Posted on 09/21/2006 6:07:24 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers.
Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the black Republican nominee for Maryland's open Senate seat, disavowed the ad Thursday as "insulting to Marylanders." He said his campaign asked the Washington-based National Black Republican Association to stop running it.
At an event in Baltimore, Steele said, "I don't know exactly what the intent of the ad was" but that "it's not helpful to the public discourse."
The ad does not mention Steele or his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ben Cardin.
The association's president, Frances Rice, did not return calls for comment. The group, founded a year ago, promotes the Republicans to black voters.
The spot begins with one woman telling another, "Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican."
Steve Klein, a senior researcher with the Atlanta-based King Center, said Thursday that King never endorsed candidates from either party.
"I think it's highly inaccurate to say he was a Republican because there's really no evidence," Klein said.
A King biographer, Taylor Branch, also said Thursday that King was nonpartisan.
In the ad, the woman goes on to say, "Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan." Her companion replies, "The Klan? White hoods and sheets?"
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
"It is absolutely true, that the Democratic party was the party of rich southern slave owners."
That is absolutely not true.
There are now and were then, "subsets" of Democrats.
My family have, historically, all been Dems since the party started and they are unbelievably "right wing".
In western MD, nearly everybody was a Dem until relatively recently.
[the "Reagan Democrat" effect began the shift]
There was little or no slavery out here.
People were almost too poor to afford to live themselves, much less own slaves.
They were coal miners and subsistence farmers.
In fact, the richest man locally was free black who owned all the property that's now the Ft. Frederick state park.
Dems here were [and most still are] God-fearing, strict, moral and conservative people.
Maryland politics are unlike any other, anywhere in the US, mainly because of the war and the declaration of martial law during the war.
Ironically, western Marylanders overwhelmingly ideologically supported abolition but they also certainly opposed and resented being placed "under arrest", for all intents and purposes for something in which they had no active part or stake.
That, more than anything else bascially locked in the Dem vote for well over a century.
Word travels slowly out here and they're only now realizing that the Dems are little more than thinly disguised socialists.
A black born in 1897 very likely would have been a Republican. And I suppose it's possible that Jr. was as well, at least by registration. As late as 1960 Richard Nixon actually expected to win the votes of a lot of black ("negro" was then the polite term) people.But Jr. was definitely left wing - not that his "content of character" criterion would be accepted on the left wing today.
He very well might have been. Algore's father who was AGAINST the civil rights movement way back when, was a democrat. Mr. Byrd a SENATOR, was a former leader of the KKK, start putting pieces together and there just might be a little truth in what the article is saying.
However more research needs to be done. This article may have more truth in it than we think.
"When the Klan was formed, there were no Southern Republicans, to form anything."
Actually, that is wrong. The Klan was formed to drive Southern Republicans out of power during Reconstruction. For the first ten to twenty years after the Civil War the southern state legislatures were dominated by Republicans -- who represented the faction of the south that stayed loyal to the Union, for the most part.
The Klan's initial purpose was to drive these -- as they viewed them -- traitors out of power. That this also involved disenfranchising blacks was viewed as a feature, not a bug.
The Klan succeded so well that many 20th-Century southerners never realized that there had been a southern wing of the Republican Party. But when the Klan started, there was, and it was the mortal enemy of the Klan.
Hmmm....
The riots were chiefly among the poor, largely Irish immigrants.
Teach me to post when not all there, huh? LOL.
My patronymic grandfather's grandfather was captain of the Second Precinct, near Washington Square during the draft riots. One thing my he passed on to my grandfather was an abiding animous towards Romanism.
If the sheet fits.
Truth has never mattered to DemoCraps before.
I love this, because it is true, and liberals can not stand truth.
No, that is not true. The so-called New York Draft Riots were instigated by the race bating Wood brothers who lead the New York Democrat party (Tammany Hall) and both of who hated Lincoln and the Republicans with a passion. Fernando Wood, who was mayor of New York in 1860, actually attempted to have the city secede from the Union upon Lincoln's election. The rioters themselves were mostly recent Irish immigrants who were easy prey for the demagogic Woods and the Democrat Copperheads.
The Draft Riots were entirely a Democrat operation that resulted in the deaths of over 100 blacks unfortunate enough to cross the rioters path.
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