Posted on 08/28/2008 9:32:43 AM PDT by Republican Extremist
Rush just said that Britney Spears’ set designer is the one responsible for this extravaganza, and McCain already has some ads ready to go!
I read that he was a registered Republican in the 50s, I don’t recall the source, but I think it is an undisputed fact. Google is your friend, if you are the seeker of further data.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08282008...pus_126450.htm
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Republicans also founded the NAACP
Good God, this gets more and more bizarre! Can you just imagine if he wins in November? His inauguration would be more like a coronation. I can just see it being like Emperoror Commodus’ coronation in the film Gladiator, laurel wreath on his head and all.
Thanks! I have great respect for Alveda King and I’m willing to take her word on this.
But I still don’t see why anyone thinks it’s effective to tell today’s leftist Democrats that MLK was a Republican. He clearly wasn’t a conservative, no matter how he was registered. Coretta King was a regular presence at Democrat conventions for many years. Other than Alveda, who seems to be something of a maverick within the King family, the rest of the family members seem to be hardcore leftists who support pro-infanticide Obama. Surely MLK would be supporting Obama if he were alive today.
I think we’d do a lot better to highlight today’s black conservatives (including Michael Steele, who’d be a great VP choice) instead of claiming a legacy with a past leftist who may have been technically registered as a Republican, but agreed with the Dems 98% of the time.
I just saw the pics at the NY Post and my 2 thoughts were *White House* and *Lincoln Memorial*.
It's a White Castle.
Explaining that MLK was a Republican is important, because most people these days have forgotten, or never knew, the history of civil rights, or how blacks ended up being 90 percent Democrat for the past few decades. Explaining the history is helpful to convincing them to consider where their interests really lie, and to help put to an end the lie that Republicans are racists.
After the Civil War, all blacks were essentially Republican, and remained so until the New Deal. After northern troops left, Southern Dems instituted Jim Crow and enforced segregation through a reign of terror. During the New Deal, the Democrat party won over northern Blacks by essentially lying to them about civil rights while at the same time promising welfare and jobs. Northern blacks joined the Democrat coalition, and gave the Democrats the margin to overtake the GOP in national elections, given the existence of the "Solid South".
In the south, in most places, blacks couldn't vote. Those that did affiliate with a party would have naturally been with the GOP, because the people perpetuating segregation and second class status were Democrats, even after the New Deal.
What blacks need to know is that the GOP was always the party that was in favor of civil rights. No party was perfect on that score, but the worst that the GOP did might be characterized as benign neglect of the issue for most of the post-reconstruction issue. When serious problems arose, as with the wave of lynchings in the 1920s, the GOP did act, passing anti-lynching laws. In the 1950s, it was a Republican president who enforced civil rights, against a Democrat governor. Republicans in general favored civil rights, whereas southern Dems were universally against it, and Northern Dems (many of whom were blue collar laborers and competed with blacks) were split.
So, when the civil rights laws were passed in the 60s, it was with a smattering of northern Dems and nearly unanimous support of Republicans. Dems, then as now, controlled the media, and so, because it was passed with the support of a Dem President, somehow, Dems got credit for it. Republicans are not the Stupid Party for nothing.
Your introduction of conservatism is largely irrelevant to this history, because conservatism was not a part of the lexicon of Republican policy until Buckley, Goldwater and then Reagan. It was not a majority of the GOP until Reagan in the 80s, until then, it was just a wing. In the 50s, when King became politically active, the GOP was pretty liberal. They did not want to reverse the New Deal, just stop its advance, or slow it down. They were caretakers of FDR's legacy. There were liberals and moderates and a very few of what we could call in today's terms conservatives in the party. So MLK could have found himself quite comfortably in the GOP in the 1950s, and the 1960s for that matter, in spite of being a liberal. Communism, no--unlike the Dems, there was no communist wing to the GOP.
When I was a kid, there was a black Republican Senator from Massachussetts. He was a legacy of that earlier time when all blacks were Republicans because all Dems wanted blacks kept in their place.
Blacks and the GOP split over the Great Society for the most part, and because black leaders became very leftist in the 60s--anti war, anti-American, liberal on social policies, taxes. Black leaders wanted to extend their gains to include quotas, and when that proved difficult to sell, to "affirmative action". Republicans never accepted that, and the media spun that to portray Republicans as racist.
Blacks were, in the 50s and 60s, essentially conservative, except when it came to race. They, as a demographic, were pro-family, religious and desirous of advancing the standing of their families. Dem policies since then have helped to destroy the black family and have caused blacks to move leftward as a group ever since, but those blacks who come from 2 parent families and who hold jobs are well integrated into the mainstream of American society and would do well to consider whether their place is really on the Democrat plantation. Spreading knowledge of this history, including that MLK was a Republican, should be a part of the strategy to convince blacks that their interests lie with Republicans, who WANT them to succeed, not with Dems, who want them to stay as a permanent, Democrat, underclass.
Should be read far and wide
I was right.
THAT... is cool.
Might be, but it’s not true.
That’s the job of the Fruit of Obama.
That’s a thoughtful response, and I’ll comment on it tomorrow (hopefully)! I’m too disgusted with Obama to comment on anything else right now. LOL!
I appreciate the history lesson, but I assure you, I don't need it. I'm well aware of the racial history of the two major parties. At the risk of nitpicking, though, I will address your assertion that the 60’s civil rights bills passed with a “smattering” of Northern Democrat support. Actually, it was quite a bit more than a smattering. Only two non-Southern Democrats in the entire Congress (House & Senate combined) voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I suppose you could claim it was three if you count Senator Byrd, from the border state of West Virginia. He was the only Democrat Senator to oppose the bill other than the Southerners (and Byrd considered himself a Southerner). In the House, Congressmen Baring (Nevada) and Lesinski (Michigan) voted no, and they were the only non-Southern Dems to vote that way. Baring was a very conservative Dem who voted with the GOP almost all the time. Lesinski represented a white area in Detroit, and his constituents were terrified that if the civil rights bill passed, blacks would flood into their neighborhoods. They did, by the way, running pretty much all the whites out over the next few years.
Outside the South, far more Republicans voted no than Dems. And every Republican from the South voted no, except for the two Kentucky senators. It's just that there were more Dems than Republicans from the South back then, and nearly all the Southern Dems voted no.
Incidentally, there were legitimate reasons to vote against all three major civil rights bills from the 60s.
But that's quibbling over history. My main point was that it's pointless to make a big deal out of this history, or about MLK being a Republican. About thirty years ago when I was a college kid, I became very interested in politics. I would even go to the library and read the great debates from old Congressional Records. Things like the debate after Pearl Harbor or the debate over the League of Nations.
It was during this time that I saw a discussion on one of the Sunday political shows about a GOP plan to win over the black vote. One of the tactics they discussed was “reminding” blacks of all of the history you mentioned. It made sense to me then, because I was still a naive college kid. Yeah, remind the blacks that the GOP opposed slavery and supported civil rights, and that the Dems supported slavery and Jim Crow, and surely they'll wake up. But guess what? Shortly after that, I stumbled across a speech by a GOP congressman named Robsion in the Congressional Record from 1935. He was wailing over the fact that blacks had switched to the Dems, having fallen in love with the New Deal. He went on and on about slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, racist Democrats, and so on, until black Democrat Arthur Mitchell showed up. Mitchell basically told him that blacks didn't give a damn about that. They liked the New Deal, and even if the Dem party was full of racists they were still gonna vote for them. And remember, this was at a time when outright KKK guys like Bilbo and Ellender were in Congress.
The same thing happened in the 60s when the Great Society lured away the remaining few blacks who were still Republicans. In states like Mississippi, where the Democrats had used every means available to maintain segregation and to keep blacks from voting, the blacks still registered as Democrats the moment federal registrars showed up after the Voting Rights Act passed.
So it's an exercise in futility to remind blacks about the respective party histories. They switched to the Democratic Party at a time when they didn't need to be reminded. They had seen Democrat racism first hand. The marchers at Selma went and registered as Democrats immediately after being beaten and hosed by Democrats who were trying to keep them from registering.
Why did they do this? Were they stupid? Well, not really. They knew that the Southern Dems were an aberration in the party after 1932, and that if they could manage to register they'd eventually take the party away from the whites and move it to the left, which is what they did. That's why Obama’s the nominee tonight.
So reminding blacks of all this history is pointless. They take it as a matter of pride that they ousted all those segregationists and took the party away from them. We've been reminding blacks that the Dems once housed racists since poor naive Congressman Robsion ranted about it on the House floor in 1935 and our share of the black vote continues to decline. We're like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Okay, yeah, we've told blacks 3,478 times that the Dems were once racist and that MLK was a Republican, but if we do it just once more it'll work. Lucy won't pull the football away this next time.
Sorry, but it's pointless. Let's honor those brave black conservatives who support us, and stop begging to those who don't.
I also remember reading the letter from the Senate Majority Leader to the Republican Minority leader, thanking him for delivering the votes needed for passage. Or maybe it was from Johnson, I don't recall.
Anyway, even granting your point that blacks who knew the history still joined the Dems, I don't believe it means that the history is irrelevant or should not be taught. You are comparing a largely uneducated, lower class group of 50 years ago that followed the lead of its left-wing elite and who wanted the government benefits that the Democrats promised, to today's black middle class. The assimilated portion of the Black community might be open to argument on the pros and cons of the welfare state for Blacks, so long as they trust the GOP not to be a haven for racists. They now have 50 years of experience about what Democrat social policies and abortion and drugs have done to Blacks. Maybe they will want an alternative, in numbers greater than 10 percent, so long as they know how welcome they have always been.
You are correct that the Republicans were needed to pass these bills, but that's because they were needed to break the Senate filibuster, which in those days took a two-thirds vote. GOP leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois agreed to instruct his members to side with the leftist Northern Democrats in breaking the filibuster after being assured that the bill would never lead to quotas or reverse discrimination of any kind against whites. We all know how that turned out. Dirksen was also apparently convinced that if the GOP put the bill over, blacks would return to voting Republican as they did prior to the New Deal. We know how that worked out, too.
The next year, BTW, Dirksen instructed his members to vote for the Kennedy immigration bill after being “assured” by Kennedy that the proposal wouldn't change the demographic make-up of the country.
Also, I agree with you that this history isn't irrelevant and that it should be taught. I just don't think there's any political gain for us in telling an arena full of euphoric Obama supporting blacks that MLK was a Republican. They either don't care, or they regard it as ancient history, or they're smart enough to know that MLK was a leftist and his membership in the GOP was “in name only” at best. Does anyone seriously think that King would have voted for Nixon over Humphrey had he lived to vote in the November 1968 elections?
I understand the desire to correct the misperception that the GOP is “racist”. It's fine to highlight the actual record to an extent. But to keep repeating this history over and over when it obviously isn't working is time wasted that would be better spent promoting real black conservatives, rather than deceased leftist blacks who happened to maintain a GOP registration. Blacks aren't going to vote for us in 2008 because some white Democrat in 1916, or even 1965, was a KKK member.
I appreciate your willingness to debate this so politely and intelligently, BTW!
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