat social policies and abortion and drugs have done to Blacks. Maybe they will want an alternative, in numbers greater than 10 percent, so long as they know how welcome they have always been.