Why Martin Luther King Was Republican

Human Events ^ | 08/16/2006 | Frances Rice

[coffee260]

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

 

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

 

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman's issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

 

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

 

In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King's leaving Memphis, Tenn., after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a "trouble-maker" who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

 

Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation's fist goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

 

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.

 

Critics of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President against Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.

 

Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater also ignore the fact that Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on Jan. 4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only 35 words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King's protest against the Vietnam War, Johnson referred to Dr. King as "that Nigger preacher."

 

Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist "Dixiecrats" did not all migrate to the Republican Party. "Dixiecrats" declared that they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than vote for a Republican because the Republican Party was know as the party for blacks. Today, some of those "Dixiecrats" continue their political careers as Democrats, including Robert Byrd, who is well known for having been a "Keagle" in the Ku Klux Klan.

 

Another former "Dixiecrat" is former Democrat Sen. Ernest Hollings, who put up the Confederate flag over the state Capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Sen. Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been "a great senator for any moment," including the Civil War. Yet Democrats denounced then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott for his remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.). Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Byrd and Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

 

The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.

 

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.

 

After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004, blocked passage of a bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and vetoed twice by President Clinton before he finally signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).

 

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More than $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

 

In order to break the Democrats' stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party's economic plantation, we must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity.

 

[Ms. Rice is chairman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) and may be contacted at www.NBRA.info.]

[Nextrush]

I think millions of Americans would join you if they had access to those thousands of pages of FBI files that are locked up until 2027.

I don’t remember any exact quotes of Bill Clinton speaking about being inspired by Dr. King, but Dr. King had a “private life” that would certainly “inspire” Clinton’s.

Its the fact of the matter, we just don’t have all the details in the public domain.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy also spoke of MLK as “less than a saint” over this conduct. And Abernathy was his right-hand man.

The King family, Jesse Jackson et al went after Abernathy when he made those comments in an autobiography in the 1980’s.

Another piece of evidence we have in the public domain along with the FBI surveillance of MLK’s lawyer and Taylor Branch’s conversations with King associates about that “private life.”

[fieldmarshaldj]

The greatest mistake the Black community made was following the destructive Socialist mantras of DuBois, Marcus Garvey, etc., rather than the individualist mantras of GW Carver, Booker T. Washington, et al.

[Alberta's Child]

People forget that the Republican Party was pretty leftist in a lot of respects back in those days. In New York, people like Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsey were high-profile Republicans who weren’t conservative in any sense of the term.

[Nextrush]

The Democrats have plenty of “racist” past to expose.

But don’t glorify Dr. Martin Luther King other than as a catlyst for what eventually would become a flood of white voters to the GOP by the time Ronald Reagan ran for President.

RR signed off on the national holiday and praised King but it would have been nice if Reagan had thanked Dr. King for helping to make him president by starting the splitting of the Democrat Party into pieces.

[RKV]

The DemoPublican Party pretty much gave in to the ideas of the fascists (national socialists) in the 1930s - the welfare state, a planned economy, trade unionism and the use of the mass media and arts to propagandize for the state. It took von Hayek, Mises, Freidman and a number of others to create the intellectual basis for a return to sanity and classical liberalism (and I use this term very precisely) which form the core of modern conservative philosophy.

[Reagan79]

You are so right, what is this revisionist history? Everybody knows King became a Democrat officially after 1960. While this article has some obvious points, it’s misrepresenting King who supported Kennedy, Johnson, etc...

While it was Southern Democrats he was fighting, he was definitely a national Democrat. His dad stayed a Republican longer, and his dad had a lot of pull in the black community in the South. But King Jr. switched pretty earlier. This is all public knowledge.

King was even at the Democratic 1964 convention cutting deals with Johnson to keep the Ms Democratic Freedom Party off the ballot for more government intervention.

I expect a little more from Human Events.

[moonman]

"We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity"

That's been repeated time and time again over the last 60 years or more. Unfortunately, only ones that believe it are 35-40 percent of electorate. It is because of your personal responsibility, ownership and hard work, others learned that they can live free off of you.

[Reagan79]

In addition, King was supporting national Democrats before 1960. I think it was 60 that he officially switched over. Also, his dad stopped supporting Republicans in 60.

[Landru]

"African-Americans and Jews voting Democrat are masochists."

Yes, but they're more than that.
Much more.

They're the epitome of useful idiots and I would care, per se, either if their numbers weren't so large dwarfing a good sized army.

All that's really needed now for the hordes is for them to get solidly organized.

That ever happens and as we used to say in the military, "Give your soul to God".

...because your ass is *fini*.

[stainlessbanner]

Reagan was a Democrat until the early 60’s

[driftless2]

"sixty percent"

You are right about that, although I heard that Nixon got fortyfive percent. Whatever.... in those days the GOP could count on a substantial portion of the black vote. Barry Goldwater drove millions more black voters in the Dem dungeon in 1964 when he rejected the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Naturally LBJ jumped on with both big feet insuring a landslide in the '64 election for the Donkeycrats.

The ironic thing that in later years Goldwater, who was not a racist, regretted his '64 stand. He had done it on principle, but it cost the GOP dearly then and in subsequent elections. Now the GOP is lucky to get ten percent of the black vote. A series of huge miscalculations by Republican "big thinkers" cost the party (and the country) dearly for many decades since.

[fieldmarshaldj]

This article apparently was from last year. We got into big trouble with some of our candidates repeating some of this stuff, which was obviously false. I find it unfortunate that the so much of the Civil Rights movement and MLK have been made into one in the same. MLK is NOT the Civil Rights movement. It was comprised of many, many people of differing ideologies (some collectivist, some individualist), many of whom gave their lives to the cause... not just a single man. The simplistic media (and historians) choose one ideological aspect linked specifically to MLK and the Democrat party and ignore everything else... and they also fail to ask the question, “Was the Black Community well served by what was accomplished ?” If they ask it, it is couched in the terms of Socialist goals and exclusively race-based solutions. Nobody has the courage to challenge convention and ask hard questions... or when they do, such as with the author of this piece, they get all the facts wrong and still fail to detach a flawed man from the movement itself and question where he was going in the post-1965 era after the main goal was accomplished of getting the CRA signed.

[Nextrush]

The long term effect of the Civil Rights Movement-MLK was to split the Democrat Party into two factions.

Lets give credit where it’s due

The GOP got the south white vote plus a lot of northern white working class votes that Ronald Reagan brought firmly into the GOP tent.

They all were the people who voted for George Wallace as a third party candidate in 1968.

The conservatives were not racist in 1964 but took their stands on constitutional grounds.

And by the way a moratorium on civil rights activities was announced in the summer of 1964 so that people would not be turned off and vote for Goldwater.

By 1966 the GOP was gaining ground in Congressional elections in reaction to LBJ’s Civil Rights-Great Soceity Agenda.

After Wallace took all those Dems third party in 68 and Nixon won there was the Nixon 1972 landslide.

Even with Watergate Ford almost beat Carter in 76.

Then came the great one to bring all those voters together for landlslides in 80 and 84.

Martin Luther King helped bring the GOP a winning coalition for many elections.

[fieldmarshaldj]

From what I read, Junior was largely “unaffiliated” prior to ‘60 (though his father was registered Republican). Although Northern Blacks had largely become Democrats by the mid ‘30s (partly due to FDR, and also due to the fact that many Northern cities were becoming controlled by Democrats, so in order to “get anywhere”, you had to become one), most Southern Blacks were still solidly Republican (although largely prevented from exercising their right to vote) until 1964. It was simply unthinkable for a Black person to be a Democrat in the South, for obvious reasons.

[fieldmarshaldj]

I’m not sure even if Goldwater had wholeheartedly endorsed the ‘64 CRA if that would’ve kept the dam from bursting. Blacks were demanding more and more government-based solutions to problems and becoming more radicalized in that stance. That was simply an abhorrant position to Goldwater and Conservatives. It had nothing to do with race, but it was made out to be, and the liberal Democrats exploited it to the hilt.

[fieldmarshaldj]

What Nixon wanted to do was position himself in between two extremist groups, between the far-left of the Democrats and the reactionary racists of Wallace, Mahoney of MD, etc. The media would later disingenuosuly portray it as an attempt to appeal to racist votes, which it wasn’t. He wanted to squeeze out and discredit both factions. Sammy Davis, Jr. knew full well what Nixon was trying to do when he endorsed him (and he had warmer feelings about Nixon’s position on Blacks & Civil Rights vs. JFK’s a dozen years earlier), but he got villified for doing so.

[Nextrush]

Goldwater had supported CRA’s in 1957 and 1962, but could not fully endorse the 1964 one.

Federal power over states went too far at this point.

[driftless2]

It's hard to say what if the civil rights movement or the Vietnam war split the Dem party more than the other. The fact is before the sixties the GOP could count on a substantial percentage of the black vote. After the sixties they were lucky to get a minuscule percentage. I attribute that to the fact that the Dems were able to successfully pander to the Black voter. In black voters minds the Dems were the ones who promised to help them.

The GOP didn't have to pander, but they took the black vote for granted. I maintain that if Goldwater had backed the '64 Civil Rights bill while objecting to some of its more pernicious segments, we would never have had Carter or Clinton elected president.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Federal power had gone on too far and too long since FDR (and in some instances, since Woodrow Wilson). LBJ was moving this entire nation towards a gigantic Socialist state. What he, and what FDR, got passed is going to ultimately bankrupt us in the near future if dramatic changes aren’t made soon. The GOP hasn’t stepped up when it had the chance to reign in these fiscal disasters.

[Reagan79]

Right. Also the write to vote was largely restricted on the basis of the percentage of blacks in a county. If it was 10% or less they were always allowed to vote.

Just confused on the purpose of saying King was a Republican. I would just stay true to the facts, and focus on how Republicans did more for Civil Rights, especially early on with Eisenhower’s judges.