PARTIES: What goes around

I appreciate Syd Albright’s history article on why African Americans vote Democratic.

I would add however that southern Republicans continue to gerrymander heavily black neighborhoods into their own legislative and congressional districts. We don’t like how they vote so GOP-controlled legislatures exiled them.

Before southern white Democrats bolted to the Republican Party after the civil rights act, the voting rights act and Jimmy Carter, they were all Democrats in the South. Blacks and whites.

When I registered to vote in Oklahoma in 1982 I was strongly advised to register Democratic if I wanted to vote in local government. I didn’t and I was not able to vote for sheriff or even a state legislator. The party of Lincoln was still disliked.

Then came the exodus of southern white Democrats to the Republicans and the South has been red ever since.

Even Trent Lott got himself in trouble with his glowing words for 48-year SC Sen. Strom Thurmond, a racist Democrat who became Republican. Mr. Lott, majority leader of the party of Lincoln, lost his job over a racist named Thurmond.

My how parties change.

Idaho has seen the reverse gerrymandering of nonwhites because many left diversity behind when we moved here. In the ’70s and ’80s, southern Idaho is where the Republicans lived. North Idaho wasn’t so far right until Sunbelt carpetbaggers came to retire with their public pensions. In the 1970s, Idaho had a Democratic governor and a Democratic U.S. Senate foreign relations committee chairman. That doesn’t happen overnight.

My how states change.

MIKE RENO

Post Falls