(ThyBlackMan.com) Demographics are against the GOP, and they know it. So they’ve gotten desperate, and they’re without limits, so if they EVER regain control of this government, they’re not letting it go again, regardless to WHAT they have to do. They’re already experimenting with despotism in the state of Michigan (or what I’ve come to call, “Michighanistan”) to see what they can get away with without causing civil unrest. Gov. Rick Snyder has replaced many duly elected officials with his handpicked corporate cronies under the pretext of an economic emergency.
As a result, many citizens in the city of Detroit have absolutely no say in government, or the actions of these unelected managers. They’ve been effectively disenfranchised. After all, what sense does it make to vote if the politicians that you elect aren’t allowed to hold office? If the GOP successfully gets away with that, and then extend that policy on a national level, this will no longer be America. So it’s time for the people to turn off BET, MTV, and ESPN, and wake up.
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Retired Army General said He’s Willing to Mount A Military Assault on the White House and congress.
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Retired army general, and FOX News analysis, Paul Vallely, is quoted as telling Arizona Tea Party Patriots, “I had a call this afternoon from Idaho. The gentleman said, ‘If I give you 250,000 Marines to go to Washington, will you lead them?’” Vallely said as the group laughed and gasped. “I said, ‘Yes, I will, I’ll surround the White House and I’ll surround the Capitol building, but it’s going to take physical presence to do things.”
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That’s chilling. Why isn’t that front page news, and why is that retired general walking around free? Think about that.
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And Ron and Rand Paul and their Libertarians or nothing more than garden variety Republicans with a twist of lime to disguise the bad tasted of their Republican agenda. They are both corporate feudalists who are intent on weakening the government in order to create a vacuum of power so the most malevolent forces in society, the corporate feudalists, can step in and occupy that vacuum. They’re engaged in conventional Republicanism, but with a twist.
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The Republicans have been trying to undermine the New Deal, along with its attendant social safety net, every since it’s inception. But they’ve been unsuccessful because these programs enjoy overwhelming public support. So the Libertarians have decided to take a new tact. They are cherry-picking issues that have broad public support, like abolishing certain drug laws, and then playing on the public desire to be left alone by the government, in order to garner wider support. But what these single-issue supporters don’t realize is, once Libertarians gain power they intend to turn this nation into a corporate state, just like most other Republicans are intent upon.
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Another thing that Paul supporters are not considering is that we can control government. All we have to do is wake up, organize, and vote the right people into office. But once the corporate feudalists take over, we won’t have that option – ask the people of Michigan (Michighanistan) whose duly elected officials have been thrown out of office by Gov. Rick Snyder, and replaced with corporate cronies who have absolutely no obligation to the voters. It’s a classic scam of bait-n-switch. Take a minute to lying eyes. Here’s Libertarian liberty and democracy in action.
[youtube txU55iFG9UA]
One of the biggest problems that we have in this country is that we allow malevolent factions to throw us a bone and then use our votes to undermine our interests. The reason we allow this to happen is because we’re so gullible that we tend to believe that any faction that supports any issue that we’re passionate about is our friend, and that tendency has repeatedly been used against us. Over the years that has repeatedly caused the American people to forge alliances with the very people who want to cut their throats.
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The one factor that has contributed most to the GOP’s ability to bamboozle the American people is that the Democratic Party has allowed conservative Republicans to seize control of the political rhetoric. The Democrats have just sat back, without rebuttal, and allowed themselves, their constituency, and their agenda to be redefined in the eyes of the American people by conservative Aspin doctors.@ As a direct result, they’ve allowed the term “liberal” to become a bad word in the political lexicon.
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Actually, when we consider how methodically the conservatives went about mounting their assault on the liberal agenda you can’t help but recognize that it was a stroke of genius. Ironically, the conservatives took the Democratic Party’s primary strength, and made it a political liability. First they took the party’s penchant for being concern with the plight of the downtrodden and coined phrases such as “bleeding heart liberals” and “tax and spend Democrats.” They then played on the frustration of the middle class by tying civil rights legislation, welfare, and crime into one neat bundle as the source of middle class woes; then they attributed all of these problems to what they called the Democrat’s tendency to be ” bleeding heart liberals”. Once the connection was made between minorities, welfare, crime, and the liberal agenda, it was just a matter of repeatedly hammering the message home.
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As a direct result, the GOP and their corporate cronies have conditioned they American to ignore their own interests to vote AGAINST the interests of minorities instead – and that’s without ever considering the fact that when they vote against the interest of minorities, they’re voting against themselves as well. That’s the primary reason that the GOP has been engaged in a brutal assault on our educational system for the past thirty-five years. They don’t want thinking Americans. They directly benefit from having a nation filled with people whose intellect is easily circumvented in order to manipulate their emotions.
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And many Black voters suffer from the very same problem. Many Black people have a tendency to support poverty pimps like Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, in spite of the fact that they both have a vested interest in Black misery – in fact, they’re in the Black misery business. If Black people woke up, educated themselves, and became a viable and enlightened political force tomorrow, that would have an horrific impact on the bank accounts of both of these individuals. The only thing that’s propping Tavis Smiley up is Walmart – a member of ALEC; THE biggest enemy of Black people, and the poor and middle-class America as a whole. So if Black people became so enlightened that they didn’t allow Smiley to influence them, Walmart would no longer have any use for him, so they’d dump him, and that would effectively put him out of business.
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The same is true of Cornel West. The vast majority of his wealth was accumulated through Black misery. Because it is only our misery that allow him to go around giving $30,000 an hour speeches about how miserable we are. So do we really believe that he wants that misery to come to an end? I don’t think so. Personally, I believe that’s why he worked so hard to get George Bush elected. During the 2000 election he CLAIMED that his motive was to make the Democratic Party do more for the people, so he teamed up with Ralph Nader and helped George Bush win the election by winning the state of Florida by a mere 537 votes. Nader and West took 97,488 votes away from the Democrats, got George Bush elected, and led directly to the condition that we currently find ourselves. So could this supposedly “brilliant” man really have been so dumb that he didn’t know what he was doing? I don’t think so. Clear evidence of that is he tried to team up with Nader again in the 2012 election to do the very same thing to Obama.
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So anyone with a lick of sense, or any knowledge of history at all, should know that trusting the Republican Party to regain control of this government, and our economy, is both the moral and logical equivalent of entrusting our children to the care of a convicted child molester.
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Next, in 1923, came Calvin Coolidge, the president that Ronald Reagan is said to have most admired. Coolidge’s policies of large tax cuts, allowing business a free-rein, and his encouragement of stock speculation contributed greatly to the impending stock market crash and the great depression that was to come.
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Then in 1929 Herbert Hoover came to power. During his administration the stock market crashed, starting the great depression. In spite of the fact that by 1933 the unemployment rate was at 33.3% with 16 million people out of work, the Republican, Hoover, just sat, thinking that the economy would eventually rejuvenate itself. During Hoover’s administration 15,000 WWI veterans marched on Washington demanding that they be paid what they were owed by the government. Hoover responded by calling in federal troops to throw these ex-servicemen off government property.
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Finally in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal democrat, was elected overwhelmingly. He immediately surrounded himself with a group of the finest minds in the country, including Columbia professors Adolph A. Berle, Jr., Rexford G. Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, known at the time as the “Brain Trust.” After assembling these men and others he went about the business of developing a” New Deal” for the working class people of this country.
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The New Deal had two components — one to help the economy to recover from the effects of the great depression, and a second component to give relief to the American people and to insure that they were never be placed in a position of total destitution again. To help heal the economy Roosevelt created programs that regulated business, controlled inflation, and brought about price stabilization; to bring relief to the people he signed The National Labor Relations Act which guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining, and he created the Social Security Administration to guarantee workers some sort of income once they became too old to work. He also signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which protected workers rights and set a minimum wage for workers.
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With his New Deal in place Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this “bleeding heart liberal”, not only led this country out of the worst, Republican generated, crisis that this country has ever faced, but went on to lead the free world in victory over Hitler in WWII. He then ushered in the most sustained prosperity that the world has ever known.
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One would think that conservatives would have seen the light, but their passion to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes seems to supersede all logic. Therefore, from the moment that the New Deal went into place, conservatives have been determined to dismantle it. The closest they’ve come to succeeding started during the Reagan administration with Supply-Side Economics, or, “Reaganomics” — and the battle is currently raging in Washington D.C. as we speak.
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Supply- Side Economics was a scheme hatch by U.S.C. economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory behind Reaganomics was ostensibly, if you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would eventually “trickle down” to the rest of us. The resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George Bush, Reagan’s vice president to be, called it “voodoo economics.”
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Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put into place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than planed.
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Instead of taking the money and investing it into creating new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of these schemes, the leveraged buy out, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company’s assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost the citizens of this country its industrial base. In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19, 1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day decline since 1914 – 15 years before the Great Depression.
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And what about Ronald Reagan’s promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit? By the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender of any president, but he also added more to the deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined. And what does the Republican Party propose to do about that? One of the Republican proposals was their “contract with America,” a capitol gains tax cut — for the rich.
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Due to the continued freewheeling fiscal policies of conservative Republicans, between 1986 and 1989, spanning the presidencies of Reagan and Bush Sr., the FSLIC had to pay off all the depositors of 296 institutions with assets of over $125 billion.
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Then in 1988 Silverado Savings and Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $1.3 billion. It was headed by Neil Bush, brother of George W. The investigation alleged that he was guilty of “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest.” The issue was eventually settled out of court with Bush paying a mere $50,000 settlement.
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Then there was the Lincoln Savings and loan scandal in 1987, involving John McCain. The scandal was very similar to the one that is currently playing out on Wall Street. He was one of a group of senators dubbed “The Keating Five” involved in a scandal by the same name.
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In 1976 Charles Keating moved to Arizona to run the American Continental Corporation. In 1984, shortly after the Reagan era push to deregulate the savings and loan community, Keating bought Lincoln Savings and Loan and began to engage in highly risky investments with the depositors’ savings. In 1989 the parent company, which Keating headed, went bankrupt, and it resulted in over 21,000 investors losing their life savings. Most of the investors were elderly, and the loss amounted to about 285 million dollars.
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After having received over a million dollars from Keating in illegal campaign contributions, gifts, free trips, and other gratuities, the Keating Five–Senators John Glenn, Don Riegle, Dennis DeConini, Alan Cranston, and Sen. John McCain–attempted to intervene in the investigation into Keating’s activities by the regulators. Later, they were admonished to varying degrees by the senate for attempting to influence regulators on Keating’s behalf. Charles Keating ended up being convicted for fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, for which he received 10 years by the state court, and a 12 year sentence in federal court. After spending four and a half years in prison, his convictions were overturned. But prior to being retried, he pled guilty to a number of felonies in return for a sentence of time served.
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Then came the George W. Bush administration that caused close to a million people to die uselessly in an illegal war in Iraq, robbed the American people blind, whose fumbling ignited the longest war in American history in Afghanistan, and whose greed came very close to sending the nation into yet another depression.
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Now, after all of their repeated efforts to deplete the national treasury, they’re unanimously voting against every piece of legislation that the Democrats propose to repair the damage they created, and to bring relief to the American people. Then they have the audacity to claim that they’re doing it because they’re concerned about deficit spending.
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They’re against affordable health care for American families; they’re against any kind of spending to put Americans back to work, and they’re against extending unemployment insurance to relieve the burden of America’s unemployed. What’s particularly telling, however, is they’re also against any kind of strong legislation to prevent the financial community (them) from being able to rob the American people in the future.
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The fact is, what they really wanted was to maintain the status quo, and make damn sure that the American people remained miserable, hungry, and divided until 2012 elections so they’d have a better chance to regain power and raid the treasury again. Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, was frustrated and reckless enough to say it out loud – “Our No. 1 priority is to make this president a one-term president” – not to save America, or to bring relief to the American people, but to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Flag pens in lapels and patriotic rhetoric notwithstanding, that says it all about the GOP’s lack of concern for America, or the American people.
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Now that they’ve lost the election, their agenda has shifted to making sure that President Obama is not successful, because if he is, and you combine that with the rapidly changing demographic and Hillary Clinton’s popularity, that could spell doom for the future of the GOP – and it should, because they’re grossly out of touch with reality, and, America’s best interest. They’re out to create a corporate feudalist society. The government shutdown alone, clearly demonstrates that they have absolutely no respect for democracy.
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Partisan politics work best for those in partisan politics that the party primarily exist to serve. The fact of the matter is that both the base of the Democratic Party and the base of the Republican Party are whites, which makes you as a black an after-thought. We are thorns in the side of partisan politicians who would prefer not to deal with us, but must deal with us. That is why our voting Democrat in a 90% block doesn’t help anymore than our voting Republican 90% would. We must separate out from our partisan political affiliation and prove our logic for voting for whom we vote. We must truly vote for those who have our best interest and have demonstrated they have had our best interest not because they say they will, but because they have demonstrated they did. Until then it will still be the color of our skin and not the party that we are in that keeps us 36% lower than whites
Neither party is for us. That is the reality of it. When the Republicans have to go back to the early 1900s to prove they ‘did things for Blacks’ and the Democrats, when they had majority control, did nothing to address the key concerns for Blacks you realize like Hoodgirl said, it is about us rallying our communities around ourselves and mobilizing.
Back in the day I did an analysis of the income gap reduction under each party using that as a proxy for reduction in discrimination. This is what I found:
Date – 1967 to 1981
Disparity Decline – 3%
Percentage Decline per Year – .2%
Party in Control Majority of Congress and White House – 15 Years Democrat
Date – 1981 to 1996
Disparity Decline – 6%
Percentage Decline per Year – .4%
Party in Control of Majority of Congress and White House – 8 Years Democrat/7 Years Republican
Date – 1997 to 2003
Disparity Decline – 4%
Percentage Decline per Year – .6%
Party in Control of Majority of Congress and White House – 7 Years Republican
Now that isn’t even in what is known as “Real Wage Rates”. Some researchers have shown that the real wage gap between Blacks and Whites haven’t declined since the 60s.
At a certain point we really need to stop defending the undefendable.
You have to consider the source.
Wattree is a Pukester for the Democratic asses.
Hoodgirl,
You words are encouraging in this uncertain time.
Thanks..
@CD Smith, you’re preaching to the choir. If only more of us could stop being CHUMPS. Love me some Malcolm X even though I believe our strength is outside the political arena nestled in individualism because that’s what communities are made of.
To know oneself is to assert oneself…Competition lies within.
For the record I agree with your assessment of the Democratic Party and the contents of this Article. I spent a lot of time on a very powerful politician’s campaign and even more time in Corporate America. What I learned along the way is that people are just people but when an individual conquers self the SKY is the limit.
HoodGirl,
Was Malcolm X seeing things through rose colored glasses?
Hear what he had to say about Democrats nearly 50 years ago…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BYVv4LY_KQ
Respectfully, Wattree’s article is a bunch of half truths mixed with nonsense…
@CD Smith, many would rather wear rose colored glasses than to acknowledge the INCONVENIENT truth which is nothing but a disservice to our community.
Excerpt from: Black and Conservative
The Hidden History Of The Democratic Party
The Democrat Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1792. If you go to the Democrat Party website and look for the history of the Democrat Party ) they use 1920 as the starting point of their history. The website also claims that the Democratic Party have been the defenders of Civil Rights for 200 years; however you will see that over 128 years of Democratic Party history is missing (1792-1920) from their website?!?
What was the Democratic Party doing before 1920?
The truth is that the Democratic Party was engaged in a near relentless “persecution” of black people for nearly 128 years before 1920 and 45 years after that and they really don’t want to talk about it. Since the founding of the Democratic Party, one of its primary interests has been to protect the institution of slavery as many of its elites were slave owners. The Democratic Party has done an excellent job of hiding their pro-slavery, pro-segregation history from their most loyal voters, the black community.
It appears that many blacks have forgotten that some well-known enemies of the Dr. King (Dr. King’s father was a Republican) and the Civil Rights movement like George Wallace, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and William Fulbright were members of the Democratic Party. As a side note, in 1993, Bill Clinton awarded William Fulbright the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1965, Democratic Senator William Fulbright signed the “Southern Manifesto “ along with 99 Democrats and two Republicans in opposition to blacks being allowed full access to public places in the South.
Here are some historical facts that the Democratic Party website left out:
1. In 1789, George Washington signed the Northwest Ordinance which contained a provision to stop the spread of slavery into the federal territories. However by 1820, the Democratic controlled Congress passed the Missouri Compromise that reversed the earlier law allowing slavery in nearly half of the federal territories.
2. In 1850, the Democrats passed the Fugitive Slave Law requiring Northerners to return escaped slaves back to their masters or face huge fines. Southern slave catchers frequently used the law to kidnap free blacks and sale them into slavery. The laws threaten blacks in Free states which forced thousands of them to flee to Canada.
3. In 1854, the Democrats passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that expanded slavery into areas of the U.S where it was banned. This action ignited violent conflicts in which pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups fought for control of the area. In response to these events, the anti-slavery Democrats along with other anti-slavery groups like the Whigs and Free Soilers formed a new political party to fight the spread of slavery called the “Republican Party”.
4. In 1856, Republican Party founder Charles Sumner gave a two speech on the floor of the Senate on the evils of slavery. After the speech, pro-slavery Democrat Preston Brooks walked to the floor of the Senate and used his cane to attack Charles Sumner nearly beating him to death. The Democrats in attendance felt the beating was deserved and Brooks later declared a hero. Sumner’s injuries were so severe that he did not return to the Senate for three and half years. When Sumner returned to the Senate, his first speech was against the evils of slavery.
5.Democratic Presidents that were slave owners: Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren James K. Polk, Andrew Johnson, James Madison, James Monroe.
6. After the election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, Southern Democrats succeeded from the Union to protect their practice of slavery.
7. In 1861, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens delivered a speech entitled: “African Slavery: The Corner Stone of the Southern Confederacy” in where he defined the Southern Democrat position that the founding fathers were wrong in stating that “All men were created equal” and that natural and “moral” condition of black people was slavery.
8. After the end of the Civil War, Southern Democrats enacted the “Black Codes” to restrict the rights of newly freed blacks and to preserve the institution of slavery. In many Southern States, if a black person did not have a work contract with a plantation, they could be charged with vagrancy and be handed over to a plantation owner as an unpaid worker. The codes also prohibited blacks from owning land and weapons to defend themselves.
9. The Civil War was declared officially ended on May 9, 1965. In December of 1865, the 13th amendment to the Constitution was ratified which declared slavery forever illegal in America. Sixty-three Southern Democrats out of the eighty-two Democrats in Congress voted against 13th Amendment.
10. On July 9, 1865, the 14th amendment was signed into law by the Republicans to provide blacks equal protection under the law. Democrats in Congress unanimously voted against the enactment of this law.
11.In 1866, ex-confederate soldiers formed the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). The goal of the KKK was to use terrorism, violence and intimidation to restore Southern Democratic rule. The newly elected black Republican officials were the primary targets of the KKK along with white Republicans or anyone else that supported efforts that educate or help blacks in any way. For the next one hundred years until the mid-1960s, the KKK would remain the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party.
12. In 1868, the Democratically controlled legislature in Georgia expelled 31 elected black Republicans as they passed laws preventing blacks from holding office.
13. Democrats at their 1868 National Convention complained that civil rights laws enacted on behalf of the newly freed blacks were unconstitutional and they, the Southern Democrats, were being subjected to military despotism and “Negro” supremacy at the hands of the Radical Republicans. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK, was honored at this convention.
14. On February 25, 1870, Hiram Revels became the first black person to serve in Congress and the first black Republican Senator. Twenty three black Republicans served in Congress from (1869-1931). It wasn’t until 1935 that the Democrats elected Arthur Mitchell as the first black member of Congress. It wasn’t until 1993 that Carol Moseley Braun became the first black Democrat member of the U.S. Senate. In 2005, Barack Obama was the second black elected as a Democratic U.S. Senator.
15. All Civil Rights Bills that were passed by Congress between 1865 and 1877 were opposed by Southern Democrats. These bills contained vital protections for the newly freed blacks as they became targets of violence and intimidation in every southern state. The Democrats used the loopholes in these laws to circumvent the protections in them. When the Democrats regained political control of their state legislatures after 1876, they instituted measures in their state constitutions to neutralize black voting power in their states. They used poll taxes and literacy tests among other schemes to disqualify black voters who predominantly voted Republican. These methods were in used to control the black vote well into the 1960s.
16. Morrill Act of 1890 was passed to require states to establish a separate land grant college for blacks that were being excluded from the existing land grant college system. Many of the HBCUs were founded in response to the Second Morrill Act. The Morrill Act was sponsored by Republican Senator Justin Smith Morrill and signed into law by Abraham Lincoln.
17. On January 21, 1907, Democratic U.S Senator Ben Tillman from South Carolina argued that the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution giving black rights to due process and the right to vote should be abolished. Tillman once stated, “The black man must be subordinate or be exterminated”.
18. Demoratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), could be arguably one of the most racist presidents toward black people in American history. Prior to Woodrow Wilson’s election, blacks and whites in the federal government worked side by side. He deceived the black community into voting the Democrat ticket with promises of equal protection but once elected, Wilson instituted segregationist policies throughout the federal government. The blacks that were employed by the federal government were no longer allowed to work alongside whites. Many black employees were intimidated to resign or forced to quit. Wilson appointed Southern Democrats in positions of leadership in the federal government to help spread his racist policies.
19. In 1920, Republican James Weldon Johnson became the first black to lead NAACP. Johnson was the author of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” often referred as the “The African-American National Anthem”.
20. In 1937, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt appointed KKK member and lawyer Hugo Black to the U.S Supreme Court. Hugo Black opposed anti-lynching legislation promoted in Congress.
21.The first permanent Civil Rights Commission was established by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. This idea was initially rejected by Franklin Roosevelt. Eisenhower also passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act though it was weakened and opposed by Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to support the desegregation of the public school system.
22. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by House Republicans, 289 to 126. In the Senate, the Republicans passed the law 73 to 27. Of the 27 in the Senate that voted against , 21 were Democrat and 6 were Republicans. One of the Republicans was Barry Goldwater.
The notable Democrats that voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were :
Albert Gore, Sr.- This was Vice-President’s Al Gore’s father
J. William Fulbright- In 1993, “Bill Clinton” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, highest civilian honor
Robert Byrd – a former KKK member, served as a Democrat Senator until 2010.
This is a mere fraction of the long, racist history of oppression against black people that the Democratic Party does not want to talk about. The Republican Party on the other hand was founded to end slavery and fought to establish equal protections under the law for black people. While no political party is morally superior, the racist history of the Democratic Party must be exposed in the light of history.