...Democrats started the KKK, they persecuted blacks and other ethnicities...
Yes, and, at the same time, No, I think.
It was the Republicans who (1) fought to preserve the Union and (2) freed the slaves and (3) sustained those freed slaves during the earliest going after war's end.
It was the
Southern Democrats who (1) seceded from the union and (2) fought to preserve slavery and (3) found workarounds for Federal protection of Freedmen (Jim Crow laws, et al) and (4) persecuted blacks between 1865 and 1964, to varying degrees.
While Southern Democrats were busy stifling Black progress, Northern Democrats were busy morphing into liberal-progressive socialist- or communal-effort -leaning politicos.
All the while, the Republican Party was morphing into the Mouthpiece for Big Business, under the guise of less-is-more government, in the context of helping the Common Man.
And then, in 1964, with an old-style racist, prejudiced bastard like Lyndon Baines Johnson, having a change-of-heart, or having a change-of-tactics (or a little of both), and shoving the Civil Rights Act through Congress, and forcing the concepts down the throats of the National Democratic Party Organization...
The old-style Southern Democrats had had enough, and bailed out of the Democratic Party, leaving the field clear for the Northern Democrat socialist - communalist - liberal/progressive element of the Party to begin its climb to control of the Party...
Those Southern Democrats morphed into the more Socially Conservative or Rightist element within the Republican Party, with a lot of spill-over into the Independent and Right-Winger camps, for those with views sufficiently extreme that the Republican Party would not tolerate them...
In a very real sense, the Southern Democrats of yesteryear are the Right-Wing Fringe types of today, yes?
Did I get it right?