One of the cardinal sins of histiography is projecting the present onto the past. It seems to me to be deceptive and disingenuous to smear people in 2015 with something that people in 1962 did.

That's the stock-in-trade of the modern spin-doctor (embarrassed by their parties' behavior). "Er . . . uh . . . the parties have all switched sides, so . . . um . . . uh . . . let's retroactively pretend that Democratic governor Fritz Hollings in South Carolina was a Republican. Or that the Rebel Flag was a Republican flag (even though Lincoln was a Republican)."

You mentioned Lyndon B. Johnson. And he's instructive. He had something called "The Southern Strategy" to poach blacks from the Republican party [the party to which they belonged to since Lincoln put out the Emancipation Proclamation]. All top black leaders were Republicans. Frederick Douglas was a Republican. Edward W. Brooke (the first popularly elected black Senator) was a Republican. P.B.S. Pinchback (the first black governor in America) was a Republican. Martin Luther King, Sr. was a Republican. According to his sister, MLK Jr. was also a Republican. In fact, his "I Have A Dream" speech was largely plagiarized by a speech read at the Republican National Convention of 1952 (by Archibald Carey).

While a Republican President [Dwight Eisenhower] was ending de-segregation, Lyndon B. Johnson said that he had a strategy to poach the blacks from the Party of Lincoln.

He's recorded talking about his Great New Society, and its entitlement programs, saying, "We have to give them something. Not enough so that it matters. But just enough to pull them away. We'll have those niggers voting Democrat for 200 years!"

So it requires a massive amount of historical revisionism to turn the Party of Lincoln into the "black-haters" and Lyndon B. Johnson into a champion of civil rights.

He's the same guy who during the 1968 Chicago riots said, "We need to watch out for the National Guard. The last thing we need is a pregnant nigger shot."

If this is your idea of "the good guy" to combat those evil Republicans (who have that long history of freeing slaves, promoting blacks to leadership positions in government, and who wrote 95% of all civil rights legislation), then so be it.

I, personally, wouldn't invoke his name in this discussion--because he clearly didn't even like blacks and merely saw them as convenient stooges to be bribed to get them as a wedge bloc to fight against his political enemies.

Long story short: It's dishonest to blame people who weren't even alive in 1962 for the rebel flag in the South Carolina capital. We need to blame the people who actually instituted it. And, awkwardly, those were Democrats. Of course, there's always the tried-and-true tactic of evading responsibility by claiming that "everyone switched sides". But you mentioned Reagan. Reagan was from Illinois: Lincoln's state. Illinois didn't magically "switch sides". It was Republican when Lincoln was alive, and it was Republican when Reagan grew up there. Or how about Dwight D. Eisenhower? He was from Kansas. That was Republican territory in the 19th Century, and still Republican territory when Eisenhower became President. Once again: No magical side-switching. You basically had people from the North (which was historically Republican) fighting Democrats in the South (who wanted to maintain the Jim Crow laws they'd enacted during Reconstruction). Hence why all the civil rights legislation was written by Republicans and fought tooth and nail by Democrats. There was no point where Eisenhower or Reagan "switched sides". They were never for Jim Crow or Rebel flags or any of that nonsense.