How did white Southern voter perceptions of party positions on integration change between 1960 and 1968?

1. The baseline in 1960: Democrats not widely seen as the integrationist party

In 1960 the dominant view among white Southerners was that the Democratic Party was not the main force behind school integration — only about 13 percent of white Southern voters identified Democrats as pushing for integrated schools, a low baseline that reflected the Democratic Party’s long-standing control of Southern state machines and the party’s accommodation of segregationist local elites ^{[1] [4]}.

2. The inflection point, 1963–1964: legislation, leadership, and suddenly a new label

A dramatic reassessment occurred between 1960 and 1964: by 1964 some 45 percent of Southern whites reported that Democrats were more aggressively promoting school integration while the share saying Republicans were more aggressive fell to 16 percent, a shift the literature ties to high‑profile federal actions — notably President Johnson’s and the Democratic congressional coalition’s passage of civil‑rights laws and the visibility of national Democratic leadership endorsing desegregation beginning in 1963 — which changed voters’ cues about party responsibility for integration ^{[3] [2]}.

3. Backlash and nuance: Southern anger at pace, not uniform endorsement

That new label did not translate into white Southern approval of integration; public opinion in the region showed intense opposition to the speed of federal enforcement — for example, in May 1965 Southerners by 61 percent to 21 percent said the government was moving too quickly on integration — revealing that recognizing Democrats as the party of integration also coincided with backlash, school closures, private segregation academies and heightened racial resistance in many localities ^{[5] [6]}.

4. Political consequences by 1968: realignment, third‑party options, and the Republican opening

Perceptions of Democrats as the integrationist party helped unlock political mobility for white Southerners: many abandoned Democratic identification during the 1960s while others defected to third‑party segregationist options (George Wallace) or began shifting toward the GOP; Republican strategists then tapped that disaffection with appeals to “states’ rights,” “law and order,” and coded racial messaging — a pattern identified in accounts of the Southern strategy and in voting outcomes such as Republican inroads from 1964 onward and Nixon’s 1968 campaign ^{[4] [6] [7]}.

5. Alternative explanations and scholarly caveats: race was central but not the only factor

Scholars stress that racial backlash to Democratic civil‑rights initiatives was a primary driver of white Southern departure from the party in the 1960s, but they also note contributing structural factors — economic development in the South, demographic changes from the Great Migration altering nationwide party coalitions, and local political dynamics — meaning the perception shift about which party promoted integration interacted with broader socioeconomic and partisan transformations rather than operating in isolation ^{[8] [9] [3]}.

6. What the data do and don’t say about 1968 specifically

Survey and archival work show the sharp change in perceptions mostly between 1960 and 1964 and then persistence of that view through the late 1960s, correlating with rising Republican performance among white Southerners and the success of candidates who exploited integration backlash; however, available sources emphasize the 1960–64 pivot as the clearest documented window and caution that voters’ subsequent choices were filtered through additional events in 1964–68 (Goldwater’s 1964 carryings of Deep South states, Wallace’s 1968 candidacy, Nixon’s appeals), so while the broad pattern into 1968 is clear, granular year‑by‑year shifts after 1964 are reconstructed mainly from election returns and campaign narratives rather than a single continuous perception series in the cited work ^{[3] [7] [6]}.