This is going to be a dog fight the rest of the way

[Brittain33]

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Coolidge + Harding were conservatives and in favor of racial equality. Wilson, was a progressive and in favor of segregation.

Unfortunately history disagrees with you.

You said "always." The Democrats of the 1910s and 1920s were no one's heroes and had their base in the south. Woodrow Wilson is pretty much a unique figure in history. I would not disagree that for many periods of time, the Democrats were worse on racial equality.

What did Coolidge and Hoover do, affirmatively, for racial equality? Not much.

By definition, being conservative meant preserving the status quo, and for most of history, the status quo was segregation and racism. The exceptions were abolitionism and Reconstruction (Republicans, 1850s-1870s) and the slow move toward civil rights which began quietly in the 1930s and 1940s (when FDR warred with the conservative wing of his party over anti-lynching laws) through to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and beyond. Liberal Republicans often fought for civil rights and conservative Dems against prior to the ideological sorting out of the parties.

[Torie]

Sad to say, for many even non-racist Pubs, they still let property rights trump the "right" not to be humiliated in the public square via, inter alia, housing and public accommodations discrimination, because they just lacked the moral imagination to vicariously live in the shoes of the other I think. And that is a fact that cannot be denied - having actually lived through that era. To deny that, is to deny history. It is far better to atone than to deny. It is good for the soul.

[Politico]

Virtually all of the "progressive" icons before Kennedy were either explicitly or implicitly in favor of segregation. An exception would be Truman, who gets a lot of grief from progressives for his use of the nuclear bomb.

[Torie]

All of the "progressive" icons before Kennedy were either explicitly or implicitly in favor of segregation. An exception would be Truman, who gets a lot of grief from progressives for his use of the nuclear bomb.

Yes, the Dems tended to become more sensitive to Civil Rights issues, when a third of the blacks who were allowed to vote in the north voted for Eisenhower in 1956. That scared the sh**t out of the Northern Dem bosses, etc. There just aren't a lot of saints in politics. Rather, they tend to be rather amoral, and all too often, craven, entrepreneurs. One wonders how civil rights history would have evolved absent the Chicken Bone Express. But that is a topic for another time.