| sapphi_snake said: @mrstickbal: No connections to slave owners...Given the distance we have from the civil war, few people really have the desire to look into seeing if they had family that owned slaves and the like. The only people that really care about that type of thing are the instigators like Al Sharpton, et all that make it a public issue on TV. Its kind of like trying to be angry at any average German for Nazism... You really can't hold that against the great grandchildren for something they despise and have nothing to do with. It's not about pointing fingers, it's just an interesting fact. As for the Democrat-Republican issue in the South, that is a very interesting one. Democrats were the ones that heavily backed slavery in the South. Republicans were the ones that were vehimently against it. After the Civil War, every freed slave voted Republican, which gave them a super majority in the South for a few decades. After time, though, more white Democrats came into power, and enacted racist laws that prevented blacks from voting, called Jim Crowe laws. Eventually, this turned the South into a Democratic power base for approximately 70 years. After time, both parties changed in general stances, which slowly led to Republicans becoming more favored in the South, due to their conservative nature. Aha, interesting. I knew about the underlined part from Gone with the Wind. So the parties just changed ideologies, and the people moved to the party with which they agreed with. |
Generally, yes.
The Democrats favor more government intervention, which is something Southerners have been heavily against (which was the cause of the Civil War), whereas the Republicans do not. It was a very gradual change, but accelerated mostly in the 1960's when the Democrats went from having 2 distinct parts - the Southern Dixiecrats (which were the pro-slavery, anti-black ones) and the Northern Democrats (which were socialist/progressive/ect generally), to mostly the Northern Democrats. You can find a few Democrats that still embrace the Southern formula (generally moderate Dems - called Blue Dogs), sans the racism in politicians like Bill Clinton (who was Governor of Arkansas before becoming president).
Having said that, you can still find a lot of people that vote Democrat in the South. They are usually minorities that prefer the offerings of the Democrats for welfare and other government handouts. In terms of civil rights policies, though, the Republicans have generally been the ones with the pro-black policies. For example, when it came to the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960's, more Republicans voted for them than Blacks. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican as well.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
