<p>"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican Chairman to tell you we were wrong.".</p>
<p>In the election of 1968, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the solid south as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters that had heretofore been beyond the reach of the Republican Party. The United States was undergoing a very turbulent period in 1968. The founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and most influential member of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968. His death was followed by race riots. Martin Luther King’s policy of non-violence was being challenged by more radical blacks and by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There were protests, often violent, against the Vietnam War. The drug subculture was causing alarm in many sectors. Nixon, with the aid of Harry Dent and then South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1964, ran on a campaign of states' rights and "law and order". Many liberals accused him of pandering to racist Southern whites, especially with regards to his "states' rights" stand.</p>