Why did the South switch parties?

[RINO Tom]

What a stale topic.

Answer is for about a trillion reasons, and different White Southerners became Republicans at different times for different reasons.

[RINO Tom]

To make it simple for the small brains on this site: it was the blacks, you see.

Well, your answer sure is simple.  Too bad the topic is more interesting than that.

[RINO Tom]

There were already cracks in the "Solid South" as early as 1928. The Great Depression and the ensuing large scale public works and investment in the South prevented it from happening sooner.

Yep.  Democratic loyalty in the South ORIGINALLY mostly formed out of two things, IMO: 1) the Democrats seeming to be less in favor of civil rights legislation than their opposition and 2) agrarian populism (New Deal populism obviously reeled it right back in for a while).  As the South got less and less agrarian, it got more and more Republican (evidenced by the suburbs turning Republican well before any CRA or VRA backlash and the rural parts of the South staying loyal to Democrats longer, like Carter in 1980).  As the Republicans became less and less associated with civil rights (i.e., the line between the national parties' stances on those issues more or less disappeared), it practically doubled the trend.

[RINO Tom]

Here's my recommendation.

https://www.amazon.com/Republicans-Race-Relationship-Americans-1945-1974/dp/0700619380

^ Infinitely superior and more in-depth read.  Shatters the myth that the GOP functionally changed in terms of racial philosophy from the days of Lincoln to the days of Reagan, which is EXACTLY why it lost the Black vote.  The GOP always believed that if you just removed institutional barriers for Black Americans and allowed them the opportunity to flourish in the free market, they'd succeed, and that stance went from being considered very pro-civil rights in the days of slavery to ridiculously naive and outdated by the mid-20th Century.  It often quotes Black leaders saying they preferred the "devil they knew" (the Democrats).  If Northern Democrats are offering housing assistance, busing and VERY aggressive civil rights legislation (not to mention an economic agenda Blacks agreed with), and Republicans are out bragging about stuff they did during Reconstruction, warning that a vote for your Northern Democrat is a vote to give Southern Democrats more committee power and supporting the most basic civil rights legislation possible ("yes, we agree, the poll tax is wrong!"), why would Blacks vote GOP other than some sentimental attachment to the Party of Lincoln?

P.S.  Another super interesting anecdote from that book was that Republicans would actually aggressively initiate civil rights legislation and unanimously support it, as long as it pretty much exclusively affected Dixie (where none of its constituents were).  Once being "pro-civil rights" meant supporting busing Black kids in the North into affluent White neighborhoods (GOP Representatives had a near lock on the suburban North), notice how the party's image changed...

[RINO Tom]

The Republicans switched platforms.

Democrats switched more. During FDR time there was almost no mentioning of Black's civil rights in Democratic platform. Of course, Roosevelt's programs helped a lot of Blacks, and he himself was, undobtlely, pro-civil rights, but, as cinically this may sound, he had other (also most important) problems, which needed to be taken care of, and he needed rather solid (and even that began to decrease to the end of his term) southern support for that. Contrast  with strong (especially - by THAT time standards) Democratic civil rights platform of 1948 is VERY clear. Before 1948 few southern Democrats thought about "alternatives" (Texas "Regulars" come to mind immediately, and, yes, there was anti-Catholic Smith backlash even in 1928, but these were isolated cases), but since 1948 search for "alternatives", and gradual understanding that "Democratic party is irrevocably changed", settles in mind of white Southern elites... And long process, mostly (some conservative white counties are STILL conservative Democratic on local level) completed by now, began..

LOL, I think he posted that as a joke.

At least I hope, I've never taken him as stupid before!