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There seems to be some confusion about the Republican Party and the South on this thread. I am pleased to help clear it up.

The Republican Party of the Civil War and Reconstruction was opposed to slavery and the terrorism that followed it. That party supported the rights of freemen and nonracist white Southerners to full participation in society, including suffrage for all men. Reconstruction failed, mainly because the federal government stopped supporting it.

The sharecropping system, Jim Crow and then segregation de jure rose to replace slavery. Most Southern whites either supported those practices or acquiesced in them. The Republican Party lost support as blacks were locked out of voting, often under threat of death. In its wake, most voters in the South (white, of course) became Democrats.

As early as the 1940s, some leaders the Democratic Party openly opposed some aspects of discrimination. Southern leaders, segregationists almost to a man, threatened to bolt the party for that reason. In 1948, Strom Thurmond ran for president as a third-party candidate for the States Rights' Democratic Party. The monicker applied to some Southern Democrats from then on was 'Dixiecrats' -- white Southerners who were Democrats, but opposed to desegregation. Thurmond also wrote the Southern Manifesto, the position paper of white Southerners who opposed integration, in 1956. George Wallace would repeat Thurmond's gestures in the 1960s and 1970s.

By the 1960s, desegregation had become real, instead of just a threat. The Republican Party courted angry white voters who were opposed to integration and other changes in the status quo. The term to describe that courtship came to be known as the Southern Strategy. It was and continues to be very successful. Most Southern whites have switched from being Democrats to being Republicans, either literally or by being reared in now Republican families. The GOP could not win its races nationally without them. Georgia is the most recent state to become Republican dominated. Its current governor, Sonny Perdue, was elected partly on the basis of support from still segregationist neo-Confederates. (A capsule history of the Southern Strategy can be read here.)

An event in the Republicans' support of bigotry is directly related to the Mississippi Burning murders. Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town obscure except for being the site of the murders of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. Doing so was a wink and nod to Southern voters who opposed civil rights.

To summarize, the Democrats lost the Dixiecrats to the Republicans. It is now the GOP that is the standard bearer for those who oppose racial equality. Black voters support the Democrats by close to 90 percent of the vote. Other minorities also vote Democrat most of the time.

Whenever I see the 'Democrats are the party of racism' claim being made, I wonder if the person making it is purposely trying to mislead others or just plain stupid. The only way one could not know that claim is false is not to know that the Democrats became more inclusive from the Civil Rights era on, while the GOP regressed. I expect intelligent people to know contemporary history.

Another lie trotted out to in the same way is that Congressman Byrd was a longterm leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Not so. He was briefly a member as a young man, but resigned when his conscience bothered him. He has volunteered that information, which he could have kept secret. The late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was also a member of the Klan, under the same circumstances. (In many Southern cities, young white men joined as a matter of course.) Like Byrd, he saw and admitted the error of his ways. But, members of the GOP who are segregationists, such as Trent Lott, have not changed.