The despicable history of the Democratic Party in supporting slavery and the KKK must be heralded far and wide. And so also the Republican history of fighting them.
Rusty Humphries talked extensively about this book today -- and I loved every second of it. We need more of that.
I am always amazed at people who are obsessed with the history of slavery and racism yet are apparently ignorant of the fact that, for many decades, the Democrats fought tooth and nail to keep them in place while the Republicans fought to end them.
Imagine how the political landscape could change if this history were widely known.
Every member of the KKK who ever served in the US Congress was a Democrat.
Good grief, there have only been 20,000 books on this subject in the last 100 years. This article acts like its some new found revelation.
Why did you choose 1882 as your starting year?
I don’t think it matters. And most people do know this or have heard of it. It’s ironic or ‘interesting’ and nothing more, to me. When I hear it, I realize that it’s “What Democrats were at one time” and that they definitely are not that now.
Whatever the party did previously with respect to the KKK doesn’t matter when they are firmly devoted to siding with minorities, particularly blacks as they are the loudest, on every issue from affirmative action to reparations (should the latter ever get off the ground), and will stomp the head of any ‘whitey’ who gets in the way now—just in case anyone doubts their sincerity.
They have clearly evolved into the all inclusive party, regardless of whatever they were then. You don’t have to have ambition. You don’t have to prize family, English, the forefathers, the US itself or anything else: All you have to do is throw em a vote, and they’ll fight for you.
Someone should let this guy know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
There is good reason that it has not been posted and, in my opinion it should be removed immediately before someone sees it. The Republican Party is the party of Freedom and Decency but to post blatantly false information which can be easily disproved is a disservice to the Party.
An estimated 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites died at the end of KKK ropes from 1882 to 1964.
Balderdash. This was the total number of lynchings in the United States. Many were carried out by the Klan but many, probably most, were not. The numbers include 31 lynchings of Whites in Arizona while NOT ONE Black was lynched. Was this the work of the Klan? Not at all. Look here.
When we use false statistics it creates an atmosphere where everything we say can be discredited. My family has been a part of the Freedom Party since the time of Lincoln and I do not want the record sullied by some half fast "historian".
Wow, the despicable KKK is so desperate...
Maybe the wrong people are being asked to pay repriations.
One note; if anyone has read anything about Forrest. The KKK was started by him and others; and was not for the purpose the KKK eventually became. He also left the KKK when he saw what they were becoming.
Blacks have always been pawns in the political process. First as slaves and then afterward. The mostly Republican North wanted to empower them to weaken the power of the mostly democrat South. The Democrat South resisted for the same reason, political power.
However, the Democrat South has always been more faithful to the intent of the founders, more conservative. As the Communist began infiltrating the Democrat Party in the early ‘20s and became progressively stronger, reaching a high point in the 1960s, conservatives began switching parties to the Goldwater Republican Party.
The Democrats exploited the historic separation of the races with Lyndon Baines Johnson commenting about the passing of the 1964 voting rights act to his friend Richard Russel of Georgia, “That’ll keep the (N word) voting Democrat for the next 200 years.”
The fight has always been between Constitutionalist and those who wanted to bend it (a Living Document) and blacks have always been exploited by one side or another, often both.
Today, we have blatant Communism versus a free society. The Democrats are outwardly exploiting the race issue while the conservative Republicans are trying to adhere to conservative principles. However, all is politics still.
The battle has always been conservative principles, those this country was founded upon, versus “progressives” who want to exploit it for their personal ambitions. The prize is control.
Conservatives value personal individual control, letting each become what they will, and the Progressives value central collective control making each become what they want of them.
Blacks are still exploited but have now been joined by women, the “poor”, Hispanics, and any other group the Democrats can convince to become “victims.” As far as this article is concerned, Republicans should be careful about being proud as a party. As they used to say in the opening of an old TV show, “ ... only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent.”
Every time I point that out, the answer I get from libs is that those democrats are now the republicans.
My father's family fought for decades the one party Dem system in LA and Texas.
The KKK was the terrorist wing of the democrat party.
An estimated 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites died at the end of KKK ropes from 1882 to 1964.
During the height of lynch law terror, in the period from 1890 to 1910, the Ku Klux Klan did not exist. The first Klan was suppressed by Federal authorities in the early 1870s, and the second Klan was not started until 1915.
"Starting with Harry Truman, Democrats began – that is, they made their first serious efforts – to fight against the barriers of race; yet … Truman's efforts were largely unsuccessful because of his own Democratic Party."
Franklin Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practice Committee by executive order and prohibited discrimination by any Federal agency, including the military. Many of the discriminatory practices in the Federal government had been established by Woodrow Wilson in the 1910s, but were not undone in 12 years of Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover), in spite of GOP majorities in both houses of Congress during their administrations. While the black vote had been overwhelmingly Republican, it shifted to the Democrat column, in part due to the efforts of big city machine politicians who set up patronage programs for African Americans in a manner similar to what they had done for European immigrants. The New Deal also offered blacks welfare programs that appealed to their pocketbooks. By 1940, black Republicanism was moribund.
Barton's documentation said the first opponents of slavery "and the chief advocates for racial equal rights were the churches (the Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc.).
True enough. However, many churchmen, such as Episcopal bishop Leonidas Polk and Presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney, later a leader of conservative Presbyterians in the South, were strong supporters of the Confederacy. In later times, such conservative evangelicals as W. A. Criswell and Jerry Falwell defended segregation in their younger days (though both later repented for their support of segregation). Overall, the record of churches and churchmen, Protestant and Catholic, on the issues of slavery and segregation was mixed.
The article suggested a contrast with the GOP, which, when former Klansman David Duke ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 as a Republican, was "scorned" by national GOP officials.
By 1991, support for a known white supremacist was as deadly to a political career as being associated with a dead girl or a live boy, as Earl Long once put it. The record of the Republican Party with regard to the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was far from admirable. Republican state administrations in states like Maine, Indiana, and Oregon were controlled by Klansmen.
Distorting history for the sake of promoting the conservative cause is no better than the PC rewriting of history performed by liberals in academia or the entertainment business.
I know of this history. Many Freepers know of this history. Yet, Ken Mehlman, a few months before the 2006 election, gives a speech where he “admits” that Republicans have practiced racism against blacks and have a sordid history of same. So, the question now is how do you fight against idiots in your own party?
for AM read
Catholics were their targets too.
And Senator Byrd still does target Republicans today.