Blacks and the Democratic Party

In 2008 FactCheck wrote an article that I thought was interesting:

Blacks mostly voted Republican from after the Civil War and through the early part of the 20th century. That’s not surprising when one considers that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and the white, segregationist politicians who governed Southern states in those days were Democrats. The Democratic Party didn’t welcome blacks then, and it wasn’t until 1924 that blacks were even permitted to attend Democratic conventions in any official capacity. Most blacks lived in the South, where they were mostly prevented from voting at all.

Often people think that the New Deal programs during the Roosevelt administration are the main reason for the partisan vote, but Republicans still received a good portion even after that:

Dwight D. Eisenhower got 39 percent in 1956, and Richard Nixon got 32 percent in his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

In 1965 Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act:

No Republican presidential candidate has gotten more than 15 percent of the black vote since.