[Bob]

A minor correction, if I may:

It would be 40 years before President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat despite the efforts of Senate democrats, signed civil rights legislation that the Republicans had passed...

[Wallace T.]

Democrats in states outside the former Confederacy, in both the Senate and the House, voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If you exclude the nay votes from the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma, all the rest of the non-Southern Democrats supported the legislation. While the same held true for non-Southern Republicans, some Republicans, notably the most conservative ones, like Barry Goldwater, H.R. Gross, John Ashbrook, and Bourke Hickenlooper, voted against the act. At the time, National Review and Human Events were opposed to the civil rights movement. The reasoning of non-Southern conservative Republicans was not based on any desire to preserve segregation, but on what they saw as an unconstitutional extension of Federal authority over matters traditionally handled by the states.