The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious Southern states that had seceded from the Union “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Robinson’s parents gave him the middle name Roosevelt in honor of Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, “who expressed disdain about racism,” Arnold Rampersad wrote in his Robinson biography, “before white supremacist power made Roosevelt retreat into conservatism.”

Branch Rickey, the white Dodgers executive who signed Robinson to a contract and became his mentor, was an ardent Republican who believed in racial equality. Robinson supported and then worked for civil rights advocate New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

“If we had one or two governors in the Deep South like Nelson Rockefeller,” King said, “many of our problems could be readily solved.”

Robinson endorsed Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president, in 1960. Nixon, who, like Robinson, was from southern California, convinced Robinson, a former UCLA athlete, that he would support civil rights.

Robinson found Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, Nixon’s opponent, “insincere” in his tepid support for civil rights.

Kennedy won the presidential election that year.

In 1964, U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona challenged Rockefeller and other more liberal Republicans for control of what the right wing called “the white man’s party.” He won the party’s presidential nomination.

Though Goldwater lost the presidential election in a landslide to Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson, he won the hearts and minds of pro-segregation Democrats, the mostly Southern politicians and their followers who had abandoned the Democratic Party when it endorsed legislation during the late ‘50s and '60s to advance civil rights and voting rights for Blacks.

Those who switched parties included U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who ran for president in 1948 as a segregationist and later filibustered for more than 24 hours to prevent passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

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