Posted on 01/15/2009 3:05:31 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
On this day in 1901, the Alabama Democratic Party called for a convention to write a new state constitution that would prohibit African-Americans from voting. Despite vocal opposition from Booker T. Washington and other Republican civil rights activists, the Democrat scam succeeded.
Democrats dominated Alabama's 1901 constitutional convention, and its chairman was a Democrat. In his opening address, he said:
"If we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law -- not by force or fraud... The negro is descended from a race lowest in intelligence and moral precepts of all the races of men."
Alabama's African-American citizens would not vote in appreciable numbers again until the 1950s. It was a Republican federal judge, Frank Johnson, who in 1956 ruled in favor of Rosa Parks and who in 1965 ordered the Democrat governor, George Wallace, to permit Martin Luther King's voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Condoleezza Rice said:
"The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."
Democrats do not want Americans to remember that Republicans supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act much more than did the Democrats.
Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the country. He is the author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party, cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision. Each day, the Grand Old Partisan blog celebrates 155 years of Republican heroes and heroics. See www.RepublicanBasics.com for more information.
I don’t think the Alabama Democrats or anyone else in 1901 had ever heard of “African Americans”. The sooner we drop this ridiculous appellation, the better off we all will be.
Yes, it is a wretched neologism. At the risk of sounding as if a hopeless provincial, notice there is no equivalent appelation other than lower-case “whites”. European-American, for example.
Hyphenation is always suspect, then.
Racial equality stems from individual freedoms, a tenant of the Republican party (the old Republican party). Why have we been silent while the Democrats have re-written history, hijacked Lincoln’s legacy and painted the Republicans as bigots?
I think a lot of the problem is that Republicans are better at knowing what we are against than what we're for and have been for since the founding of the party. It's well and good to be against the Democrats because there's a lot that Dems are for that we should be against, but that's only half the battle. We need to be just as much for Lincoln and Sumner's ideas of universal individual liberty as we are against the Democrats' freedom-eroding, special interest, us against them policies.
Well said.
The true history drives the leftists mad. On Mr. Zak’s Grand Old Partisan site, there’s an interesting discussion between Zak and a leftist who sees red over a similar exposing of the Democrats sad racial history. It’s rather humorous but more sad that some will not open their eyes to the true past.
Southern Democrats, other black activists, Kennedy/Johnson’s FBI, and angry, cuckolded husbands, they were all King’s enemies.
And in 1960, before the general election, MLK, Sr. became a Democrat and never looked back. Unfortunately, this discussion that comes up from time to time has been riddled with inaccuracies, and I think we’d be better off directing our energies elsewhere.
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