The real deal on Liberals and Civil Rights
Firing more shots over the bow:
Tonight the first of three post regarding the history of Democrats as guardians of the civil rights movement.
Anyone who really knows their history will know that this is not true. Unfortunately, thanks to the media, academia and the entertainment industry liberals have become synonymous with civil rights.
That's why I decided to repost this article that's been gathering digital dust on my hard drive.
This article was posted at the now defunct Calpatriot.org. The site featured conservative students from different California colleges whom posted articles about current events, opinion pieces and articles like the one you see below...
So, for anyone that's still in the dark about the real history of the democratic party then I suggest you read this one through throughly..
The Dark Side of the Democratic Party
Orignally posted at:
http://www.calpatriot.org/february03/erasing.html
The racist left is revealed through historical
analysis
Those on the left of the political divide, especially
ones of the Democratic variety depict themselves as
champions of racial justice while portraying
Republicans as demagogues of hate. They will list all
Republican injustices, real or imagined, while
conveniently forgetting innumerable Democratic sins:
Woodrow Wilson’s segregationism, William
Jennings Bryan’s support of the Ku Klux Klan,
and Franklin Roosevelt’s indifference to
anti-lynching legislation. Fortunately, in the light
of history, their arguments fall far from the truth.
Many have forgotten that Democrats were not just the
party of slavery, they were the party of Jim Crow, of
segregation, of “separate but equal,” and
until as recent as the 1960s, the party that required
blacks to count the number of jellybeans in a jar as a
“test” to be registered to vote. President
Bush’s National Security Advisor and close
friend Condoleeza Rice, arguably the most powerful and
influential black woman in the history of America,
likes to tell the story of how her father became a
Republican because Democrats would not allow him to be
registered to vote. Let it be known that in the 26
major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of
Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80
percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican
majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of
the votes! If one were to peel back the layers of
history even further, one party has stood on the
grounds of racial equality and civil rights, and that
party is the Republican Party.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Public Law 88-352) was
largely based on Civil Rights legislation sponsored by
Republicans in years past that had been watered down,
defeated by segregationist Democrats, or struck down
by Democrat-controlled courts. Republicans, the
minority party at the time, voted in higher
percentages for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than
Democrats. In the House of Representatives,
Republicans voted for civil rights by a margin of 80
percent to 20 percent, 138-34. The Democrats margin
was 152-96, or 61percent to 39 percent.
However, the most important vote for civil rights
legislation was the vote for cloture of the anti-civil
rights filibuster where two-thirds of the Senate was
needed. On June 10, 1964, Senate Republican leader
Everett Dirksen made an impassioned speech before all
100 senators for ending the filibuster.
"There are many reasons why cloture should be invoked
and a good civil rights measure enacted. It is said
that on the night he died, Victor Hugo wrote in his
diary substantially this sentiment, 'Stronger than all
the armies is an idea whose time has come.' The time
has come for equality of opportunity in sharing of
government, in education, and in employment. It must
not be stayed or denied."
Civil Rights legislation was not stayed nor denied.
Republicans voted overwhelmingly to break the
filibuster by 81.8 percent (27-6), while 65.7 percent
(44-23) of Democrats voted for cloture. Nine days
later the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the senate
73-27 with 6 Republicans and 21 Democrats opposing.
With the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, one has to ask why it took a century after
the end of the civil war to achieve civil rights for
Black Americans.
It is to be said that Democrats, from Andrew Johnson's
presidency to Lyndon Johnson's, sought to reassemble
the Jacksonian coalition of northern machines and
southern segregationists. In 1924, Franklin Roosevelt
advised Democrats to raise only issues of importance
to the entire nation--which meant that they should
abstain from the questions of integration and racial
equality. While Truman did integrate the military and
Kennedy did enforce court orders to integrate Southern
state universities, their support for civil rights was
luke-warm at best. FDR, Truman, and JFK looked upon
civil rights advocates primarily as interests to be
managed rather than integral parts of their electoral
coalitions.
As a matter of record, John F. Kennedy's civil rights
record before 1963 was neither a rejection of civil
rights legislation nor a clear endorsement. Southern
segregationists preferred jury trials to bench trials
because all-white juries rarely convicted white civil
rights violators. Well aware of this fact, Kennedy
still voted to allow juries to hear contempt cases. As
a Massachusetts senator, Kennedy had the opportunity
to vote in favor of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
Unwilling to jeopardize his presidential ambitions,
Kennedy elected to pass along the legislation to the
Senate Judiciary Committee--dominated by
Democrats--where it would have been shelved.
To be fair, John F. Kennedy was a Democratic
politician of his time, and like all politicians of
any party, his first priority was to gain and maintain
power. In his narrow win over Richard Nixon in the
1960 election, Kennedy needed to keep the old
Jacksonian coalition together and as a result barely
mentioned civil rights as part of his presidential
campaign. After his election, JFK did not produce any
new civil rights proposals in 1961 or 1962. During
this period the civil rights movement generally
proceeded without Presidential Support. However, by
1963 American opinion had forced the issue.
A poll conducted by The National Opinion Research
Center of Northern Whites in 1963 determined that the
number of Americans who approved neighborhood
integration had risen 30 percent in twenty years, to
72 percent in 1963. Support for integration of schools
was even higher at 75 percent. Democrats could no
longer appease southern segregationists and win in the
north. Years of peaceful protests by blacks and whites
made civil rights the most important issue in the
coming election for a substantial segment of the
American populace. As a result Northern Democrats
overwhelmingly joined the Republican Party in
supporting civil rights.
Democratic politicians did not lead the charge on
civil rights, they merely took credit. Although
Republicans have for decades voted in great majorities
for civil rights, neither Democrats nor
Republicans can claim sole credit for the passage of
the Civil Rights. It was efforts by Protestant and
Catholic clergy, Urban Leagues, the NAACP, Martin
Luther King Jr., and countless other groups and
individuals of all races that forced civil rights to
be crafted into federal law. However, the group that
deserves the most credit for bringing upon civil
rights is black Americans. During their 250 years of
bondage and 100 years of segregation, black Americans
conducted themselves with nothing less than dignity,
perseverance, and bravery. Black contributions as
fighting men in both World Wars coupled with the hard
work of millions of blacks, their families, and their
churches were the keys to success in the civil rights
movement.
Realignment and the Rise of Southern Republicans
When Lynden Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of
1965, he ruefully quipped that he had just delivered
the South to the
Republican Party for the next generation. Many people
attribute this to the South’s racism; however
they tend to forget that at that time the overwhelming
majority of blacks in the south were Republicans.
Blacks in Georgia alone accounted for 70% of the
Georgia Republican Party. Lynden Johnson clearly
thought he gave Republicans millions of votes across
the south that were disenfranchised in previous
elections.
However, when given the ability to vote those Black
Republicans became Democrats. This process started in
1933 when northern blacks joined Roosevelt’s New
Deal coalition and began a gradual realignment of
blacks towards the Democratic Party. As late as 1960,
Richard Nixon still received 32 percent of the black
vote. The Republican share of the black vote in 1964
dropped to a mere six percent and a Republican
candidate has not received above 15 percent since
then. What happened between 1960 and 1964 to make the
black vote almost unanimously Democratic?
Whereas Lyndon Johnson supported the civil rights
bill, his opponent in the 1964 presidential campaign,
Barry Goldwater, opposed the bill on the grounds that
its public accommodations section violated
people’s rights to do business with whom they
pleased. Goldwater felt that discrimination in the
workplace was morally wrong, but feared government
would “require people to discriminate on the
basis of color or race or religion.” Although
called a racist by the left, Barry Goldwater, a
pro-choice libertarian-conservative, was perhaps one
of the least racist politicians in America. Goldwater
was a staunch NAACP supporter who had voted
affirmative for every previous civil rights bill. In
his state of Arizona, Goldwater desegregated the
National Guard before Truman desegregated the
military. Alas, Goldwater is proof of how one
politician can change the perception of an entire
political party for decades to come. Martin Luther
King Jr., who had remained neutral in the 1960
presidential race, enthusiastically endorsed LBJ in
the 1964 race. While King declared that Barry
Goldwater was not racist, his positions gave aide and
comfort to racists.
Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of
1964 coupled with his 1962 statement that electorally
Republicans should “go hunting where the ducks
are” convinced blacks that the Republican Party
was hostile to blacks and hastened their political
realignment. Although Republicans delivered the
overwhelming margins needed to pass Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and were champion of previous civil rights
legislation, Goldwater’s tactics severed black
America’s link to the Party of Lincoln.
Furthermore, the GOP’s opposition to big
government policies such as the Great Society in later
years strengthened that view.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Goldwater’s
opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the
subsequent shift of blacks to the Democratic Party,
did not send a flood of segregationist whites towards
the Republican Party. The GOP did not, and has not
become a racist party. Only one Democratic Senator who
voted against civil rights shifted allegiances to the
Republicans. That Senator, Strom Thurmond, later
renounced his segregationist past and voted for the
Voting Rights Act of 1980. Most democrats who opposed
civil rights such as Albert Gore Sr., J. William
Fulbright, and future Democratic Senate Leader
(1977-1988) and former KKK member Robert C. Bryd (who
democrats now call the conscience of the senate)
remained Democrats. The vast majority of southern
segregationist did not become Republicans.
Segregationist created the Dixiecrats and returned to
their party of origin- the Democratic Party- when the
civil rights movement succeeded. Republicans did not
make gains in the south till much later, when a new
breed of Southerners emerged and thousands of
Northerners began moving south. In the 1968
presidential campaign began, polls showed that Nixon
was at 42 percent; Humphrey at 29 percent, and
segregationist Democrat George Wallace was at 22
percent. When the presidential race ended, Nixon and
Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13
percent. The 9 percent of the “racist”
vote that Wallace lost had gone to Humphrey.
Nixon’s southern strategy was not based on race
as his critics have claimed.
When Richard Nixon began his campaign for president in
1968, he penned a column on the South that declared
the Republican Party would build its foundation on
states rights, human rights, small government and a
strong national defense. In that letter he declared he
would leave it to the “party of Maddox, Mahoney
and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political
juice out of the rotting fruit of racial
injustice.” In this campaign Nixon only endorsed
those Republicans who were not members of the John
Birch Society. During the Nixon presidency, budgets
for black colleges were doubled and the share of
Southern schools that were desegregated from 10
percent to 70 percent. Among Nixon’s more
notable achievements on Civil Rights was his work on
the passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, for which
Martin Luther King Jr. thanked personally.
During the 1960s and 1970s Republicans only mustered
one-fifth of the white vote in southern congressional
elections. As the old Southern Democrats began to lose
power (or die), a new type of non-segregationist
Southerners grew. The South’s shift away from
the Democratic Party to the Republican Party largely
occurred during the Reagan Era. Exit polls taken in
eleven southern states in 1982 showed the GOP’s
weakness among white voters: on average, 45 percent of
southern white voters were Democrats and only 23
percent were Republicans. Ronald Reagan’s
platform of racial equality, cultural conservatism,
family values, low taxes, federalism (i.e. small
government), a strong military, and a hawkish stance
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union began to attract Southern
white voters. It was not until the 1990s when the GOP
gained an advantage in party affiliation and 1994
marked the year Republicans captured a majority of
southern house and senate seats. In this past
election, the state of Georgia elected the first
Republican governor and senator since reconstruction!
With the rise of southern Republicans, the Republican
Party has become a truly national party that is
competitive in every state. While it is true that the
Republican base is centered in the Western and
Southern states while the Democratic base is centered
in the North Eastern states and California. The states
where Democrats enjoy the largest percentage of
registered voters - Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
Hawaii, Maryland, New York and Connecticut - all have
Republican governors.
The Republican rise in power in the south and
consequently the entire US was not predicated on race
as commonly trumpeted in our universities and the mass
media. Our party’s position on civil rights
since the age of Lincoln has been constant: we believe
government should be color blind and that all people
should be judged equally as individuals in the eyes of
the law. Unfortunately, the left believes that not
supporting items on their agenda all comes down to one
issue: race.
They charge that voting against massive transfer
payments from one group to another is a display of
racism. If you don’t believe in preferences for
any group of Americans, you are racist. If you
don’t believe in high taxes and an expansion of
government programs, you are racist. Fifty years ago
Democrats campaigned by stirring up racial fears,
opposing color-blind laws, and silencing those who
oppose them. In many ways they still do.
So there you have it. Liberals haven't always been so quick to support the rights of blacks after all. I'll have some more on this tomorrow night.
