How Congress voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, broken down by party and with a few more details; chart by Kevin M. Kruse; from Kruse’s Twitter account.
Not sure if everybody got their Bogus History from Dinesh D’Souza, but a lot of people have the same wrong ideas about what party supported civil rights in the post-World War II era. These crappy distortions of history are showing up on Facebook and all over Twitter. Worse, people believe them.
The crappy claim is that Democrats are the party of racism and support for the Ku Klux Klan. Historically, that was once so; but it has not been so since 1948 as the two main parties in the U.S. switched positions, with Democrats taking on civil rights as a key cause for Democratic constituencies, and the Republican Party retreating from Abraham Lincoln’s work in the Civil War and immediate aftermath, and instead welcoming in racists fleeing the Democratic Party.
Think Strom Thurmond, vs. Mike Mansfield and Lyndon Johnson.
Kevin Kruse corrected D’Souza in a series of Tweets, and you ought to read them and follow the notes. Kruse is good, and better, he is armed with accurate information.
This is solid history, delivered by Kruse in a medium difficult for careful explanations longer than a bumper sticker.
Mr. Kruse made a key point early in the thread.
First of all, the central point in the original tweet stands. If you have to go back to the 1860s or even the 1960s to claim the “party of civil rights” mantle — while ignoring legislative votes and executive actions taken in *this* decade — you’re clearly grasping at straws.
Anyone who reads newspapers would know that. Alas, one of the campaigns of conservatives over the past 40 years has been to kill off newspapers. They’ve been way too successful at it.
I’ll include mostly the Tweets for the rest of this post.
It’s a big tell. See my earlier posts on the 7 Warning Signs of Bogus History.
You can view the entire thread in one unroll, which I find difficult to translate to this blog platform — but you may find it easier to disseminate:
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Ooops. D’Souza failed to mention that he opposes civil rights laws, still, didn’t he.
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Thanks for the Snopes link on LBJ’s comments. Snopes is astonishingly accurate, and relatively exhausting on these issues — which really ticks off a lot of so-called conservatives.
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https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/
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See also:
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There are other issues related to the right-wing assault on history, which Mr. Kruse has thoughtfully addressed in other threads on Twitter. You may wish to view those, too.
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