Democrats want to blame Republicans for all the atrocities against African-Americans, and for the lazy masses this argument may ring true. Unfortunately history plays the Democrats as the ones behind the slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.
For 150 years Democrats have hidden behind the policies of Congress, and recently Congress offered an apology for the actions of America, when in fact the Democrats themselves perpetrated the atrocities.
From 1792 to 1865 the Democrats through their racist agenda cited “states rights” as the contributing factor in the continued and partially expanded slavery into the Northern States. In 1854 the Republican Party was formed to combat slavery, and to champion the civil rights for blacks.
In 1861 a group of anti Civil War Democrats called “copperheads” for the poisonous snake sought to form a confederation of southern states and a negotiated agreement to keep slavery.
In 1856 Democrats instituted fugitive slavery laws, known as the “Dred Scott vs. Standford”, which legally classified slaves as property, and expanded slavery. Further laws included the Missouri Compromise, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which moved slavery into 50% of the northern states.
In 1863 anti-civil war Democrats in New York participated in what is known as the “4 days of terror” against the city’s black population.
It was President Lincoln who in 1865 issued the “Emancipation Proclamation” which was later morphed into the thirteenth amendment that was ratified by Congress and essentially ended slavery by law. As a reaction to this legislature the Southern Democrats issued state laws intended to deny blacks the same rights as whites, known as the “black codes of 1865.”
In 1866 the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party formed the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1866 the Republicans signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 in an effort to establish a new style government in the south to make laws more fair for blacks.
In 1868 and 1870 respectively the Republicans passed and ratified the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to give blacks, voting rights. As a knee jerk reaction in 1875 the Democrats passed the “Jim Crow Laws” denying blacks the same access to public facilities. Later the same year Republicans passed the “Civil Rights Act of 1875” to prevent racial discrimination in public facilities, thereby reversing the Democrats actions.
The Hayes-Tilden Act in 1877 by Republicans sought to stop the lynchings and respect the rights of blacks.
Shamefully the Democrats regained the majority in Congress and overturned the entire Republican’s anti discrimination laws. The Supreme Court even issued a ruling in the “Pleesy vs. Ferguson” case in 1896, allowing “equal but separate doctrine” which claimed it wasn’t against the Constitution to have separate public facilities. It would be 6 decades before the Republicans could regain enough power to challenge the Democrats on civil rights.
On February 12, 1909, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Republicans formed the NAACP. Republicans also started the HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), because of the Democratic actions to keep black out of colleges.
During the civil rights era of the 1960's, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. fought to stop Democrats from denying civil rights to blacks. It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican as has been affirmed by his niece, Dr. Alveda C. King.
Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t support the very party that for 100 years had sought to hurt the Republicans attempts to gain civil rights for blacks. All the racist Democrats remained Democrats until the day they died as they were known for the statement, “would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than a Republican because the Republican Party was know as the party for blacks.
Unknown at the time but the Democratic Party supported the School Board in the 1954 case of “Brown vs. The Topeka Board of Education.” Chief Justice Earl Warren (appointed by President Eisenhower) ruled in favor of Brown and thereby ended segregation in the school system. He went on to declare the 1896 “Plessy vs Ferguson” ruling violated the 14th amendment, and thereby reversed it.
Little known is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, Dirksen was instrumental in the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hailed Senator Dirksen’s “able and courageous Leadership”, and "The Chicago Defender”, the largest black-owned daily at that time, praised Senator Dirksen “for the grand manner of his generalship behind the passage of the best civil rights measures that have ever been enacted into law since Reconstruction”.
The chief opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd, a former official in the Ku Klux Klan who is still in Congress. None of these racist Democrats became Republicans.
Democrat President John F. Kennedy is also lauded as a civil rights advocate. In reality, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil rights Act while he was a senator. After he became president, John F. Kennedy opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph who was a black Republican. Dr. King criticized Kennedy for ignoring civil rights issues. This criticism was one of the reasons that Kennedy, through his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.
The fact that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican was no secret to those close to him, but the history of the oppression of blacks has been kept a carefully guarded secret among powerful Democrats. In 2007 the North Carolina Democratic Party State Executive Committee unanimously passed a resolution acknowledging the Democratic Party of 1898’s role in the bloody massacre in Wilmington in which dozens of African Americans were killed. The resolution apologized to those affected by the riots and their repercussions and renounces these actions. The Committee, comprised of more than 700 Democratic Party leaders and activists from all 100 counties, is the governing body of the Party.
As the great Paul Harvey used to say, “now you know the rest of the story.”
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.928/article_detail.asp
http://www.nationalblackrepublicans.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.DYK-Democrats%20Owe%20Blacks%20an%20Apology
