The Ku Klux Klan was
founded in 1866 by ex-Confederate soldiers Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones and James Crowe in Pulaski, Tennessee. The group was originally a “social club” but quickly became a violent white supremacist group.
Its first grand wizard was
Nathan Bedford Forrest, an ex-Confederate general and prominent slave trader.
In 1915, Cornell William J. Simmons
restarted the KKK. This second KKK was made up of Republicans and Democrats, although Democrats were more widely involved.
the Republican Party was much more concerned with protecting African Americans and their voting rights from its founding through the early 20th century. In the mid-20th century, both parties' stances on racial equity began to switch.
“It starts with FDR and the New Deal, but the actions with Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s with the Voting Rights Act and civil rights legislation really kind of seals the deal,” Grinspan said.
As the Democrats
introduced policies to support voting rights, it became the favored party for most Black voters and has remained so since. With that realignment, many racist voters who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 left the Democratic Party to become Republicans.
“That was 150 years ago and the parties are totally different today,” Grinspan said. “It’s like a dinosaur to a modern-day bird. So much evolution has happened. These really aren’t the same groups anymore.”
Noah has mocked the political trope of highlighting the Democratic Party’s racist past to question its current progressive policies.
“That was true in like 1910, but then after World War II Democratic presidents like Truman and Johnson started supporting civil rights laws and that led to a mass exodus of racists from the Democratic Party,” Noah mocked the claim in 2016: “Just because something used to be something doesn’t mean it still is. What matters more is what it is now.”
Frequent claims that the Democratic Party of the 19th century either started the Civil War or formed the KKK are false, according to historians.
www.usatoday.com
PS. The first time blacks started leaving the Republican party was after the Great Mississippi Flood in the 1920's. Republicans really treated blacks like second class citizens and they never stopped. Even to this day.
What matters most now is you're the white racists not us.