The Party of Racism is not what most think

This is a back-dated post inserted here to link to for future reference.

The Democrats have PR down to an art. How else do you explain the fact that Republicans are reflexively known as the Racist party that doesn't care about black people?

Let's review....

• Lincoln. - Republican. Martin Luther King Jr. - Republican.
• 1854. Democrats passed the Kansas-Nebraska act that overturned the Missouri Compromise... allowing the importing of slaves into the territories.
• After the Civil War, 23 blacks (13 ex-slaves) were elected to Congress. All as Republicans. (The first black Democrat wasn't elected to Congress until 1935.)
• Democrats opposed the "40 acres and a mule" after the Civil War. Vetoed reversed by Democrat/National Union Party President Andrew Jackson Johnson after Lincoln's assasination.
• A little lesson here... in 1867, 170 people, 150 of them black, formed the Texas Republican Party. Not the "Black" Texas Republican Party. The Texas Republican Party.
• The Emancipation Proclamation? 100% of Republicans voted for it. 23% of Democrats voted for it.
• 14th Amendment? Every voting Republican voted for it. No Democrats voted for it. (Maybe this is why they're not concerned with "equal protection").
• 15th Amendment, guaranteeing Blacks the right to vote? Same scenario as the 14th Amendment.
• In 1872 during congressional investigations, Democrats admitted creating the KKK in an effort to stop the spread of the Republican Party and to re-establish Democratic control of the southern states. Blacks, who were solidly Republican at the time, were the primary targets of the KKK's violence.
• Southern Democrats (such as Al Gore's father, Al Sr.) debated against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
• At least a majority of Democrats (64%) voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act (80% of Republicans voted for it).

There's more.

The deal is, the Republicans as a rule (far, far more than the Democrats) have been for equal treatment, and have been demonized in the past 30 or so years as being racist for not wanting to go beyond that and elevate minorities to a special status. It is not the Republicans being inconsistent. It's the Democrats buying minority votes and convincing them that they are dependent on Democrats to keep those mean Republicans from putting them back under the boot. I am not saying there are not racist Republicans, nor am I saying all Democrats are, or were, racists. Lefties can point to examples But you can't ignore the numbers and the trend over our history.

Democrats went from protecting slavery to rejecting citizenship to blacks, to actively persecuting them and then finally, after figuring that battle was lost, to pandering to them as a permanent voting block. The Democrats are perpetually buying that voting block off.

There was a discussion I had last fall with a couple of co-workers. One a Democrat transplanted here from the Northeast, the other a Missouri boy who isn’t so much a Democrat, but he did vote for our Democrat governor. He’s what I’d call center-right.

At any rate, when I pointed out the things contained in the link in my comment above, the answer came back “well, they switched roles since the 1960’s.”

I don’t buy that.

What happened is that the racists switched parties. Not because the Republicans were suddenly racists, but because A) the Democrats switched to minority advocacy where Republicans stuck to the equal treatment under the law argument, and B) people aren’t one-dimensional, and the racists had other opinions that were more conservative in nature as the Progressives gained dominance in the Democratic party.

So they have come and pitched their tents on the fringes of our camp. We can accept their support where they agree with us, but of course the vast majority of us who tend to vote with the Party of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr, the party of the first black congressmen — all ex-slaves …. those of us who have always embodied the “All Men Are Created Equal” arguemnent … are kinda stuck with them. We must make it clear to them and to our detractors that that point of view isn’t welcomed in our tent. And it’s up to us to try to change their minds. Remember, these are the holdouts whose minds we couldn’t change when they were Democrats.

And then of course there’s my own anecdotal observation that I know several fairly prominent Democrats in my county who are some of the most racist people I know.