Republicans are the racist bunch???? weren’t all the slave owners in this country Democrats???, wasn’t it the Democrats who refused to accept the fact that blacks could vote and have equal rights???? and yet the blacks vote Democratic......splain that one!!
Whigs and Democrats (at least the Southern ones). Democrats opposed voting rights for Blacks in the South since they would obviously be enough to keep many of the states in the Republican column as Blacks voted overwhelmingly GOP.
Democrats tried to find ways from the beginning of Reconstruction-era enfranchisement to either manipulate or steal away the Black vote (astonishingly, even when the GOP vote was overwhelming, Dems still managed to get a modest sliver of Black support and even some Black Democrats were elected prior to the 1930s. Sadly for the Black community, Dems finally discovered what would unlock their vote, and it turned out to be Big Government $$ support and welfare, combined with pressure from mostly Democrat cities where Blacks moved to from the South, which forced them to vote their way or they might lose out on jobs, welfare, housing, et al.
Decades of that, combined with not even really having a voting alternative (i.e. the GOP not bothering to contest their vote, run candidates, fund said candidates, etc.), and the decay of the Black family structure (a result of welfare policies) and even peer pressure, led to the voting pathologies we see today.