This must be Democrat history month.

In case you forgot, Michael Barone reminds us:

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who seems like a nice person, got caught making a huge historical mistake; he said George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who defied a desegregation order 50 years ago, was a Republican. Nope. He was a Democrat and ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, 1972 and 1976; he also ran for president as a third party candidate in 1968. Hayes either didn’t know that–surprisingly for a political commentator–or temporarily and perhaps conveniently forgot it. Or maybe he just figures that all political villains are Republicans. In any case he apologized for what he, appropriately, called a "stupid, inexcusable, historically illiterate mistake."

Here’s another fact he and others may want to keep in mind as we remember the climactic events of the civil rights movement 50 years ago: Bull Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner who turned fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, was a Democrat too. In fact, he was Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama, at a time when each state and territory had just one male and one female member on the Democratic National Committee. 

One more reminder: President John Kennedy’s endorsement 50 years ago this month of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came in the third year of his presidency, in response to events in Birmingham and elsewhere; previously he had been reluctant to raise the issue for fear he would antagonize Southern Democratic officeholders and voters. Some on the left evidently want to depict the civil rights battle as a struggle between benificent Democrats and evil Republicans. It was no such thing.

There was a "switch" of the parties following the 1960's on race. It wasn't a switch on policy, it was a switch on history. The Democrats, who for two centuries had been racists or who had eagerly collaborated with racists to hold power, went all out to portray Republicans as racially bigoted, and themselves as eternally racially enlightened. The memory hole got a lot of use in the late 20th century.

Of course, basic party ideology actually changed very little. Republicans remained the party of color-blind policy. They refused to pander to racial favoritism or racial hate. Republican policy has always been equality under law, regardless of race. 

Democrats, newly in black-face, remained the party of race-baiting. They continued to use race to gain political advantage. By the 1960's they understood that their centuries of slavery and Jim Crow were no longer useful to them, so they baited a different race, promising favors and distributing dependence, all in exchange for votes. Their policies, on display in America's great cities, reduced blacks to penury, family disintegration and endemic crime. But their policies produced a reliable black voting block, which replaced their reliable bigot voting block that was disintegrating because of Republican victories on civil rights.

Black families had withstood Democrat slavery, segregation and lynching. The black family did not survive Democrat dependency.

The cost of Democrat vote-buying to black Americans was the decimation of black families and neighborhoods that made the innumerable Klansmen who still carried their Democratic Party I.D. cards quite satisfied, deep in their Progressive hearts.

When Harry Truman courageously tried to dismantle segregation, Republicans were his allies and Democrats were his foes. While Barry Goldwater was founding the Arizona NAACP and Dwight Eisenhower was passing the first civil rights act (in 1957) since Reconstruction, Democrat majorities were fighting against desegregation and against voting rights and even against federal anti-lynching laws:

Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson:

"[Truman's civil rights program is] a farce and a sham -- an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty." He continued: "I am opposed to that program. I have voted against the so-called poll tax repeal bill. ... I have voted against the so-called anti-lynching bill."

Senator Lyndon B. Johnson:

“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

Meanwhile Senator John F. Kennedy was establishing his presidential bona fides with southern Democrats by voting against Eisenhower's civil rights bill.

After President Kennedy's assassination, Democrats enacted Great Society programs that deepened black dependency on government and replaced black fathers with government checks:

President Lyndon B. Johnson:

“I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years." 

The racial struggle in America is not between those who love black people and those who hate black people, nor between those who love white people and those who hate white people. It is between those who work for a color-blind society on one side, and on the other side those who work for a society in which skin color is the coin of the realm and racial hate and fear are the down-payment on political power.