"State's rights" was not used by Republicans as a code word. By then, nobody wanted to bring segregation back, so there were clearly no racist appeals in that.
Reagan kicked off his campaign in 1980 in Mississippi in a town where civil rights workers had been murdered and talked about "state's rights." Add that to his welfare queen comments and his bizarre reverence for the Waffen SS, and you have a troubling picture of President Reagan on race.
In three of the five Southern states that Wallace carried in 1968, Humphrey beat Nixon for second.
Maybe the Humphrey voters were the blacks who were allowed to vote. Humphrey did win 97% of the black vote.
Blacks had been voting Democrat since the 1930s in response to the New Deal,
But, their support for Democrats increased tremendously after 1964. In 1960, Nixon won 29% of blacks. In 68, he won 3%. A party that's strong on civil rights doesn't see its vote among black folks go down by 90% in an eight year period.
Not all Southern Democrats were racists or segregationists, and though they weren't racist because they were Democrats, they were Democrats because they were racist.
That's illogical on its face. If Southerners were Democrats because they were racist, then all Southern Democrats would have to be racist.
even if non-Southern Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act more than Republicans (which isn't even fair when you include Southerners like John Tower with the other Republicans), the majority of the bill's opposition came from Democrats
We have different theories. My theory is that being an elected official in the Jim Crow South is an indicator of racism. Your theory is that being a Democrat is an indicator of racism. If you theory was correct, one would expect a higher percentage of Democrats in the north would oppose the civil rights act. Yet, much to the contrary, outside the South, being a Democrat made you more likely to support the Civil Rights Act. What is your explanation for that?