Civil Rights History Summation



Photo: Republican President Abraham Lincoln

The Republican Party – From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.

The Democratic Party – As author Michael Scheuer stated, the Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s:  slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism. 

Democrats enacted Fugitive Slave laws to keep blacks from escaping from plantations and instigated the 1856 Dred Scott decision which legally classified blacks as property.
Democrats pushed to pass the Missouri Compromise to spread slavery into 50% of the new states. 
Democrats also pushed to achieve passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that was designed to spread slavery into all of the new states.
Democrats formed the Confederacy, seceded from the Union and fought a Civil War (1861 to 1865) to keep blacks in slavery. Over 300,000 white Republicans were killed to free blacks from slavery.
After the Civil War, Republicans amended the US Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment).
Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860's, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks.
If the Democrats had left blacks alone at this moment in history, our nation would not be faced with racial divisiveness today.  Instead, Democrats set for themselves the horrendous task of keeping blacks in virtual slavery.
In the book "A Short History of Reconstruction", renowned historian, Dr. Eric Foner, revealed that the Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan in 1866 to kill Republicans, black and white. Over 3,000 Republicans were killed, 1,000 of whom were white and 2,000 were black Republicans.
The Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877 was an attempt by Republicans to end the presidential election stalemate, as well as get the Democrats to stop the lynchings and respect the rights of blacks. Contrary to popular belief, President Rutherford Hayes did not remove the last federal troops from the South, but merely ordered federal troops surrounding the South Carolina and Louisiana statehouses to return to their barracks.
After they took control of Congress in 1892, Democrats passed the Repeal Act of 1894 that overturned civil rights legislation passed by the Republicans, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. It took Republicans nearly six decades to finally achieve passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The Modern Civil Rights Era – Democrats fought against civil rights in the 1950’s and 1960’s
Democrat Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor in Birmingham let loose vicious dogs and turned skin-burning fire hoses on black civil rights demonstrators.

Democrat Georgia Governor Lester Maddox famously brandished ax handles to prevent blacks from patronizing his restaurant.

In 1954, Democrat Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus tried to prevent desegregation of a Little Rock public school.

Democrat Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama schoolhouse in 1963 and thundered, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, a former “Keagle” (Recruiter) in the Ku Klux Klan remained a Democrat until he died in 2010. He was a prominent leader in the Democrat-controlled Congress where he was honored by his fellow Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate.”


Byrd was a fierce opponent of desegregating the military and complained in one letter:

“I would rather die a thousand times and see old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen of the wilds.”
All of these racist Democrats remained Democrats until death.


Republican President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools.
Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court which resulted in the famous 1954 “Brown v. Topeka Board of Education” decision that ended school segregation and the “separate but equal” doctrine created by the 1896 “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision.


Behind closed doors, President Johnson said: “These Negroes, they’re getting uppity these days. That’s a problem for us, since they got something now they never had before.  The political pull to back up their upityness. Now, we’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to give them a little something. Just enough to quiet them down, but not enough to make a difference. If we don’t move at all, their allies will line up against us. And there’ll be no way to stop them.  It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”
Democrat President John F. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Senator Al Gore, Sr. After he became president, Kennedy opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, a black Republican.
President 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. 




Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Never Wrote An Autobiography

“The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.” was written by Professor Clayborne Carson, not Dr. King, and was first published in 1998, 30 years after Dr. King was killed.  Dr. King never wrote an autobiography. 
Notice the words on the bottom of the cover that read, “Edited by Clayborne Carson.”  This is a clever attempt to disguise the fact that the book was not written by Dr. King.
In reality, the King estate commissioned Carson to write a book about Dr. King.  It should have been written as a biography.  Instead, Carson chose to write the book in the first person, as if he, Carson, were Dr. King.  It is hard to determine what is fact in the book and what is conjecture or educated guessing by Carson, a liberal professor of history at Stanford University and the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.





Republican Senator Everett Dirksen Championed Civil Rights In the 1960s
Little known by many today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

In fact, Dirksen was instrumental to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968.  Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing.

The chief opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd who filibustered against the bill for 14 straight hours before the final vote. President Johnson could not have achieved passage of the civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.
Ignored are the facts that Barry Goldwater was a life member of the NAACP and voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act on Constitutional grounds because he wanted the law to pass Constitutional muster.
 

After decades of Democrats trying to lure blacks away from the Republican Party with handouts, the major switch occurred in the 1960s. At that time, blacks were wrongly convinced that John F. Kennedy got Dr. King out of jail. In reality, Kennedy merely made a call to King’s wife, Coretta. The King family friend and Kennedy civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford, orchestrated King’s release from jail. This revelation is  in Wofford’s book “Of Kennedys and Kings” on pages 14-23.

Kennedy was at first upset about King’s release from jail because he thought it would make him lose the Southern vote. He later claimed credit after being told he could benefit politically. Nixon, a Republican, knew he would be ignored if he made a call to the jail in a state controlled by Democrats.

Nixon's "Southern Strategy" Was Not An Appeal To Racism 
Photo: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Republican President Richard Nixon who voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act
Democrats condemn Republican President Richard Nixon for his so-called “Southern Strategy.”
These same Democrats expressed no concern when the racially segregated South voted solidly for Democrats for over 100 years, while deriding Republicans because of the thirty-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party.
The "Southern Strategy” that began in the 1970’s  was an effort by Nixon to get fair-minded people in the South to stop discriminating against blacks and vote for the more racially tolerant Republican Party. Georgia did not switch until 2004, and Louisiana was controlled by Democrats until the election of Republican Bobby Jindal, a person of color, as governor in 2007.
As the co-architect of Nixon's "Southern Strategy", Pat Buchanan provided a first-hand account of the origin and intent of that strategy in a 2002 article posted on the Internet.  Buchanan wrote that Nixon declared that the Republican Party would be built on a foundation of states’ rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense. Nixon said he would leave it to the Democratic Party to squeeze the last ounce of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.

Nixon Started Affirmative Action Implementation

Photo: Fletcher meets with former President George H. W. Bush at the White House
The enforcement of affirmative action began with Richard Nixon‘s 1969 Philadelphia Plan. The plan was crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher who became known as “the father of affirmative action”. It was merit-based and set the nation‘s first goals and timetables. 
Affirmative action was designed to ensure "equal" opportunity for blacks. Democrats turned affirmative action into an unfair and divisive quota system they call "equity."
Nixon was also responsible for the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1970’s.
Notably, Fletcher, as president of the United Negro College Fund, coined the phrase “the mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Fletcher was also one of the original nine plaintiffs in the famous “Brown v. Topeka Board of Education”.  Fletcher briefly pursued a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1995.
Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system that even most blacks do not support, affirmative action was pushed by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson kicked almost all blacks out of federal government jobs after he was elected in 1912.

Also, while Wilson was president and Congress was controlled by the Democrats, more discriminatory bills were introduced in Congress than ever before in our nation’s history.
View the article that was published by the editors of “The New York Times,” entitled “The Case Against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton” which acknowledges the truth about the liberals’ progressive icon, Woodrow Wilson.
See the article in Salon about how Princeton has whitewashed Woodrow Wilson for decades.  Also see the article in VOX entitled “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time.”
Republican President Ronald Reagan Made MLK's Birthday A Holiday
 
On November 2, 1983, Republican President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in the White House Rose Garden making the Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a national holiday. 

The bill first came up for a vote in 1979, but the Democrat-controlled US House of Representatives refused to pass the legislation.

The first national celebration of the holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took place on January 20, 1986 and is celebrated on the 3rd Monday in January. 
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission with the mission of overseeing the observance of the MLK holiday was created in the bill signed by Reagan.


In May 1989, Coretta Scott King was made a member of the commission for life by Republican President George H. W. Bush.
The Democratic Party Was Sued For Their 200-Year History of Racism
The roots of modern-day racism are planted firmly in the Democratic Party. Democrats first used terrorism and discriminatory laws to stop blacks from voting for Republicans.
Now Democrats use deception and discriminatory social "equity" programs that trap blacks in poverty to keep blacks from voting for Republicans.
The Democratic Party was sued for their 200-year history of racism by Rev. Wayne Perryman and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Unable to lie under oath, Democrats admitted their racist past in court. A copy of the lawsuit is included in Perryman’s book “Whites, Blacks and Racist Democrats: The Untold Story of Race & Politics Within the Democratic Party from 1792-2009.”
In his book, Perryman describes how the Democratic Party became known as the "Party of White Supremacy" that fought to preserve slavery and enacted discriminatory laws to deny civil rights to blacks.
Perryman's lawsuit demanded an apology for the Democrats' history of racism based on the Democratic Party' “States Rights” claims. The Democrats admitted their racist past under oath in court, but refused to apologize because they know that they can take the black vote for granted. Democrats hired an army of lawyers and escaped being held accountable by using a legal technicality.

Democrats Should Follow The Lead of North Carolina And Apologize

The 2006 report of the Commission appointed by the Governor of North Carolina prompted the Democratic Party of North Carolina to pass a unanimous resolution in 2007 apologizing for the Democratic Party’s role in the bloody 1898 Wilmington Race Riots where dozens of black Americans were massacred.

In a letter to the North Carolina Democratic Party, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Richard H. Moore wrote: “We can no longer ignore the fact that many of us grew up being taught a much sanitized – and inaccurate – history….  The truth is ugly.”  

If we, as a nation, are to heal our racial wounds, move beyond racial divisiveness and assure economic prosperity for blacks, we must first hold the Democratic Party accountable and demand an apology for the harm that party has inflicted on black Americans.
Until the Democratic Party is held accountable for it's racism, Democrats will continue to fan the flames of racism, as they have done for over 200 years, for partisan political gain.
When Democrats are confronted about their racist past, they claim that “the parties switched sides.” It does not make sense to believe that, after Republicans spent over 150 years fighting for black civil rights and won, all of a sudden they stood up, crossed the aisle and switched sides with the Democrats. In fact, the racist Democrats declared that they would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than vote for a Republican, because the Republican Party was, and still is, the party for blacks.
See the article "The Parties Did Not Switch Sides on Racism" which contains the article "The Party of Civil Rights" by Kevin Williamson. 
The Myth of Voter Suppression By Republicans
Every election cycle, Democrats try to deceive blacks by claiming falsely that Republicans engage in “voter suppression” and want to “disenfranchise” blacks, even though blacks are voting in record numbers, especially during the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
A poll found that a majority of black voters support voter ID laws.  Also, there is strong support for voter ID laws in every major demographic, including Democrats.  Voter ID laws passed in states have not resulted wholesale disenfranchisement of black voters, despite the tiresome claims of race agitators.
States that have voter ID laws provide a free ID for anyone who does not already have a government-issued photo ID.  It’s an insult to say that black Americans are too stupid to acquire an ID.  In fact, all Americans, including black Americans, must present an ID to do business in a bank, fly an airplane, get government benefits, visit the White House or vote.
Democrats have used divisive identity politics since the slavery era, first pitting whites against blacks and now vice versa for partisan political gain.
Democrats have run black communities for over 60 years and the failed socialist policies of the Democrats have ruined those neighborhoods, witness Detroit, South Chicago and Baltimore. Since President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" over $22 trillion has been wasted on poverty programs without the poverty needle moving one iota.

Socialism sounds good but has failed wherever its been tried. Capitalism sounds harsh but is the only economic system that makes it possible for poor people to climb the ladder of success. The Nazis were socialists. The word "Nazi" is the German acronym for "National German Socialist Workers' Party." Today, socialist liberal Democrats who deceptively call themselves "Progressives" control every major institution in America: mainstream media, academia, administrative government, Hollywood and big tech. So, if "systemic" racism really does exist, whose fault is it.

The Republican Party Promotes Black Prosperity


The problem with black poverty is not money – and it is not the Republican Party.
Republicans take actions at the state and federal levels to help blacks prosper.  
Republicans believe in providing a safety net for those in need who can’t help themselves, while giving a hand up to the able bodied who want to work hard to prosper.
The core socialist philosophy of the Democrats is to give people fish, so they can eat for a day. Socialism uses welfare--giving people fish--to keep blacks in poverty.
The core free enterprise capitalist philosophy of the Republicans is to teach people how to fish, so they feed themselves for a lifetime.

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure,
The creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy,
It's inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery...
-Winston Churchill
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The War on Poverty Has Cost $22 Trillion

National Center for Policy Analysis

Since the War on Poverty began under President Lyndon Johnson, welfare spending has exploded to sixteen times its original size. In a new report from the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield tackle the welfare system, explaining how spending has skyrocketed since the 1960s.

•America has spent more on welfare than defense since 1993.

•The War on Poverty has cost $22 trillion -- three times more than what the government has spent on all wars in American history.
•Federal and state governments spend $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars on America's 80 means-tested welfare programs annually.
•One-third of all Americans receive benefits from at least one welfare program.
What has the United States gotten in return for all of this spending? It hasn't led to a drop in the poverty rate, which remains close to the same level it was when the War on Poverty began. However, Rector and Sheffield point out that it's misleading to think that Americans are not better off today -- the poverty rate is measured based on income that does not include welfare transfers. They offer this example:  a household receiving $50,000 in welfare benefits would still be classified as poor if its pre-welfare income fell below the poverty line.
So, how are poor households today doing? Rector and Sheffield offer a few statistics: eighty percent of America's poor households have air conditioning, two-thirds have cable or satellite television, half have a personal computer and 43 percent have access to the internet.
Source: "Opportunity for All, Favoritism to None," Heritage Foundation, 2015.
The True Black Tragedy
By Walter E. Williams
Hustlers and people with little understanding want us to believe that today's black problems are the continuing result of a legacy of slavery, poverty and racial discrimination. The fact is that most of the social pathology seen in poor black neighborhoods is entirely new in black history. Let's look at some of it.
Today the overwhelming majority of black children are raised in single female-headed families. As early as the 1880s, three-quarters of black families were two-parent. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black families were two-parent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father.
Today's black illegitimacy rate of nearly 75 percent is also entirely new. In 1940, black illegitimacy stood at 14 percent. It had risen to 25 percent by 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" and was widely condemned as a racist. By 1980, the black illegitimacy rate had more than doubled, to 56 percent, and it has been growing since. Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
Much of today's pathology seen among many blacks is an outgrowth of the welfare state that has made self-destructive behavior less costly for the individual. Having children without the benefit of marriage is less burdensome if the mother receives housing subsidies, welfare payments and food stamps. Plus, the social stigma associated with unwed motherhood has vanished. Female-headed households, whether black or white, are a ticket for dependency and all of its associated problems. Ignored in all discussions is the fact that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994.
Black youth unemployment in some cities is over 50 percent. But high black youth unemployment is also new. In 1948, the unemployment rate for black teens was slightly less than that of their white counterparts — 9.4 percent compared with 10.2. During that same period, black youths were either just as active in the labor force or more so than white youths. Since the 1960s, both the labor force participation rate and the employment rate of black youths have fallen to what they are today. Why? Are employers more racially discriminatory today than yesteryear? Were black youths of yesteryear more skilled than whites of yesteryear? The answer to both questions is a big fat no.

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 Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism
By Shelby Steele

Liberals sell innocence from America’s past. If bigotry is pronounced dead, the racket is over.
Is America racist? It used to be that racism meant the actual enforcement of bigotry—the routine implementation of racial inequality everywhere in public and private life. Racism was a tyranny and an oppression that dehumanized—animalized—the “other.” It was a social malignancy, yet it carried the authority of natural law, as if God himself had dispassionately ordained it.
Today Americans know that active racism is no longer the greatest barrier to black and minority advancement. Since the 1960s other pathologies, even if originally generated by racism, have supplanted it. White racism did not shoot more than 4,000 people last year in Chicago. To the contrary, America for decades now—with much genuine remorse—has been recoiling from the practice of racism and has gained a firm intolerance for what it once indulged.
But Americans don’t really trust the truth of this. It sounds too self-exonerating. Talk of “structural” and “systemic” racism conditions people to think of it as inexorable, predestined. So even if bigotry and discrimination have lost much of their menace, Americans nevertheless yearn to know whether or not we are a racist people.
A staple on cable news these days is the “racial incident,” which stands as a referendum on this question. Today there is Charlottesville. Yesterday there were the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others. Don’t they reveal an irrepressible racism in American life? At the news conferences surrounding these events there are always the Al Sharpton clones, if not the man himself, ready to spin the tale of black tragedy and white bigotry.
Such people—and the American left generally—have a hunger for racism that is almost craven. The writer Walker Percy once wrote of the “sweetness at the horrid core of bad news.” It’s hard to witness the media’s oddly exhilarated reaction to, say, the death of Trayvon Martin without applying Percy’s insight. A black boy is dead. But not all is lost. It looks like racism.
What makes racism so sweet? Today it empowers. Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that. The ’60s recast racism in the national consciousness as an incontrovertible sin, the very worst of all social evils.
Suddenly America was in moral trouble. The open acknowledgment of the nation’s racist past had destroyed its moral authority, and affirming democratic principles and the rule of law was not a sufficient response. Only a strict moral accounting could restore legitimacy.
Thus, redemption—paying off the nation’s sins—became the moral imperative of a new political and cultural liberalism. President Lyndon Johnson turned redemption into a kind of activism: the Great Society, the War on Poverty, school busing, liberalized welfare policies, affirmative action, and so on.
This liberalism always projects moral idealisms (integration, social justice, diversity, inclusion, etc.) that have the ring of redemption. What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.
Here we see redemptive liberalism’s great ingenuity: It seized proprietorship over innocence itself. It took on the power to grant or deny moral legitimacy across society. Liberals were free of the past while conservatives longed to resurrect it, bigotry and all. What else could “Make America Great Again” mean? In this way redemptive liberalism reshaped the moral culture of the entire Western world with sweeping idealisms like “diversity,” which are as common today in Europe as in America.
So today there is sweetness at the news of racism because it sets off the hunt for innocence and power. Racism and bigotry generally are the great driving engines of modern American liberalism. Even a remote hint of racism can trigger a kind of moral entrepreneurism.
The “safe spaces” for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment. As minorities in these spaces languish in precious self-absorption, their white classmates, high on the idea of their own wonderful “tolerance,” whistle past the very segregated areas they are barred from.
America’s moral fall in the ’60s made innocence of the past an obsession. Thus liberalism invited people to internalize innocence, to become synonymous with it—even to fight for it as they would for an ideology. But to be innocent there must be an evil from which to be free. The liberal identity must have racism, lest it lose innocence and the power it conveys.
The great problem for conservatives is that they lack the moral glibness to compete with liberalism’s “innocence.” But today there are signs of what I have called race fatigue. People are becoming openly cynical toward the left’s moral muscling with racism. Add to this liberalism’s monumental failure to come even close to realizing any of its beautiful idealisms, and the makings of a new conservative mandate become clearer. As idealism was the left’s political edge, shouldn’t realism now be the right’s? Reality as the informing vision—and no more wrestling with innocence.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).