Sorry but the facts of history show you are wrong. Prior to 1948 Dems had a stronghold on the southern states, due to the pre civil war support for slavery. In 1948, the Dems national campaign had a very direct civil rights plank and that same year Truman desegregated the military. Southern Dem politicians and voters were outraged over this and many left the party, some forming the "Dixiecrats" who nominated the virulently racist Strom Thurman as their presidential candidate and their sole platform was pro segregation and pro Jim Crow.
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We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program
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They had enough racist support in the south to win 5 previously stronghold southern Dem states, but Truman still won the election. After losing the election, most of the Dixiecrat office holders rejoined the Dems but their constituents increasingly moved toward the Republicans over the next 2 decades and were joined in 1964 by Strom Thurman who left to join the Republican party after the passage of Kennedy's Civil Rights Act, even though the Act was opposed by most southern politicians of both parties, it was a Dem bill and the only support for it in the Southern States came from Dems. That same year, 5 southern states (LA, GA, MS, AL, SC) that had all gone Dem in almost every election since the Civil war (except in '48 when Thurman ran against the Dems on a Jim Crow platform) all voted for the Republican Goldwater, and no Dem but Carter has won in those states since.
Nixon's and his strategists really seized upon the strategy of appealing to southern racists in 1968. The seeds of their approach were rooted in Nixon's 1960 loss to Kennedy. During that election, Kennedy pressured for the release of an arrested MLK while Nixon was silent. That led to near universal support for Kennedy among southern blacks, but Kennedy lost many southern white votes as a result, and just barely typically Dem southern states, due mostly to his southern VP running mate.
In 1970, Nixon's strategist laid out this approach of appealing to southern racist that had been developing over the last decade among southern Republicans, but never explicated to this degree:
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
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Centuries of political speeches show that racism and Christian fundyism have gone hand-in-hand in the US since at least the rural southern Christian revivals of the late 1700's. Therefore, once the Republicans decided to go for the racist vote, this inherently meant going for the fundy vote.
