I hear this often but I have to respectfully disagree.
Do we punish sons for the sins of their fathers?
The fact is, a 21 year old white male from Alabama in 1964 is 75 years old today.
Polls showed that young whites in the South (school children in 1964) were far less racist than the older generations from the mid 1960s to today.
When High Schools were desegregated down here older people predicted all kinds of terrible things would occur—gang rapes, murder, terrible violence—well it didn’t.
As a conservative and Alabamian who happens to be white, I’m certainly not a fan of modernism in our culture, but I definitely appreciate the end of slavery and Jim Crow.
Also, while the old time religion NEVER left the South, it did change considerably during the 1980s with the Religious Right, which really focused on politics. I’ve had people tell me that these Evangelicals were secretly racist—but there is absolutely no proof for this frankly was the opposite. God demands we be good, not haters. So by focusing politically on religion the process invoked condemnation of racial discrimination, not the continuation of it.
The older Alabamians didn’t move in mass from the democrat to the Republican party. The older democrats died off while younger people decided to be Republican, starting in the Nixon days, and especially in the Reagan years. By those times, the only real segregationists left were still in the democrat party of old. That’s why it took 30 years to happen. A lot of people were still voting democrat here until the early 200s. They’re in the Choir Invisible now.
Aha! I didn’t check the date.
Well, I do still think what I said is true. Southern Segregationist democrats died out much more than became Republicans.