Black History Month: Debunking the 10 biggest myths about black history

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3. The modern Democratic Party is still the party of the Klu Klux Klan

During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the Democratic Party ruled the South, and their reign of terror was made successful thanks to groups like the Klan, which provided the muscle that kept black people down, subordinated and ‘in their place’. As historian Eric Foner noted in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, “In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy.”

Meanwhile, the Republican Party was a diverse party, a true “big tent” with liberals and moderates in their ranks. Following the Civil War during Reconstruction, blacks were overwhelmingly Republican. Even President Eisenhower received 39 percent of the black vote in 1956, while Nixon won 32 percent of the black vote in his loss against Kennedy. Moreover, greater majorities of Republican lawmakers voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. In fact, Democrats and Republicans outside of the South approved the bills in the face of a filibuster from Southern Democrats.

Things began to change in the 1960s, when Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, and Southern conservatives began to take over the GOP by appealing to white Southern resentment over civil rights. As a result of a Southern Strategy based on states’ rights, white Democrats flocked to the Republicans. In today’s South, the Republican Party is a mostly white conservative party, and the Democratic Party is disproportionately African-American. The parties switched places.