Nixon knew it what he was doing. Do you remember Lee Atwater's infamous statement?
Nixon's Southern Policy:
In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#:~:text=In American politics%2C the Southern,to racism against African Americans.
The South previously to the passage of the Civil Rightrs Bill was the Solid South for the Democrats. With the passage of the Civil Rights Bill the Republicans saw a chance to capture the South through racism, playing on the fears of we Southern white folk.
In his 1991 book, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker captures the political two-step that Nixon danced as he sought to govern and to carry out a strategy to turn the South into a Republican-dominated region as it had been a “solid Democratic South’’ for much of the twentieth century. Wicker gave Nixon credit for “a spectacular advance in desegregation’’ in 1970. “Perhaps the most significant achievement of his administration’s domestic actions,” Wicker wrote, came as “the Nixon administration had appeared in retreat from desegregation, while actively courting the white vote.”
Indeed, in his 1968 campaign and afterward, Nixon used coded language, political symbolism and court interventions as signals to southern white voters. In the aftermath of city riots in 1967 and 1968, as well as Vietnam War protests, Nixon said he was for “law and order.’’ His administration went to court to slow down school desegregation. Nixon tried to install two so-called strict-constructionist conservatives, Clement F. Haynesworth Jr. of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, on the Supreme Court, but the Senate turned down both nominees.
By his political calculation to capitalize on the racial and cultural divisions of his day, Nixon opened the gate to the political polarization of the United States in 2018. While President Donald Trump hardly emulates the furtive and nuanced Nixon, there is a direct line that runs from the Nixonian “southern strategy’’ to the Trump presidency.
https://www.southerncultures.org/article/southern-strategy-from-nixon-to-trump/
This lays out why I, a Southerner, had to leave the Republican Party.