I can’t really find an example right now, but I’ve seen conservative tellings of the civil rights era that were along the lines of the following:
“Restaurant owners and other business owners in the southern states wanted to be able to accept black patrons (because they were businessmen after all, and the only color they cared about was green), but because of Democrat Big Government, they weren’t allowed to”
The way I recall it is that this premise was then used in support of an equivalency between Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights laws, i.e. “First they were prohibited from taking customers that they wanted, and now they’re being forced to take all customers, even ones that they don’t want”.
I’m sure this is bullshit, but honestly I don’t know enough about that part of American history to refute it, and it kind of does make intuitive sense that a restaurant owner would want as many patrons as possible. So can one of you more knowledgeable folks here debunk it?
The so-called Lost Cause of the South went through two iterations.
First is to deny the fact that the Confederacy's legacy was fundamentally about preserving slavery in order to justify the preservation of racial stratification. Slavery had been a political poison pill even before the civil war so naturally you wouldn't want it to be associated with your wholesome racial hierarchy (which you'd want since it keeps the huwhite poors in line by having them fixate on black people). Post-Civil Rights is when its purpose eventually changed as a means to try to preserve as many facets as possible of the segregated South once (overt) racism became the political poison pill.
The funny thing about the ideological superstructure is that the people pushing it for entirely cynical reasons are susceptible to eventually buy it (or at least their children or grandchildren are). Sure, you still have people even in the newer generations who understand it entirely for what it is and embrace it (Dylann Roof, those aforementioned chuds who lost it once Obama got elected) or at least keep it behind closed doors (like many interviewees in those posted articles). But there are many such instances where the Lost Cause is touted by people who are only subconsciously racist, and even might have black family members and such (something their forebears would disown if not lynch them over).