The keystone of the Southern Strategy was Nixon's working with Strom Thurmond to get his endorsement and behind the scenes support for the 1968 Republican nomination. Nixon's concessions included nominating Supreme Court justices who reflected Thurmond's vies and pulling back on federal enforcement of integration (this was nearly 15 years after Brown.)
Look up Nixon's first two nominations for the Supreme Court: they were from South Carolina and Georgia.
South Carolina and Georgia are not in the upper south.
A significant chunk of the population of Georgia and some parts of SC were/are in the Upper South, I would argue (especially when you don't break it up into Upper South, Mid South, Deep South or an equivalent combo). I believe this is about the best modern day assessment of what's Upper South:
Georgia in particular has always had two distinct cultures and the dividing line between them has more or less always passed through the modern ATL metro. Today, the metro is so influential and geographically-expansive that it does a good job at maintaining said division (while also creating to some degree its own Third Way), but geography and other factors kept North Georgia and South Georgia clearly divided into Upper and Deep South even before then and even without a large metropolitan area separating the two.
Another good map to see what I mean is the majority-minority counties of the past 100 years. Everything north of the counties that were M-M at one point or another was definitively (white) Upper South, and everything south of it was definitively (white) Deep South. The stretch of M-M counties itself for all intents and purposes can be considered Deep South as well. Metro ATL's growth, again, complicates this simple definition in the present day.
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