Franklin Roosevelt knew that supporting black emancipation in the south would lose critical southern white support for the New Deal and so ignored for the most part the plight of black Americans and the horrors of lynching. During the 1950s and 1960s the coalition of black and white voters that the Democrats drew to them began to fragment as black rights advanced throughout the period. This was a key factor in the fragmentation of the New Deal's support base, which was ruthlessly exploited by Richard Nixon in 1968.

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