“The majority of the ACRU study focuses on the horror of Jim Crow, which at its core was a system of state-enforced laws that relegated blacks to inferior status. When police enforcement wasn’t enough, lynchings were used to keep Jim Crow in place. At least 3,500 blacks were lynched during the Jim Crow years, and people were murdered right up through the mid 1960s.
But the political enforcement of Jim Crow was entirely in Democratic hands. The Ku Klux Klan functioned as the paramilitary wing of the Democratic party, and it was used to drive Republicans out of the South after the Civil War. Before he took up the cause of civil rights as president, Lyndon Johnson acting as Senate majority leader blocked the GOP’s 1956 civil-rights bill, and gutted Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act. Democratic senators filibustered the GOP’s 1960 Civil Rights Act.”