George W. Bush’s presence at the ceremony was particularly grotesque. The president’s career is closely associated with those who opposed the civil rights movement, including his own father. In his unsuccessful election campaign for the Senate in 1964, George Herbert Walker Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act enacted that year, denouncing Texas’ Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough as an “extremist” and “left-wing demagogue” for supporting the federal legislation that outlawed racial segregation.
The modern-day Republican Party is the product of a conscious appeal to win segregationist votes in the 1960s, after the national leadership of the Democratic Party—which had long been the party of Jim Crow in the South—moved to support civil rights legislation. Leading figures of the Republican Party today, such as Georgia Congressman Bob Barr and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, have close and public ties to white supremacist organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens.
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In a clear reference to Bush’s attack on civil liberties former president Jimmy Carter noted that the Kings had been the target of “secret government wiretapping” and that the “color on the faces” of the victims of Hurricane Katrina had shown that the struggle for civil rights had not been completed.

The underlying political tensions within the ruling elite were highlighted when Carter deliberately refused to shake the Republican president’s hand.

It is a good article and does not spare the Democrats either.