In the 1940s,
Byrd obtained the Klan rank of “Exalted Cyclops” and spent decades promoting
their vile, racist message. He took part in what was – at the time – the
longest filibuster ever against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
As Byrd once
announced:
“I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side … Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
“Senator Byrd was a man of surpassing eloquence and nobility.” And, “It
is almost impossible to imagine the United States Senate without Robert Byrd.
He was not only its longest serving member. He was its heart, its soul, and
it’s historian.”
Why does
Hillary Clinton get a pass for her friendship with a former, high-ranking KKK
member?
______________
It was a major
unforced error. Coming from a woman who has
reportedly received $20,000 in contributions from KKK members in recent months,
her attempt to tie Trump to the Klan can only serve to discredit her and to draw
attention to the Democratic Party’s sordid racial history.
When asked by
reporters about his reaction to the Duke endorsement, Trump replied, “I didn’t even know he endorsed me. David Duke endorsed me? Okay, all right. I disavow, okay?”
His response
was a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s warm embrace of the late Senate
Majority Leader Robert Byrd (D-WV) upon his death on June 10, 2010.
On that occasion, Clinton heaped praise on the former Grand
Kleagle of the West Virginia KKK, saying, “Senator Byrd was a man of surpassing
eloquence and nobility... It is almost
impossible to imagine the United States Senate without Robert Byrd. He was not just its longest-serving member;
he was its heart and soul.
“From my
first day in the Senate, I sought out his guidance, and he was always generous
with his time and his wisdom. I admired
his tireless advocacy for his constituents, his fierce defense of the
Constitution and the traditions of the Senate, and his passion for government
that improves the lives of the people it serves…”
She
concluded by saying, “Robert Byrd led by the power of his example, and he made
all of us who had the honor of serving as his colleagues better public servants
and better citizens. After more than
five decades of service, he has left an indelible imprint on the Senate, on
West Virginia, and on our nation. We
will not see his like again.”
Coming from a woman who sees
herself as the “champion” of the poor and underprivileged, her endorsement was overly
generous for a man who had once recruited some 150 of his friends and acquaintances
to create a new chapter of the Ku Klux Klan
in Sophia, West Virginia.
As Clinton
attempted to tie Trump to former Klansman David Duke, it was learned that another
prominent Klan leader, Will Quigg, Grand Dragon of a California branch of the
KKK, has raised some $20,000 for the Clinton campaign and that the Klan is
officially endorsing her for the presidency.
News reports
tell us that, shortly after participating in a giant cross burning in Georgia,
Quigg submitted to an interview with Vocativ, a highly-respected media technology
company. In that interview, Quigg is
quoted as saying, “She is
friends with the Klan. A lot of people
don’t realize that… For the KKK,
Clinton is our choice.”
If David
Duke is, or was, a Klansman, he must have been a very lonely man because the
KKK is, was, and always has been an all-Democrat organization. Because the Republican Party was born in 1854
as an anti-slavery party, white Republicans were never welcome in the Klan.
However, since
Hillary Clinton has introduced the Klan into the 2016 presidential campaign, I
have taken the opportunity to review my copy of The Lynching Calendar, compiled largely from Tuskegee Institute
records and various news archives by autopsis.org.
Turning the
119 pages of The Lynching Calendar is
a most troubling experience. Each of
those pages contains names, places, and dates associated with at least 25, sometimes
hundreds, of atrocities in which blacks and white Republicans were violently
murdered by the Klan.
Looking at page
after page of those names, it is impossible to imagine the horrors they experienced. And while nearly half of the 6,613 victims listed
were blacks and white Republicans, all identified by name, some 3,690 are
described only as “unidentified” black men, women, children, and infants.
Those
lynched during that sad period in American history included farm workers, sharecroppers,
U.S. military personnel, members of Congress, state legislators, judges, prosecutors,
medical doctors, clergymen, city and county elected officials, federal
marshals, sheriffs, police officers, and militiamen. Nor did Klansmen discriminate by age or
gender. They lynched men, women, children,
and the elderly. At times they lynched
entire families.
In the days
and weeks following the Orlando, Florida, night club killings of June 11, 2016,
in which a lone Islamic terrorist murdered 49 people, many members of the
mainstream media described the terror attack as one of the greatest, if not the
greatest, mass murders in U.S. history.
They failed
to recall that, in October 1868, Klansmen murdered 63 African Americans in New
Orleans, Louisiana, some 200 in St. Landry Parish, 162 in Bossier Parish, and
42 in Caddo Parish, Louisiana.
They also
failed to mention that, during the months of May and July, 1917, Democrat
Klansmen murdered some 130 black citizens of East St. Louis, Illinois.
They failed to report that on October 1-2,
1919, the Klan murdered some 200 blacks in a mass killing in Elaine,
Arkansas.
And they failed to report that,
on May 31, 1921, some 150 blacks were killed in a major race riot in Tulsa,
Oklahoma.
But of all
the murders committed by partisan Democrats in the 100 year period between 1865
and 1965, one of the most gruesome atrocities occurred in Valdosta, Georgia, on
May 17, 1918.
On that day a
black woman named Mary Turner announced that she would see to it that the white
men who had lynched her husband would be prosecuted. Turner was nine months pregnant at the
time. She was dragged from her home,
tortured, and hanged.
And while she
was still alive, dangling from the rope, they slashed open her abdomen. Her unborn child spilled out onto the ground
where they crushed the baby’s skull with the heel of a boot.
Mary
Turner’s mistake was that she thought the rule of law was available to
her. She became a threat to the white
Democrats who had lynched her husband and she paid for it with her life and the
life of her child.
In the years immediately following the
Civil War, Democrat-controlled legislatures in the South enacted Jim Crow laws,
supplementing the Black Codes that had been in force since colonial days.
The Jim
Crow laws and the Black Codes dictated where and for whom blacks could work,
where they could live, where they could eat and sleep, which restrooms and
drinking fountains they could use, and where they were allowed to sit in movie
theaters and on trains and busses.
The Black
Codes and the Jim Crow laws were overturned with the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.
But even
then, passage of the Act required the strong support of Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Democrats
voted 153-41 (63%) in favor of the bill, while Republicans voted 136-35 (80%)
in favor of the bill. In the Senate, the
bill was approved by Democrats by a vote of 46-21 (67%), while Republicans
voted 27-6 (82%) on final passage.
It is
interesting to note that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was essentially identical,
word for word, to the Republicans’ Civil Rights Act of 1875, which Democrats
had declared unconstitutional when they gained control of the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1883.
Mrs. Clinton
might also wish to consult her husband on the question of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, since both of his political mentors, Senators J. William Fulbright
(D-AR) and John McClellan (D-AR), along with Senator Al Gore, Sr. (D-TN),
opposed passage of the Act in the Senate.
In fact, Senators Fulbright and Gore participated in a filibuster
designed to prevent its passage.
Demonstrating that he was no less fond of
segregationists than his wife, Bill Clinton said on June 5, 1996, at a White
House dinner honoring the memory of Senator Fulbright, “Hillary and I
have looked forward for some time to celebrating this 50th anniversary
of the Fulbright Program, to honor the dream and legacy of a great American, a
citizen of the world, a native of my home state and my mentor and friend,
Senator Fulbright.”
By attempting
to tie Donald Trump to the KKK, citing the David Duke endorsement, Hillary
Clinton is merely employing one of the favorite ploys in the Democrat Party
playbook… i.e., to always accuse Republicans of doing that which Democrats,
themselves, are doing.
For example,
during U.S. Senate debate on The Repeal Act of 1894, Democrats gave strong
support to a provision in the law that would have removed all federal marshals stationed
across the South to guarantee voting rights and other civil rights for blacks. Just before the final vote on February 7,
1894, Senator George Hoar (R-MA) threw down the following challenge to
Democrats:
“Mr. President, this is a question of fraud
or no fraud… If you will produce me a
citizen of the United States, a Democrat,
who lost his honest vote in consequence of intimidation or impediment created
by these United States marshals, I will find on record here the proof of ten
thousand Republicans who have lost their votes by Democratic practices….
“Mr. President, the nation must protect its
own. Every citizen whose right is
imperiled, if he be but one, when it is a right of national citizenship and a
right conferred and enjoyed under the Constitution of the United States, has
the right to demand for its protection the entire force of the United States
until the Army has spent its last man and the Navy fired its last gun. Most of us have nothing else than the right
to vote…. The urn in which the American
casts his ballot ought to be, aye, and it shall be, as sacred as a sacramental
vessel.”
In the 122
years, 7 months, and 3 days since Senator Hoar threw down that gauntlet, no
Democrat has had the courage to take up his challenge.
Perhaps it’s
time for Republicans in 2016 to renew that challenge.
For every
Republican Klan member Democrats can identify, Republicans will produce a
thousand Democratic Klan members.
And since
Barack Obama is so fond of apology tours, perhaps he could be persuaded to spend
his remaining days in office apologizing for the thousands of African Americans
and white Republicans systematically murdered by members of his party. It’s time to “pin the tail on the donkey.”
Paul R. Hollrah is a retired
government relations executive and a two-time member of the U.S. Electoral
College. He currently lives and writes
among the hills and lakes of northeast Oklahoma’s Green Country.
____________
The
Democratic Party was sued by Wayne Perryman for that party's 200-year history of racism and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court.
In his
lawsuit, Perryman describes in detail how the Democratic Party became known as
the "Party of White Supremacy" and fought to preserve slavery,
started the Ku Klux Klan to kill Republicans (black and white), enacted discriminatory laws to deny civil rights to blacks and fought against the civil rights laws of the 1860s and 1960s.
Perryman also wrote a book called “Whites, Blacks and Racist Democrats: The Untold Story of Race & Politics Within the Democratic Party from 1792-2009.”
As author Michael Scheuer wrote, the
Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation
and now socialism.
See "The Black-O-Scope Show" videos for a visual presentation of the sordid history and current failed socialist policies of the Democratic Party that have caused great harm to black Americans.
