Subject: Re: Hey Tommy Tuberville...
Bingo! Albaby nailed it as usual.

What's truly remarkable is that this needs to be explained to some folks.

To be fair, the nuance cuts both ways.

It's certainly true that the segregati....nah, let's just call them racists, of the mid- to late-1960's that decided to switch parties during the Civil Rights Movement all went in one direction - out of the Democrats and into the GOP. Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms were perhaps the most notorious - they took a look at where the two parties were going, and decided that the GOP was the right fit for them. There's no doubt that the Democrats were the party of the Civil Rights Act, and that the Southern white conservative faction of the party had lost that internal battle for policy.

Buuuuuuuut - most of the racists stayed right where they were, and the Democrats were willing to let them stay in the party for quite a while. Sure, the ones who lasted the longest were forced to recant a bit, like Robert Byrd. But back in the 1970's, even the biggest racist arseholes were quite welcome to stay in the Democratic tent, and wield an enormous amount of power. Folks like Senators John Stennis and James Eastland and Herman Talmadge were fine and dandy Democrats. Even named an aircraft carrier after Stennis, as staunch and unrepentant a racist as you could want. All those Democrat-dominated state legislatures throughout the South stayed Democratic and wholly resistant to civil rights for the immediate duration, too. You don't get a Democratic Georgia legislature picking a flat-out racist like Lester Maddux to be the Democratic governor without some serious issues.

So while it's defensibly the case that opponents to the Civil Rights Act were more welcome in the Republican Party than the Democratic Party in the immediate aftermath of passage, it's not the case that they were unwelcome in the Democratic party.

That said, though, it's completely anachronistic to apply the political affiliations and divisions of the parties as they were in the 1960's and 1970's to their modern analogs. The Democratic party was much more solicitous of conservatives, and the GOP of liberals, back in those days. Now that the parties have almost completely sorted along conservative and liberal lines, the entirely conservative opponents of the CRA would certainly be shut out of the modern Democratic party.