"Coulter goes on to show that LBJ continually rejected civil rights bills proposed by only Republicans and it was not until 1964, when Johnson finally signed the civil rights act with very little help from his fellow Democrats in Congress. Even after the passage of the civil rights act, Democrats continued to win elections in former segregationist states all the way through the election of George H.W. Bush despite the folklore of the GOP “southern strategy.”
PICKET: Coulter shreds 'southern strategy' myth as GOP successfully runs more blacks in conservative districts - Washington Times
There was no "Southern Strategy."
But....there are low information voters who believe it.....
Raise your paw.
Coulter is no authority.
This tells the story:
The Rockefeller family's billions had once helped finance the Republican Party and the advancement of the interests of African Americans by endowing the N.A.A.C.P. and institutions of higher learning serving black folk.
The Party of Lincoln had been the natural home of African Americans until the Great Depression and F.D.R. started to peel them away from the G.O.P.
L.B.J. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voters Right Act of 1965 sparked a major realignment of the political parties in America. African Americans in the 1960s were now solidly Democratic and
the Solid South, which had once been solidly Democratic, began moving towards the new Republican Party procreated by Goldwater, Reagan and ex-Democrats from the former Confederacy like Strom Thurmond.
The first Republicans voted to Congress since Reconstruction from the Deep South started to appear in the 1960s, starting with John Tower in 1961, who was was elected to the U.S. Senate seat once held by then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson in a special election in 1961. Connecticut transplant
George Bush, whose father
Prescott Bush was a moderate Republican who represented the Nutmeg State in the U.S. Senate, was elected to the House of Representatives from Texas in 1964,
reaping political hay from the backlash against civil rights.
The Republican in the South to make the biggest splash in the 1960s was U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who as the Palmetto State's governor in 1948 broke with Harry Truman over the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform (crafted by
Hubert H. Humphrey) and ran for president as the head of the "Dixiecrat Party". Thurmond won four Southern states good for 39 votes in the Electoral College. In 1964, he quit the Democratic Party and resigned from the Senate to protest the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which a filibuster by Southern Senators, Democrats all (including Senator Strom, a racist who had fathered a mixed race child with his African American mistress) failed to derail. He subsequently was elected in a special election to his old seat as a Republican.
Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Reagan's political career had been bolstered by his support of Goldwater and his opposition to Fair Housing Laws in the state of California.
Reagan rode the backlash against civil rights to the governor's mansion in Sacramento and later to the White House. Under
Reagan, who had launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the lynching of three civil rights workers in 1964, the spirit of the hated Abraham Lincoln was exorcised from the G.O.P. he helped create, enabling Southerners to embrace the Grand Old Party they previously had despised as a symbol of the Union's defeat of the Confederacy and is championing of equal rights for black folk during the hated Reconstruction period.
Shorn of Lincoln and a commitment to civil rights (
in 1990, Republican President George H.W. Bush would become the first president in history to veto a civil rights act), the realignment of the Deep South with the Republican Party that had started in the 1960s quickened. The process that had begun with a Democrat from the South (L.B.J.) in the White House was completed by the mid-1990s, ironically, under another Democratic President from a former Confederate state,
Bill Clinton. (The next Democrat in the White House would be an African American,
Barack Obama.)
By 1976, the Grand Old Party that the Rockefeller family had financed was dying. Rockefeller's party had supported African American suffrage (Ike pushed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 to increase the number of black voters in the Deep South and L.B.J. as Senate Majority Leader got them passed) and had had an equal rights for women plank in the party platform since 1940. (An echo of Teddy Roosevelt's support for women's suffrage in his renegade 1912 Progressive Party presidential bid, the equal rights plank would be torn out of the party platform by Ronald Reagan in 1980.) In the Bicentennial Year of '76, Rockefeller's G.O.P was waning, and a new party more aligned with Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat Party of 1948 was arising, Phoenix-like from the ashes of Lincoln's G.O.P. In 1976, Nelson Rockefeller was no longer welcome, and by 1980, progressive "Rockefeller Republicans" like U.S. Senator
Jacob Javits of New York would begin to fall by he wayside, defeated by the likes of conservative 'Alfonse D'Amato'. By the 1980s, the only Rockefeller in elected office,
Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia (the son or Rocky's brother
John D. Rockefeller III), would be a Democrat.
Nelson Rockefeller - Biography - IMDb