Just like I predicted. Nothing matters to you except that he had a "D" after his name. He could be a child murderer and you wouldn't care as long as he's a Democrat. Thank you for confirming.
Apparently you're the one(s) counting letters -- it's the only pseudo-point you simpletons seem capable of articulating.
The fact is, racists exist and have existed, in sufficient numbers to make them targets for political exploitation by any political movement that could make hay out of them -- whether that was in the old daze when the "solid South" meant a Democratic stronghold where Republican influence was all but nonexistent, or in our modern era when the "Southern Strategy" where the exact opposite is the case.
Does that make either of those parties "racist" by nature, even within their own time?
Actually no, it doesn't. It makes both of them
opportunists in those times. The racists aren't the knights in that dynamic; they're the
pawns.
As for how and why these events got started, in the middle of the 19th Century the Whigs were dead; the Republican Party had only been formed in 1854, and six years later the war erupted with the first Republican President, who vanquished the South in a deeply traumatic national wound. Now think about it -- with what party would you expect the vanquished to go with in that situation -- the Greens?
Racism/opportunism: know the difference.