Changing With The Times, Donkey And Elephant

I get pretty sick of reading on right-wing websites that the Republicans are the party of Lincoln while the Democrats are the true racists -- the party of slavery, Southern rebellion, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and all the rest of that unsavory baggage. It's true, of course -- but irrelevant. The racists simply switched sides in the 1960s, out of disgust with what they saw as the backstabbing actions of President Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Nixon, counseled by Lee Atwater, welcomed the bigots to the GOP -- the Southern Strategy -- ushering in the last 50 years of Republican racism. (Shockingly, there are 300,000 registered members of the vile website Stormfront: Does anyone seriously believe that even one of those 300,000 votes Democrat today? I didn't think so.)

Anyway, things were different before the turbulent '60s. The platform of the Republican party under Eisenhower was pretty similar to that of today's Democrats; the most reactionary force in Congress was the Democratic senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond. Click here for the Wikipedia entry, "Civil Rights Act of 1957." Here are the opening paragraphs:

The Civil Rights Act of 1957, Pub.L. 85–315, 71 Stat. 634, enacted September 9, 1957, primarily a voting rights bill, was the first civil rights legislation passed by Congress in the United States since the 1866 and 1875 Acts.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was also Congress's show of support for the Supreme Court's Brown decisions.[1] The Brown v. Board of Education (1954), eventually led to the integration of public schools. Following the Supreme Court ruling, Southern whites in Virginia began a "Massive Resistance." Violence against blacks rose there and in other states, as in Little Rock, Arkansas, where that year President Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered in federal troops to protect nine children integrating a public school, the first time the federal government had sent troops to the South since Reconstruction.[2] There had been continued physical assaults against suspected activists and bombings of schools and churches in the South. The administration of Eisenhower proposed legislation to protect the right to vote by African Americans.

Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, an ardent segregationist, sustained the longest one-person filibuster in history in an attempt to keep the bill from becoming law. His one-man filibuster lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes; he began with readings of every state's election laws in alphabetical order. Thurmond later read from the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington's Farewell Address. His speech set the record for a Senate filibuster.[3] The bill passed the House with a vote of 285 to 126 (Republicans 167–19 for, Democrats 118–107 for)[4] and the Senate 72 to 18 (Republicans 43–0 for, Democrats 29–18 for).[5] President Eisenhower signed it on September 9, 1957.