Republican racists replaced Democratic racists

I agree with Daniel House (“Focus on this Democratic racist,” Aug. 20) that the Benjamin Tillman statue should be removed from the State House grounds. And I don’t disagree with his statement that the Democratic Party was the “racist one” during Jim Crow and legalized segregation.

It never ceases to amaze me, however, that whenever Republicans give us this history lesson on Southern politics, they can never cite anything after 1963 to support their thesis that the Democratic Party is still the racist one.

1964 was the year that President Lyndon Johnson, admittedly with the help of liberal Northern Republicans, passed the Civil Rights Act, which was viciously opposed by his presidential opponent, Barry Goldwater, and by Strom Thurmond.

After Strom deserted the Democratic Party for its temerity in standing up for civil rights and against Jim Crow, guess what all those racist Southern Democrats became?

Since then, we’ve had Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads and now, with Donald Trump, the essence of what the Republican Party has degenerated into over the past 40 years: a party leader who calls Mexicans rapists, tries to ban all Muslims, attacks an Indiana-born judge for having an Hispanic surname, puts an alt-right white nationalist on his staff and equates Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen to the demonstrators who oppose them.

Which party is “the racist one” now?