Two wrongs make it right :GOP' excuse for racism in their party

 So goes the argument from the Trumpists. Democrats were once the racist party too, so it makes the GOP today, OK?  That is as logical as two wrongs make it right.  It also is indicative of ignorance of American political party history post World War II.  I lived through most of that time myself in a city that was an easy drive from the site of the infamous Tulsa race massacre that took place seventeen years before I was born.  https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre

 I graduated from a Muskogee, Oklahoma whites only, high school in 1956, having lived in a Jim Crow culture until then. For over a third of our population, African Americans,  it was back of the bus, segregated schools, and separate water fountains and toilets. Muskogee was about as Jim Crow as you can get. Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" described my neighborhood too. Memories were very fresh there of the epic destruction and massacre by white racists in Tulsa's black ghetto.. The Black community had learned the lesson of Tulsa well and kept a subservient and self-imposed apartheid profile. The large Cherokee and other Native American populations were considered white so long as their ancestors had not mixed with African Americans.  Brown v Board of Education 1954 was beginning to force changes. Yes, the Democrats were in charge. OK was a one-party, Democrat,  state when I grew up there. Now OK is still a one-party state,  but Republican, bible belt still, and Jim Crow in many minds if not permitted by law to act upon it.  I was born and grew up in Muskogee because dad was a telephone company executive transferred to Muskogee by Southwestern Bell. My parents were not from there..one from Colorado and the other with deep mid-west roots. Mom told me she would wash my mouth out with soap if I ever used the N-word. At home my parents' view of civil rights was very different than the community in which they lived, but they kept their view on race quiet and separate from the common public attitudes that dominated this very southern town of 40 thousand. They were pro-choice and pro-business Republicans, though they registered as Democrats to have a voice in primaries in a one-party state. Everyone in their lives was as anti-communist and pro-defense as they were.   They passed away in the mid-1980s.   If they came back to earth, my guess they would be registered independents. Dad hated anything extreme, left or right. So do not rationalize racism in today's Republican party because Democrats were racist too, way back. Do not ignore the historical sequence. Two wrongs do not make it right.

 Nixon was the first to exploit the white resentment and since then the strategy was to flip the south to Republican and to win that way. He defined the strategy and if you look it up, the southern strategy got its name then. Nixon was no more racist than anyone else, but he was an opportunist and a keen strategist.

 it was a pure political opportunism, taking advantage of a certain mentality, protection of power and social order of the past,  and particular culture, evangelical Christian, with a sense of white and fundamentalist theological superiority.. The southern strategy has worked for years for the GOP as it worked for years earlier for Democrats. ...until the civil rights legislation that actually was the work of a Democrat, and as Johnson acknowledged the fallout would end the Democrats in the South. The truth is: bigotry and racism was the everlasting and overriding factor...and whatever the name on the party du jour was not so much the issue, but on whose side it was at the time...It was not a sudden shift, but gradual with always lingering residuals of the past. As I said above, I, a child of the reddest state in the union, Oklahoma,...saw it switch from one, dominant party Democrat to one-party Republican..before my very eyes but it took 20 years to make that transition. It has always been racist with a tinge of hilly billy culture.. Merle Haggard wrote about my hometown, Okie from Muskogee...and no truer words were ever sung. I have attended high school reunions, and traded social networking, and found little change over the years.  There were a few like me politically, but very few, and most of them no longer live in Oklahoma.