Posted on 06/26/2005 1:35:28 PM PDT by RWR8189
JUST WHO OWES lynching victims an apology?
Judging from some of the commentaries we've seen, you'd think the eight Republicans who did not cosponsor the Senate's lynching apology — including Sens. Judd Gregg and John Sununu — had all been unmasked as former Ku Klux Klan members. (The bill passed on a voice vote with no objections.) But alas, the only former Klansman in the Senate is a Democrat, which brings us to the issue at hand.
What the Senate passed last week was not an anti-lynching bill, as some have portrayed it. It was a formal apology by the U.S. Senate for the failure of previous senators to pass anti-lynching legislation. Senators who did not sign, hint Democrats, must not be all that appalled by the lynchings past senators failed to address through legislation.
As Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Andres Martinez has pointed out, anti-lynching bills often had majority support in the Senate throughout the 20th century. What stopped them from passing was not the collective action of the entire Senate, but repeated filibusters by a minority of Southern senators.
Who were those senators? They were Democrats.
While Democrats now say that every member of the Senate has to apologize for the past collective inaction of that body, no one seems to have asked the obvious question: What of the Democratic Party?
It was the Democratic Party, not the U.S. Senate, that defended the institution of slavery, passed Jim Crow laws in the South, worked hand-in-hand with the Klan to repress, murder — and, yes, lynch — black Americans, and stood in the schoolhouse door to block black progress.
According to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, "Leading Democrats supported the Klan, and the party was largely indistinguishable from it. Klansmen beat, maimed, intimidated, and even killed Republicans of both colors who challenged them at the polls, or blacks and whites who tested the bounds of white supremacy by providing education or relief to the black freedmen."
Frederick Douglass in 1892 urged all blacks to support only Republican politicians:
"In view of the great issues involved and of the dangers impending, it is sad to think that in this campaign any Negro may so act as to endanger the lives and liberties of his brothers in the South, and to also injure in the North the good name of his race. Such would certainly be the case should any support be given by him to the Democratic party — the party which has always endeavored to degrade his race — and should he refuse to support the Republican party — the party which has always endeavored to improve the conditions of his existence."
If any modern American political institution can be held responsible for the atrocities committed against blacks in the past two centuries, it surely is the Democratic Party, not the U.S. Senate as a whole or Senate Republicans as a subgroup. And yet the Democrats have spun the tables. They have masterfully shifted the blame for their own racist past onto contemporary Republican senators.
Of course, we believe that current members of an institution are not responsible for the actions or inactions of previous members. Just as current U.S. senators owe no one an apology for the behavior of past senators, current Democrats owe no apologies for the behavior of their own political forebears.
Yet the Democrats do claim that we are all accountable for the sins of our fathers. Therefore, lest they be hypocritical, they are duty bound to apologize for every horrible crime committed by the Democrats who came before them.
Until they do this, their feigned outrage at eight Republicans who believe in individual accountability cannot be taken the least bit seriously.
Wow! What can I say, the "do as I say, but don't do as I do" crowd never ceases to amaze me! History dosen't lie!
I wonder if the "Terri must die" crowd will ever apologize.
Good post. THANK YOU!
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