Sure. It’s a very complicated story that could easily fill up a semester, but I’ll do the super-quick version: the Republican Party abandoned Reconstruction in 1876 following gradual voter fatigue over Federal intervention in the South and then gradually shifted to merely pro-forma support of civil rights in the 1880s, and then gave even that up in the 1890s.
The next big moment is when black voters in the North in the 1930s and 1940s – who had become a significant voting bloc due to the First Great Migration – joined the New Deal coalition (a shaky but potent coalition that included southern whites, western farmers, “white ethnic” working class voters in the Midwest and Northeast, the labor movement, middle class liberals and former Progressives, etc.) following the 1936 election, when the Republican Party embraced austerity and opposed the New Deal, which many African-Americans relied upon for survival.
This then gradually (I’m talking 1940s to 1960s gradually) forced the Democratic Party to embrace the cause of civil rights. In turn, southern whites began breaking with the Democratic Party – first, in creating a legislative alliance with conservative Republicans after 1937 to block further New Deal legislation, second, with the 1948 walkout from the Democratic Convention that led to Strom Thurmond running for President as the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” third, the gradual erosion of the (white) “solid South” in the 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections.
This formed the basis for the “Southern Strategy” pursued by Richard Nixon: he saw that the white South was up for grabs due to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and believed that he could win their votes without appearing to openly favor segregation by campaigning on “law and order” and “states’ rights” without explicitly mentioning race.
And the rest was history.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 