I can’t help it — just a little more:

When asked if Martin Luther King was a communist: “We’ll find out in about thirty-five years, won’t we?”
–Ronald Reagan

When asked if Martin Luther King’s assassination was his own damn fault: [It's a] “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”
–Ronald Reagan

The birth of modern conservative movement was when Barry Goldwater decided to try to turn racist, segregationist Southern whites from conservative Democrats into conservative GOP voters. Here are some quotes from the time to put conservatives and liberals of the time in context for you, Mike and Tyfoc, since you to need it.

You may also need to hear this: Martin Luther King was a liberal. The people who opposed him were conservatives.

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“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N****r, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
–Lee Atwater, 1981

“I wouldn’t like to see my party assume that it is the role of the Federal Government to enforce integration in schools.”
–Barry Goldwater, 1961

“We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”
–Barry Goldwater, 1961

“I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
–Ronald Reagan, 1966

“I believe in States’ Rights. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”
–Ronald Reagan, Philadephia, Mississippi, 1980

“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
–Ken Mehlman, 2005

“Now what are some of the domestic consequences of the war in Vietnam? It has made the Great Society a myth and replaced it with a troubled and confused society. The war has strengthened domestic reaction. It has given the extreme right, the anti-labor, anti-Negro, and anti-humanistic forces a weapon of spurious patriotism to galvanize its supporters into reaching for power, right up to the White House. It hopes to use national frustration to take control and restore the America of social insecurity and power for the privileged. When a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor can become a leading war hawk candidate for the Presidency, only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events.”
…
“It has been estimated by Senator (Harkey) that we spend approximately $500,000 to kill a single enemy soldier in Vietnam. And yet we spend about $53 for each impoverished American in anti-poverty programs. Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It appropriates poverty funds with miserliness and grudging reluctance. The government is emotionally committed to the war. It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.”
–Martin Luther King, November 1967

Those CONSERVATIVE Democrats, by and large, all became Republicans. Again, no one denies the role that the Dixiecrats played during the civil rights era. But they either renounced their prior racist views, like Wallace and Byrd, or like Strom Thurmond, they all left the Democrats when Democrats became the progressive party.

In fact, this is a favorite talking point of wingnuts so you can’t very well deny it. As Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left me.” Wingnuts are always pointing out this leftward shift of the Democrats during the mid-60’s. Embracing civil rights was part of that trend that alienated so many conservatives and won over the south the Republicans for generations.

That trend explains the transformation of the south from Blue to Red. The people didn’t change, just their party affiliation. They became much more at home in the racist Republican party of anti-immigration, anti-affirmative action, pro-racial profiling.

The past is what it is, but today’s modern segregationists are all Republicans.

We liberals won, Mike. The successor to the anti-civil rights platform was the GOP. Ronald Reagan spoke out frequently against the civil rights movement on behalf of law and order. That’s how the GOP won over racist segregationists, and that’s why they dominate the Southern white vote.

Then his successors in the Democratic party made a career out of smearing any Republicans who ever uttered the words law and order as “racists.”

Fascinating.

Although it should be noted that while Byrd’s history shouldn’t be ignored or excused in the least”

Although Byrd has a racist PAST…

he has a 100% rating from the NAACP.

…he has reformed his views so profoundly SINCE THEN that even the NAACP considers him an ally.

No one denies Byrd’s past, but UNLIKE Republicans and Thurmond, we don’t praise it either. Nor are we trying to retrograde America back to the 1950s when everything was so simply and wonderful – for white people.

That’s because the world evolves and conservatives don’t. Or they’re just really slow at it.

On a related note, back in the 40s and 50s, Republicans (including Richard Nixon) were toying with the idea of really pushing civil rights hard in order to steal the Democratic party’s liberal wing and win the votes of blacks nationwide. I do wonder what the GOP and the country would have looked like if they’d actually gone after it. A dominant, socially liberal, business-oriented GOP with a base in the midwest and northeast, and a conservative, populist, George Wallace-style Democratic party with its base in the South. It’s a subject that’d be ripe for alternate historians.

History proves that conservatives are always wrong.

He probably is, but anyone who truly cares about issues of race in the South has no illusions about which party is the heir to Southern conservatism. Once again, they distract from the issue by attacking an individual.

The solid South is still pretty solid. In no other region is the white vote so politcally monolithic (except Utah). Bush won like 85% of the Mississippi white vote in 2004, compared to like 58% nationally.

http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html

http://themoderatevoice.com/society/history/15520/recall-the-words-of-the-national-review/

Oh, also, to preempt the trolls: ROBERT BYRRRRDDDDD!!!!