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Well, you make some very valid points, and I thank you for your input. HOWEVER....

I grew up in the Segregated South. I never went to school with a Black person until I was in College. And, down here in Texas, ALL THE POLITICIANS in the 50’s ad 60’s were DEMOCRAT SEGREGATIONISTS. It was a Republican President (Eisenhower) who sent troops to Little Rock, AR. DEMOCRAT SEGREATIONISTS ruled the South until the Conservative Revolution, led by Ronald Reagan, in 1980. And, Blacks were voting Democrat all along; especially after JFK and LBJ. Why? ENTITLEMENTS / GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS!!! The same way that the DemocRAT Party keeps them in the fold today.

I think we agree, NoDems, that the South was once divided between two different wings of the Democratic Party, one which was inclined toward Northern progressive liberalism and one which, while socially and politically conservative, was often populist and quite willing to listen to appeals for social programs to benefit poor people along with tax-the-rich agendas.

Republicans were basically irrelevant in most of the South until Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and others like them switched parties, and LBJ's populism was successful in getting lots of blacks to switch parties to become Democrats just at the time they were gaining the right to vote. Remember that Condoleeza Rice's father was a Republican in part because the Democrats refused to accept his voter registration. I don't know whether Rev. Rice was required to pass a literacy test or pay a poll tax, but as a pastor, others like him would have been some of the few highly educated people in the black community able to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test.

Of course, much has changed since those days, and much of it for the better. When even Bob Jones University is changing its rules on interracial dating, we can have some hope for an end to unbiblical discrimination in conservative circles. I just wish we Republicans had been more successful in winning the votes of Southern conservative whites without losing the black vote — but maybe, given the environment of the 1960s, that simply wasn’t possible.