Recent history doesn't favor the GOP.

There has been a lot of chatter on social networks that the GOP can't be racists since it was the Democrats who actually were members of the KKK. If you go back far enough, that's true. But recent history isn't as nice to the GOP as they would like it to be.

If you go back in history to the start of the KKK, back in the late 1860s, it's obvious that those in the hoods were, almost totally, Democrats. The Republican Party, led by Lincoln, was the party pushing for abolition. But even Lincoln had to wait for a victory to announce the Emancipation Proclamation due to questions about slavery in the GOP. So immediately after the Civil War, it was the northern Democrats that were carpetbaggers, and those in the south that still believed in states rights and slavery couldn't be in the Party of Lincoln, and they were Democrats. And over the next 100 years, however, a schism in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party emerged. For those Democrats from the north, soon after the turn of the century, they believed that government was need to stop the excess of big business, and leveling the playing field for everyone. Southern Democrats rallied behind their belief in religion and states rights. The GOP, their stronghold in the north, were for big businesses. Behind the northern Democrats, they were able to pass the New Deal, and after WWII, de-segregate the military. This act by President Truman caused the rift between northern and southern Democrats that became the push by the GOP for their Southern Strategy after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act was passed in the mid 1960s. By this time, the GOP had only big business in their corner. They hadn't won the White House with a true member of the GOP (Eisenhower in 1952 was asked to run by both the GOP and the Democratic Party) since before the Great Depression. How to gain the White House, the GOP asked themselves. Their answer has lead to the 2 political parties that we know today. They would try to push dis-satisfied southern Democrats, who disliked the way both the Democratic Party and the federal government was over-riding states rights, to vote for them. Big business already wanted the federal government out of their lives, so the GOP, which started as the party for federal government outlawing states rights over slavery, became the small or no federal government party, giving southern states their rights to nullify federal laws, and against laws regulating businesses.

So, if you go back far enough in history, it was the Democratic Party that was against equal rights for all Americans. But recent history doesn't favor the GOP, who for the last 40 years has pushed for states rights nullifying federal laws, since those states rights have their background in segregation and racism.