Posted on 03/24/2008 7:12:54 AM PDT by connell
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, Brian penned this somewhat coherent response:
Phooey.
FDR, a Democrat, started efforts to end Jim Crow against the pressures of his own Party. Truman, a Democrat, desegregated the military by executive order against the wishes of Democrats AND Republicans in Congress. (Many associate this action with the Civil Rights banner being carried by the Democratic Party and the long association of the black community with Democratic Politics.)
JFK inspired a generation of civil rights activists. (Of course, there was Hoover's investigations of civil rights activists, but go ahead, link Hoover to anyone but himself!)
LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act -- which admittedly was opposed by many Southern Democrats. However, northern and Western Democrats, along with Republicans -- the minority party -- pushed it through Congress. (The GOP may want to say they did the CRA on their own, but the math wouldn't let it happen.) LBJ championed the CRA and when signing it into law acknowledged that he "lost the South for the Democrats for at least a generation."
Brian sucked Mike in as well, who suffers from what one psychiatrist calls Bush Derangement Syndrome. I decided to respond...
(Excerpt) Read more at modernconservative.com ...
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The Republican Party was started in 1854...about 200 years after slavery was legally established in the British colonies on the North American mainland, and about 350 years after the Spanish began bringing Africans to the New World as slaves.
Incredible how such recent history has been so completely re-written in the popular imagination.
One possibility I’ve read recently was that Sen. Barry Goldwater’s vote against the 1965 Voting Rights Act was all the dems needed to proclaim the republicans against Civil Rights.
And let’s not forget how the Democrats were against going to war when the South seceded. Copperheads, anyone?
That was the single greatest catalyst for the change and the subsequent rewriting of history.
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