Posted on 08/02/2004 10:50:02 AM PDT by hoosiermama
Open Letter from African Americans to the Democratic Party
Open Letter from African Americans to the Democratic Party
Email from the author | 6/3/04 | Frances Rice
By Frances Rice
We, African American citizens of the United States, declare and assert:
Whereas in the early 1600’s 20 African men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship as slaves and from that tiny seed grew the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery which shaped the course of American development,
Whereas reconciliation and healing always begin with an apology and an effort to repay those who have been wronged,
Whereas the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices committed against African Americans during the past two hundred years, nor for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices and current soft bigotry of low expectations are having on us today,
Whereas the Democratic Party fought to expand slavery and, after the Civil War, established Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive legislation that were designed to disenfranchise African Americans,
Whereas the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, and their primary goal was to intimidate and terrorize African American voters, Republicans who moved South to protect African Americans and any other whites who supported them,
Whereas, according to leading historians (both black and white), the horrific atrocities committed against African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction were financed, sponsored, and promoted by the Democratic Party and their Ku Klux Klan supporters,
Whereas from 1870 to 1930, in an effort to deny African Americans their civil rights and to keep African Americans from voting Republican, thousands of African Americans were shot, beaten, lynched, mutilated, and burned to death by Ku Klux Klan terrorists from the Democratic Party,
Whereas Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman rejected anti-lynching laws and efforts to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission,
Whereas the Democratic party has used racist demagoguery to deceive African Americans about the history of the Republican Party that: (a) started as the anti-slavery party in 1854, (b) fought to free African Americans from slavery, (c) designed Reconstruction, a ten-year period of unprecedented political power for African Americans, (d) passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting African Americans freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote, (e) passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 granting African Americans protection from the Black Codes and prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, (f) passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 granting African Americans protection from the Jim Crow laws, (g) established Affirmative Action programs to help African Americans proper with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan that set the first goals and timetables and his 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act that made Affirmative Action Programs the law of our nation, and (h) never sponsored or launched a program, passed laws, or engaged in practices that resulted in the death of millions of African Americans,
Whereas Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (a 1954 decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower) was a landmark civil rights case that was designed to overturn the racist practices that were established by the Democratic Party,
Whereas after Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the vote of African Americans, he banned African American newspapers from the military shortly after taking office because he was convinced the newspapers were communists,
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Law, opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was later criticized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for ignoring civil rights issues.
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy authorized the FBI (supervised by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy) to investigate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on suspicion of being a communist,
Whereas Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, made a 14-hour filibuster speech in the Senate in June 1964 in an unsuccessful effort to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and was heralded in April 2004 by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd as a senator who would have been a great leader during the Civil War,
Whereas when the 1964 Civil Rights Act came up for vote, Senator Al Gore, Sr. and the rest of the Southern Democrats voted against the bill,
Whereas in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans,
Whereas Democratic President Bill Clinton sent troops to Europe to protect the citizens of Bosnia and Kosovo while allowing an estimated 800,000 black Rwandans to be massacred in Africa, vetoed the welfare reform law twice before signing it, and refused to comply with a court order to have shipping companies develop an Affirmative Action Plan,
Whereas Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore created harmful racial division when he falsely claimed that the 2000 presidential election was “stolen” from him and that African Americans in Florida were disenfranchised, even though a second recount of Florida votes by the “Miami Herald” and a consortium of major news organizations confirmed that he lost the election, and a ruling by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission declared that African Americans were not denied the right to vote,
Whereas the Democratic Party's soft bigotry of low expectations and social promotions have consigned African Americans to economic bondage and created a culture of dependency on government social programs,
Whereas the Democratic Party's use of deception and fear to block welfare reform, the faith-based initiative and school choice that would help African Americans prosper is consistent with the Democratic Party's heritage of racism that included sanctioning of slavery and kukluxery, a perversion of moral sentiment among leaders of the Democratic Party whose racist legacy bode ill until this generation of African Americans,
Now, therefore, for the above and other documented atrocities and accumulated wrongs inflicted upon African Americans, we demand a formal written apology and other appropriate remuneration from the leadership of the Democratic party.
#####
Frances Rice is an attorney and an African-American woman who served in the Army for 20 years before retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. While in the Army she served as a company commander, an adjutant in a basic combat training brigade and a prosecutor in courts-marital.
Upon retiring, she was awarded the Legion of Merit. She is currently serving on the Board of the Military Officers Association of Sarasota, the SaraMana Black Republican Club and the SaraMana Community Development Corporation, a non-profit organization that helps low-income residents become homeowners and small business owners. In these positions, she puts both her Juris Doctorate and MBA degrees to good use.
She was recently appointed by Governor Jeb Bush to serve on the Medal of Merit Board for the state of Florida. Frances is married to Peter Rice, a retired diplomat from the U.S. Department of State.
Remember how in 2004, the Dems were blaming their loss on low voter turnout in black areas due to GOP vote fraud/vote suppression?
Am on my phone. Will you do the honors and repost it!?!?!
Sure. I will. Thanks.
Ugh, I messed up the ping for you! http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3026509/posts
There it is.
I'm all for the formal written apology but let's be honest here; the remuneration would only cause more divisiveness because the only thing the democrats know how to do is redistribute wealth.
Besides, we can all see how well remuneration has worked in the past. /s
It's time to dispense with the revisionist history of the democrat party. Tell the truth, issue the apology and fix the problems. In doing so, we expose the race-hustling industry and cast aside its poisonous by-products. We, as Americans (not hyphenated) need to work together and stop letting the political elites pit one against the other, especially now that they're attempting to triangulate the strategy.
Amen
Bump for later
Bookmark
I hear this often but I have to respectfully disagree.
Do we punish sons for the sins of their fathers?
The fact is, a 21 year old white male from Alabama in 1964 is 75 years old today.
Polls showed that young whites in the South (school children in 1964) were far less racist than the older generations from the mid 1960s to today.
When High Schools were desegregated down here older people predicted all kinds of terrible things would occur—gang rapes, murder, terrible violence—well it didn’t.
As a conservative and Alabamian who happens to be white, I’m certainly not a fan of modernism in our culture, but I definitely appreciate the end of slavery and Jim Crow.
Also, while the old time religion NEVER left the South, it did change considerably during the 1980s with the Religious Right, which really focused on politics. I’ve had people tell me that these Evangelicals were secretly racist—but there is absolutely no proof for this frankly was the opposite. God demands we be good, not haters. So by focusing politically on religion the process invoked condemnation of racial discrimination, not the continuation of it.
The older Alabamians didn’t move in mass from the democrat to the Republican party. The older democrats died off while younger people decided to be Republican, starting in the Nixon days, and especially in the Reagan years. By those times, the only real segregationists left were still in the democrat party of old. That’s why it took 30 years to happen. A lot of people were still voting democrat here until the early 200s. They’re in the Choir Invisible now.
Aha! I didn’t check the date.
Well, I do still think what I said is true. Southern Segregationist democrats died out much more than became Republicans.
flashback - 2004 -
someone send this to Kanye..
I have sent twice and this video
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xYaU-_unAk8
He gets so many tweets the more who send the more likely he will see it
You are likely to be familiar with this, but here goes (just in case)-
Go to your FR State locale in your account
Click on Florida
At the top of the page, there is this-
[Other Locations] [Set My Location] [New Prototype — Click for Members List]
Select the third one. You will get a huge list, maybe very old, but it might help.
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