It was introduced by a Republican, garnered bipartisan support, and enacted by (then governor) Ronald Reagan, with support from the NRA, with the espoused claim of "not harming a single honest citizen."
Arguably, 1967 is not today, but even to people like myself, who try my absolute damnedest to look for non-racial motives where others ascribe racially motivated malice, it looks like it was just designed to disenfranchise Black Panthers of the same 2A right as their white peers.
Here is a picture that seems, almost, to come from am alternate reality:
https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-...
"Throughout the late 1960s, the militant black nationalist group used their understanding of the finer details of California’s gun laws to underscore their political statements about the subjugation of African-Americans. In 1967, 30 members of the Black Panthers protested on the steps of the California statehouse armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols and announced, “The time has come for black people to arm themselves.”"
...
"The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions."
And it's dubious that this is true for other regulations against "assault weapons".
One is that the AWB wasn't a racist provision of the overall bill. The gun control measure was not rooted in racism.
The second is that the bill as a whole wasn't "rooted" in racism. It certainly was a bad bill that had terrible consequences, and we should undue a lot of the damage it did, but the intent of the bill was, in part, to help the black community (and it had support from many people in the black community at the time). Horribly misguided in hindsight though.
The crime bill was designed to stop the "super predators" (to quote two democrat presidential candidates). It was a racist depiction of black men. It included a provision to outlaw scary black guns. You can't really divorce the two and pretend they're not related.