Posted on 09/24/2006 10:33:07 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
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.
The National Black Republican Association ads have been heard in Ohio, the Ohio Democratic Party said Thursday.
Republican Party officials and the campaign for Republican gubernatorial nominee Ken Blackwell, who is black, said they haven't heard of the ads and can't say whether they've aired in Ohio.
Blackwell, the state's secretary of state, faces Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, who is white, in the November election.
U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones said in a news release that she wants the National Black Republican Association to discontinue the ads.
``This radio ad campaign is the sort of shameful tactic that Republicans are using to distract from their failed leadership in Ohio and the United States,'' said Tubbs Jones, a Democrat.
Ohio Republican Party spokesman John McClelland said he hasn't heard of the ads but read a transcript on the Web site of the National Black Republican Association.
``This is the same type of race-baiting that we don't like the Democrats doing,'' he said. ``This ad would not be something the party would condone.''
The Washington Post reported Thursday that the ad was running on stations in Baltimore.
In Maryland, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the black Republican nominee for that state'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 any candidates.
Blackwell, who would be Ohio's first black governor, is thought to have the potential to cut into some of the Democratic Party's black base. But Strickland leads Blackwell comfortably in polls released this week.
The president of the National Black Republican Association, Frances Rice, did not return calls for comment. The group, founded a year ago, promotes the GOP to black voters.
It was not immediately clear which radio stations were airing the 60-second ad or how long it had been running. The group's Web site announced the ad's release in a statement dated two weeks ago.
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?''
The KKK, never a political party, was a racist group of white men that started in the South after the Civil War, when Republicans were almost unheard of in former Confederate states. The mainstream Democratic Party never endorsed the Klan nor claimed to have founded it.
The group running the ads describes itself on its Web site as ``a resource for the black community on Republican ideals.'' It does not say how many members it has.
On one hand, it is race baiting. On the other hand, there is a misconception that Republicans are patent racists and Democrats are not racist at all.
*cough* Robert Byrd *cough*
Just heard it on the organization's website. Among other things, the ad implies that the GOP supports affirmative action and the Democrats oppose it. Is this the message we want to send? How does this ad help conservatives?
Oh, I beg you to bring that down to Mississippi. Jackson NEEDS A HARDLINE REPUBLICAN MAYOR! My kids all think that Lincoln was a Democrat.
Although he set about freeing the slaves, Lincoln was a racist.
These ads should run in St. Louis and wherever else the scumbag Democrats have run their "black churches will burn" ads and their "James Byrd, pick-up truck lynching" ads. Screw 'em. Where can I donate?
Who wasn't a racist in 1860?
I see Republicans and controversial in the headline: someone must have slipped and told the truth.
Sounds to me like this particular group has more money than sense.
Crude and unhelpful, I'm afraid, if you care about getting folks off the Dem plantation.
Exactly what I was thinking. These ads are tame, compared to some of the ones put out by Democrats. Let them run.
Wasn't Governor Wallace a democrat? And David Duke?
Exactly. Racism has been the norm in all societies throughout human history until the last hundred years or so ago when Western Civilization adopted the notion of racial equality.
David Duke was elected as a Republican, though with no support from the state or national party.
lib/dems always trot out robert KKK byrd as their champion!!!
of ocurse the lib/msm never challenges him or other lib/dems....
it is always the bad racist republicans that are going to put blacks back on the plantation..
and as piaps says.."and ya know what I'm talkin about!"
Who's not a racist now?
According to anyone running for office if you don't agree with diversity and multiculturalism as the ultimate social construct, you're a racist.
How is that possible? How can we NOT see the differences in race?
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