@Veteran229 This is less to do with legal changes, but with resistance to social changes. The Democratic party, going back to the 1960s, has used legislation to protect minorities on the edge of social changes, via anti-discrimination laws (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 being a classic example). Republicans have always resisted this, saying, "You can't legislate morality," as if it's moral to discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color, gender, sexual preference, or what have you.

These issues have already passed the 3/4 test. The 14th Amendment provides equal protection of the law. All the rest follows from that. The "rights" you're talking about being "trampled by the majority" sound like code for the right to discriminate against groups that they disapprove of.

Nobody is discriminating against conservatives. But conservatives hate being called out and call it reverse discrimination.

@Veteran229 "southern democrats, known as dixiecrats" who promptly switched parties and became Republicans, unto this generation. Lyndon Johnson is famously rumored to have said, upon signing, "We have just lost the South for a generation," and he was right. The Dixiecrats were to the Democrats of the time what the RINOs (Republican In Name Only) are today.

And Republican votes for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were not duplicated in other key civil rights battles, the fair employment practices bills 1949 and 1950 or the fair housing act in 1966. It's a very popular and misleading practice to try to paint Democrats as the party of discrimination based on a single vote, when the overall record is clear that the Republican party has been the party voting to roll back civil rights legislation since the time of Reagan.

@Veteran229 I was thinking the same of you.

So, it wasn't about the Democrats doing the right thing, and a segregationist Southern wing of the party splitting off, which is what actually happened. It was just about votes in your view.

Had the only concern been votes, they could have easily continued on the path of ignoring civil rights except for giving lip service while pandering to the white vote, which was in fact to become Nixon's Southern Strategy and would serve the Republican party well up to the present day. Kennedy and Johnson after him did the right thing on moral grounds, as did the majority of Republicans for that particular vote. The Republican party then proceeded to hammer Democrats about the head and shoulders for the next 5 decades with race-baiting politics in the South and pretty much nationally as well (remember Willie Horton?)(remember the Birther non-issue?).

I daresay a large proportion of American whites were racist in that era. The difference was that the Democratic party in Washington allied with the civil rights movement to try to change the laws and do something about conditions for blacks and other minorities, whereas the Republican party capitalized on it for voting blocs. (And still does.)