Question about conservatives, and racism?

[crookedbomb974]

George Wallace and Orval Faubus never joined the Republican Party, even though they both lived into the 1990's.

The last KKK member in Congress was a life long Democrat who lived until 2010.

Out of the 26 members of the Dixiecrat Party, 23 of them were never Republicans.

Strom Thurmond was an isolated case of a Dixiecrat joining the Republican Party. He did not reflect the majority of Dixiecrats.

Democrats started the KKK and Jim Crow laws.

The KKK has less than 10,000 members today. Even if every KKK member is a registered Republican, it would be less than 0.02% of all Republicans. It does not in any way reflect the views of the Republican Party in general.

Conservative Democrats of 50 years ago have nothing to do with conservative Republicans of today. It is not valid to claim guilt by association just by labelling southern Democrats as conservative and then pretending that makes Republicans into racist bigots.

The southern states switched to Republican majorities because the growing population of urban areas in the north caused the northern Kennedy Democrats to gain power in the Democratic Party, so it no longer represented the views of southern Democrats. Before 1948, most Democrat politicians were members of the KKK, and segregation was an official policy of the Democratic Party. In 1948, the Democratic Party ceased to support segregation, and many southern Democrat were voting Democrat only because of their support of segregation. After 1948, southern racists no longer had a reason to vote Democrat.

The Republican Party has never supported segregation or any other overtly racist policies against blacks. Republicans originated most civil rights legislation before 1964, and Democrats fillibustered and defeated it. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas to force Democrat Governor Orval Faubus to allow black students to enter the public schools in Little Rock.