Free Republic

As Democrats prepare to nominate Sen. Barack Obama to be the first black president, the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Howard Dean, have whitewashed the party's horrific and lengthy record of racism. The omission is in the section of the DNC Web site that describes the party's history. The missing history raises the obvious question of whether the Democrats, unable or simply unwilling to put their party on record as taking direct responsibility for one of the worst racial crimes of the ages, will be able to run a campaign free of the racial animosities it has regularly brought...

Talk about warped priorities. The do-nothing/14 percent approval-rated Congress, led by Nancy the Navigator Pelosi, refuses to allow debate on drilling; the appropriations bills are in limbo, and judicial vacancies abound. But hey, they’ve found time to take action on that all-important apology for slavery and Jim Crow laws: The House of Representatives was poised Tuesday to pass a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for slavery and the era of Jim Crow.The nonbinding resolution, which is expected to pass, was introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, a white lawmaker who represents a majority black district in Memphis, Tennessee.While many states have apologized...

WASHINGTON -- The congressional apology for slavery, passed Tuesday, made headlines across the country and generated calls to U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen's office from newspapers and radio news outlets around the world. But in Memphis, the message was mixed, measured by more than 200 comments posted on The Commercial Appeal's Web site. Some called the measure, which Cohen introduced in the House in February 2007, an effort to pander to black voters less than 10 days before next week's Democratic primary. One of Cohen's opponents, airline lawyer Nikki Tinker, while agreeing with the resolution in principle, found the timing of...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - The House on Tuesday issued an unprecedented apology to black Americans for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws.</p> <p>"Today represents a milestone in our nation's efforts to remedy the ills of our past," said Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.</p>

WASHINGTON - The House on Tuesday issued an unprecedented apology to black Americans for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws. "Today represents a milestone in our nation's efforts to remedy the ills of our past," said Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. The resolution, passed by voice vote, was the work of Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen, the only white lawmaker to represent a majority black district. Cohen faces a formidable black challenger in a primary face-off next week.

Who's an Uncle Tom? By Bruce Walker As the Democrats' nomination process descends into the ugly area of racial politics, it may be helpful to explore and to learn about the origin of some of the equally ugly racial mockeries that have become a part of American political life. The term "Uncle Tom" was used extensively during the decade of civil rights reform to describe a black man who simply did what white people wanted. Where did this term come from? The literary reference, of course, comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the passionate and simple anti-slavery novel...

Two years ago, a liberal friend of mine told me that Republicans had introduced slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK to the United States, and that Democrats had always been champions of civil rights for Black Americans. Another friend, a successful physician, expressed surprise when I told him that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. A few weeks later, I wrote this essay to illustrate how our public schools and media had successfully reinvented American history. It remains one of my most satisfying essays and one that still generates controversy. Although I don't ordinarily respond to Daily Kos moonbats,...

The eruption of outrage, shock and fear that is flowing over Barack Obama’s campaign like hot lava because his pastor has preached some strident sermons tells us one thing for certain: Many white people don’t know black people at all. If they did, they would know that Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago is hardly the only black minister who uses the pulpit to rant against racial duplicity and injustice. The black church has always been the place for letting our hair down and speaking our peace -- a safe haven from the criminations outside. It’s how and why the black...

In his new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes a strong case for his belief that the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s. A key piece of evidence for Mr. Krugman is that Ronald Reagan gave his first speech after accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in...

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Wednesday the Senate should apologize for slavery and segregation, calling them “dark chapters in our history.” McCain said he would support a planned resolution by fellow Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, who is also seeking the presidency, to apologize for racist laws, some of which ended more than a century ago. “They were federal policies,” Brownback told the Boston Globe on Monday. “They were wrong. The only way for us to move forward . . . is at the end of the day acknowledging those, taking ownership for it, and asking for forgiveness.” McCain agreed...

Crossing the cafe, I felt the hard stares of Saudi men. A few of them stopped talking as I walked by and watched me pass. Them, too, I ignored. Finally, coffee in hand, I sank into the sumptuous lap of an overstuffed armchair. "Excuse me," hissed the voice in my ear. "You can't sit here." The man from the counter had appeared at my elbow. He was glaring. "Excuse me?" I blinked a few times. "Emmm," he drew his discomfort into a long syllable, his brows knitted. "You cannot stay here." "What? Uh … why?" Then he said it: "Men...

ORLANDO, Fla. - Walt Disney Co.'s 1946 film "Song of the South" was historic. It was Disney's first big live-action picture and produced one of the company's most famous songs _ the Oscar-winning "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." It also carries the story line of the Splash Mountain rides at its theme parks. But the movie remains hidden in the Disney archives _ never released on video in the United States and criticized as racist for its depiction of Southern plantation blacks. The film's 60th anniversary passed last year without a whisper of official rerelease, which is unusual for Disney, but President and CEO...

'Song of the South' pits art vs. cultural sensitivity http://www.charleston.net/assets/webPages/departmental/news/Stories.aspx?section=localnews&tableId=136791&pubDate=3/31/2007 http://tinyurl.com/2w5vty BY RON MENCHACA The Post and Courier Talk of a possible re-release of the 1946 Walt Disney film 'Song of the South,' which is criticized for its plantation-era depictions of blacks as the happy servants of wealthy whites, already is sparking a debate. The film was reshown in theaters as recently as 1986, but it never was released on video in the United States. Its cultural and cinematic significance have been the subject of scholarly debate for decades, and bootlegged copies of the film are popular on the black...

In both of our political parties, activists talk about fighting for the "soul of the party." Do parties have a soul? Political parties are messy things -- coalitions, fueled by people of great ambition, scarred by the corrupt and the petty, lifted by those with vision. How could they possibly be said to have a "soul"? In the fall elections, candidates will run in different ways. Some Republicans will line up with President Bush; others -- many after voting his way nearly 100 percent of the time -- will run away from him, now that his poll numbers are down....

"For the past century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has proven to be the most effective political organization ever to champion equality and human rights in the United States and around the world."-- Michael Zak This weekend marks a proud milestone for Republicans, the 150th anniversary of the first Republican National Convention. Founded in 1854, the Republicans, distinct from Democrats, grounded their party on two noble convictions: that America was truly one nation, not a polyglot of regions, races, or classes, and that American identity was based not on blood or soil, but on its founding ideal -- the dignity, worth, and...

in my never-ending pursuit of "higher education" , I'm taking a civil rights history class. does anyone know some good books on the matter of Jim Crow laws and gun rights as it pertains to the matter of US civil rights movement from the turn of the 20th century till now? I believe Kopel has a book on the subject. Also , any insights/articles about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and who voted for what and why would be appreciated. I recall something about Al Gore's pappy being a racist and know some of the history of "KKK" Byrd....

White supremacists plotted an insurrection in one North Carolina city in 1898, historians now say. RALEIGH, N.C. - As a horse-drawn machine-gun regiment fired into crowds and frightened blacks fled into the cold swamps, the dream of a Reconstructed South died on the streets of Wilmington, N.C., on Nov. 10, 1898 - more than 30 years after Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox ended the Civil War. The uprising began a day after the election in Wilmington, then North Carolina's largest city. The city's Democrats, who regained power from the Republicans, proceeded to wrest control of the government immediately....

Rosa Parks and history Oct 27, 2005 by Thomas Sowell The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? "Racism" some will say -- and there was certainly plenty of racism...

Any day now the Justice Department will render judgment on one of the single most discriminatory pieces of voting legislation of recent years: a Georgia state law requiring voters to present one of only six forms of photo identification before they can exercise their right to vote. Before enforcing this statute, Georgia must get Justice Department approval by proving that the law will not put minority voters in a worse position than they were in before the requirement was instituted. The facts surrounding Georgia's voter identification requirement cannot be disputed. Virtually every black legislator opposes the legislation, and most black...

The Voting Rights Act, whose 40th anniversary we celebrate this month, has helped minorities elect 81 sitting members of Congress and thousands of local officials. But the rally civil rights groups held in Atlanta earlier this month to push for extension of the act's key temporary provisions downplayed those gains and instead pushed wild claims that some state laws requiring an ID to vote are the functional equivalent of Jim Crow poll taxes. Both Judge Greg Mathis, the star of a syndicated courtroom TV show, and California Rep. Barbara Lee claimed that the last two presidential elections had been "stolen."...

Shari'a Swimtime Mark Steyn's latest article in The Spectator, on the western liberal idiocy of celebrating the sociopathologies of foreign cultures, reminds me of a recent Seattle incident I've been meaning to blog about: government-funded Islamic apartheid. Steyn: [quoting steyn] By pretending that all cultures are equal, multiculturalism doesn’t ‘preserve’ traditional cultures so much as sustain them in an artificial state that ensures they’ll develop bizarre pathologies and mutate into some freakish hybrid of the worst of both worlds. [end qoute] Last month there was an article in the Seattle Times on a program where city public swimming pools have...

During a discussion with minority leaders and journalists on Monday, Howard Dean declared that Republicans are “a pretty monolithic party. They all believe the same. They all look the same. It’s pretty much a white Christian party.” He further stated that “the Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people” and Democrats are “more welcoming to different folks, because that’s the type of people we are.” Dean continued to defend his remarks as recently as Thursday. Dean’s comments clearly suggest that the GOP is, if not hostile to a demographic broader than white Christians, at least cool toward...

Tell me What I Say Department The Lord condones Retaliation and Divorce! "Hang all the Law and the Prophets." -- Jesus of Nazareth. We are forever in debt to Dr. diLorenzo. In his efforts to show that Lincoln was actually a not-so-crypto commie, he has provided us with a new exegetical technique which sheds light on, well, on just about everything! The left wing of the Supreme Court will soon be using diLorenzian interpretation to show that the Constitution mandates ex post facto law when it states, "Ex post facto law shall be passed." (It's in there, believe us: Article...

3/7/2005 GOP senator Graham rankles some over comments on Lincoln By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor Senator Lindsey Graham has ignited a new furor in Washington over comments he made over the weekend referring to his state’s difficulty in “getting over” President Abraham Lincoln, with apparent reference to Lincoln’s role in the civil war and the freeing of American slaves, RAW STORY has learned. “We don’t do Lincoln Day Dinners in South Carolina,” Senator Graham told a Lincoln Day gathering in Tennessee Saturday. “It’s nothing personal, but it takes awhile to get over things.” According to a Knoxville News...

Group trying to block building name change: NASHVILLE, Tennessee -- A state appeals court heard arguments Wednesday over whether Vanderbilt University can remove the word "Confederate" from a dormitory the United Daughters of the Confederacy helped build in the 1930s. The Tennessee chapter of the group claims the university's effort to drop the first word from Confederate Memorial Hall violates decades-old contracts, but Vanderbilt claims the contracts are no longer valid. The judges, who did not say when they will issue a ruling, had strong words for both sides. "You're arguing social values and making the courts be the tough...

This was a CSPAN televised event given by someone who has written the only book on this subject.

Bush Administration Files Another Partial-Birth Abortion Lawsuit Brief Email this article Printer friendly page by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com Editor February 12, 2005 Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The Bush administration on Friday filed another brief defending the federal ban on partial-birth abortions. The brief comes in an appeal of a Nebraska judge's decision overturning the ban in one of three lawsuits filed against it by abortion advocates.The brief is part of an appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging a September ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf saying the ban was too vague and would prohibit other types of abortions.The...

John Kerry's Jim Crow America... "The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigated these allegations over a six-month period beginning in January 2001. Its 200-page majority report, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election, excoriates Florida's election officials for various acts of misfeasance. But the conclusions drawn by the report often bore little relationship to the facts contained therein. And media descriptions of the report did little to dispel the widespread belief among the black electorate that blacks had been systematically targeted for harassment, intimidation, and disenfranchisement."

Review of Unfounded Loyalty by Robert Oliver (thechicagocommunicator.blogspot.com) Unfounded Loyalty: An In-Depth Look Into The Love Affair Between Blacks and the Democratic Party Wayne Perryman (www.wayneperryman.com) Lantham, MD: PNEUMA Life Publishing, 2003 198 pp. $23.50 ISBN 1-562290-7-38 “Why are most Blacks in America Democrat?” asked a group of inner-city young people to Rev. Wayne Perryman of Seattle, Washington. Perryman replied, “Because Democrats have done the most for Black people.” They asked him for material find out exactly what the Democrats have done for Blacks. Perryman did not have any material to give them. He said, “I could see I would...

State GOP historically diverse By Sen. Charles Ford Leading Democrats and their pundits attempt to divide Oklahomans by painting a picture of elitism, exclusiveness and white male dominance among Republicans while promoting themselves as the party that embraces women and minorities. The notion that Republicans are anti-woman and anti-minority could not be further from the truth. The Republican Party in Oklahoma has a diverse membership and a long history of encouraging women and minorities to participate in the electoral process. Republicans have led the way to change and made the most remarkable inroads at a time when women and minorities...

No Excuse for the Black Underclass. 3/17/04 To say that racism doesn’t exist today is to put your head in the sand. But in spite of the existence of modern day racism, there is no reason for the existence of the black underclass. By 1975 the last vestiges of “Jim Crow” were gone. I have picked that year as the turning point for this editorial. If you were born in 1960 as I was, you grew up as “Jim Crow” was coming to an end and you remember the events on the day of the murder of Dr. King. In...

Defense Department officials tried to put DoD's best foot forward in attracting minority students to seek careers in the department at Florida A&M University here Feb. 18-19. DoD held a career exposition Feb. 18 for middle school, high school and college students to see presentations and visit exhibits set up by the military academies, ROTC programs and civilian internship programs. Feb. 19 featured a symposium, during which DoD officials discussed critical minority representation issues in ROTC and internship programs, as well as long-term concerns, with presidents of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other minority-education leaders. Charles S. Abell, principal...

ALBANY Oh, dear. It's that time of year again, when black folks have to be careful with one another. A simple invitation to your tree-trimming party can find you denounced for "capitulating to the master's culture" by the most button-down, suit-and-tie brother on the block. Asking the fellow preschool parent in kente clothing to make a Kwanzaa presentation can find you stammering your apologies when he thrusts his St. Christopher medal at you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer fending off the undead. Being black in December is almost as exhausting as being so in February, when it's taken for granted...

PBS, 8:00 P.M. Wednesday, November 19, 2003 – Following the visual of the Rebel Flag, a youngish, very short haired woman appeared on the screen. My reception is fuzzy here, so while I can hear the audio perfectly, I cannot always see the picture clearly. As near as I could tell, she was in a setting which spoke of academics. It may also have been an office conference room. She had the large round glasses of the modern female “scholar.” The first time she opened her mouth, she testified to the total bias, the total Orwellian historical rewrite, that one...

When did people who claim to be civil rights activists start supporting government-sponsored racial discrimination? Forty years after Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech," many people and organizations who claim to be his heirs argue that rather than judging people by the "content of their character," the government isn't classifying people by the color of their skin enough. It's become a cliché to quote Dr. King in opposition to race-conscious affirmative action programs. It's true that the most famous leader of the civil rights movement was more open to these types of government policies than many political commentators...

<p>Any day now, the Supreme Court will announce its decision on the constitutionality of the University of Michigan's affirmative-action policies. Advocates for minorities hope the court will uphold the program. It should not. Such a decision will almost certainly damage the long-term interests of the very groups the proponents of diversity seek to protect.</p>

The diversity argument--how are we gonna get enough blacks and Latinos unless we rig the rules?--is transparent baloney. As Bass, our top-drawer cartoonist has trenchantly pointed out, universities ignore questions of diversity when really important activities, like football, are at stake. Is it necessary to dwell on the question of just how many black and Latinos constitutes sufficient diversity? Who the hell are those admissions officers to decide who gets what goodies? What in the world does this have to do with running a university? The best argument for racial preferences for blacks is the reparations argument advanced by Mick...

<p>"Now it is true, if I may speak figuratively, that Old Man Segregation is on his deathbed. But history has proven that the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive."</p>

It was Inauguration Day, and in the judgment of one later historian, "the atmosphere in the nation's capital bore ominous signs for Negroes." Washington rang with happy Rebel Yells, while bands all over town played 'Dixie.' Indeed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who swore in the newly elected Southern president, was himself a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, "an unidentified associate of the new Chief Executive warned that since the South ran the nation, Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race." Somebody had even sent the new president a possum, an act...

“From the time it was passed in 1870 until 1965, no president, no Congress, and no Supreme Court did anything serious to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment …” -- Howard Zinn “I’m gonna sing this verse, I ain’t gonna sing no more / Please get together, Break-up this old Jim Crow.” -- Lead Belly, “Jim Crow Blues”Certain myths remain popular in spite of reality. Americans, for example, rely on a few admired figures and television images to help them understand the impetus behind the civil rights movement, even though the bus boycotts, voting drives and the March on Washington were just...

Know your place, chile. Always know your place.'' I still remember Mama Robinson telling us that, talking about Jim Crow and segregation. We black folks, colored folks, Negroes could never be uppity, always had to be deferential. Folks would be watching. Bad things could happen. She was a sweet old lady, her white hair pulled back in a bun. She wore that ever-present apron that always smelled of pound cake. Yellow pound cake. ''Get you a piece of cake, baby,'' she would say. More than four decades removed I can still see her, sitting in a rocking chair on that...

Mayor Bloomberg was right to call reparations a divisive issue. What's historically just for black Americans is historically wrong for America.