of what constitutes civil rights and the struggle for equality. You're right, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican because that was prior to Nixon's "Southern Strategy." MLK would have recognized how ludicrous it would have been to have been a Republican after Ronald Reagan started his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He would have recognized Reagan's references to the "welfare queen" as being the racist dogwhistle that it was.
I agree that racism is not the whole reason for right-wingers and Republicans to oppose Obama, but to fail to recognize the racist overtones in Newt Gingriches speeches just shows you're just not very attuned to what Gingrich is saying. To say that white progressives voted for Obama entirely because of his race is simply incorrect. Hillary Clinton was in favor of the Iraq War and only later changed her mind. Obama was opposed to it from the very start. There was no contest there. We wanted someone who looked at the evidence and reached the correct conclusion the first time.
Was LBJ "dragged screaming and kicking to sign the civil rights act" or did he truly believe that African-Americans were the equal of whites and that they needed to have the law of the Federal Government weigh in on their side? The 1996 piece by "one Tennesseean" very strongly suggests that the latter view is the correct one.

BTW, ThinkProgress did a nearly four-minute video on the racial politics as they've been practiced by the Republican Party for the last few weeks.