ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” story. It is an editorial by the editor.

One terrific example of fake news, or deliberately misappropriating history, is the pesky and persistent Facebook meme about Democrats being a more racist party than Republicans. What makes it live a longer than deserved life in pseudo-political cyberspace discourse is that it’s half true.

As a lifelong student of history who majored in the subject in college and who used it extensively almost daily as a journalist since then, I acknowledge that 150 years ago the Democratic Party indeed was racist. I offer no argument to the assertions of this meme that no Democrats supported the constitutional amendments to outlaw slavery and provide for equal rights under the law to African American men.

That was during the Civil War. That was then, this is now. If people can change, so can political parties.

Those who perpetuate this very misleading argument want the unwary reader to believe the same conditions hold true today. They seem to want their audience to believe nothing has changed, though nothing could be further than the truth.

The Republican Party, under Abraham Lincoln, was the one that freed the slaves, but since that noble act it has done very little on behalf of minorities. In fact, over time the GOP seems to have joined the other side.

To be sure, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century were still somewhat friendly to black people. One Republican, Senator Robert M. LaFollete of Wisconsin, was a genuine progressive. Furthermore, Woodrow Wilson was a horribly racist Democratic president and the party was overrun by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s as badly as the GOP is overrun today by the Flat Earth Society Christian Right.

Things began to change with the presidential election of 1928, when Democrat Al Smith became the standard bearer despite the fact he was Catholic, much to the chagrin of the KKK. Things got even worse for Republicans in 1932 with the landslide victory of Franklin DeLeano Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression, and blacks began to see FDR’s policies as more palatable than that of Republicans, the party of business.

To be sure again, the South remained a Democratic stronghold for decades afterward. The private commentary in those days was, “The only people who vote Republican are ‘Ns’ and damn fools.” It was the Dems who perpetuated Jim Crow and “separate, but equal” drinking fountains.

We saw the last vestiges of the Solid Democratic South in the late 1960s and early 1970s with Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia and Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.

The biggest turning point came in the presidential election of 1964, when the solid Democratic South flipped to the Republicans not long after Lyndon Johnson shepherded the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law. Johnson was rumored after its passage to have declared the Democratic Party would lose the South for a generation.

The GOP now dominates the South politically, and it has the upper hand in flyover America, in the breadbasket, in the Bible belt.

What happened over those 150 years was that the two parties switched sides on the issue of championing the rights of minorities and black people. The Republican Party, over that time became the party of business and old white men. The Democratic Party became the party of working people and unions.

Things have changed even further since then. The GOP has taken in the religious right since the late 1970s and the Dems have picked up a lot of Wall Street dollars, thanks to the Clintons and Barack Obama.

I’ve actually developed a disliking for both parties that play their self-serving roles in a rigged system against workaday stiffs. Through skillful marketing and advertising they can get the unwashed masses to be misled, distracted and manipulated via emotions. There are many times I want to shout, “A pox on both of your houses!”

But I’m sick and tired of misappropriating history to continue the myth, the fake news, that Democrats are still the party of the KKK while the GOP champions African Americans. It’s a baldfaced dirty lie.