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.]

[fieldmarshaldj]

I wonder if MLK ever spoke out against the oppression of Black Cubans under Fidel (I’m guessin’ he didn’t). Batista was a Black Cuban.

[usmcobra]

I don’t see how you can read those speeches and positions and not recognize he was clearly Socialist.

Lincoln has been called the first communist by people that don't understand how he wanted to ensure equality.

Show me one socialist country where the poor don't work and yet are paid a wage (which during MLK time) would put them on an equal footing with the middle class for doing nothing?

Even the worst forms of socialism aren't based on such stupidity as you are desperately trying to read into what King said.

[Tailgunner Joe]

It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis? ...

Few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was, during all those years, robbed of the wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. ...

Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token change quell all the tempestuous yearning of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo. When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care--each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, 1964

[fieldmarshaldj]

“Desperately trying to read into” ? C’mon, man, now you’re just trolling. You’re reminding me of the dead parrot skit from Monty Python.

[x]

Technically speaking, they're right. But I don't think the campaign is going to do any good.

How we would have voted if it were 50 or 100 years ago and how long dead people would vote now are at best parlor games.

What matters is getting things right in the present.

[ReignOfError]

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.

One less-obvious reason was that many Southern states had "white primaries" under the legal theory that the parties were private organizations, and could restrict their membership as they pleased. Since Republicans rarely won anything in the Democrats' "solid South," the primary was the race that mattered, and black votes were rendered more or less irrelevant.

The supreme court banned white primaries in 1944, but I don't know how long it took the states to comply.

[usmcobra]

It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis? ...

Few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was, during all those years, robbed of the wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. ...

Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token change quell all the tempestuous yearning of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo. When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care--each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, 1964

And who was he talking about that did all those things to black people....The Democrats!

Every attempt by the republicans to make things equal in this country for those that suffered under the abuses of the democrat party has been subverted by the democrats, welfare, affirmative action,the war on poverty civil rights all subverted and perverted to becomes tools for the democrats continuing to subjugate a whole race of people.

Hasn't this party always been the one that wanted all our citizens to be treated as equals under the law? Isn't that what Dr. King was asking for as well?

Maybe I'm the only one here that remembers how brutal and vile blacks were treated by democrats in the south, or how republicans stood up to them and stood beside Dr. King when Democrats were willing to use force against people asking for what our constitution guaranteed them as citizens.

Maybe I am the only one that remember how Mexicans were treated better then blacks in the south, or how a black man couldn't ask a decent wage without risking their jobs or in some cases their lives.

If it is socialism to want equality for all our citizens, doesn't that make The Republican party the true socialists in this nation?

There is more to socialism then asking for a decent wage, civil rights, or respect as a man or a woman, and neither of you have shown me enough to make me say the man wasn't a republican, if anything you have shown that he embodied the ideas that have been the hallmark of this party and the antithesis of what the democrats have proven they believe in.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Are you seriously endorsing Marxist economics as a logical and workable solution to 400 years of oppression ?

[TASMANIANRED]

Democrats won the black vote by throwing money at them and it worked.

[Tailgunner Joe]

King was saying that there hasn't been enough welfare, not enough handouts, not enough redistribution of wealth, not enough socialism. Leftists always think the answer to the failures of socialism is more socialism! Equality under the law is not the same thing as equality of wealth!

King wanted the minimum yearly wage to be the same as the median income! That doesn't even make sense, because the median income would drastically increase if the minimum wage was increased to equal the median income! The only way the minimum yearly income would equal the median yearly income would be if everyone in the country made the exact same wage! That doesn't sound like socialism to you? The median income in the US in 2006 was over $32,000. Do you think it would be a good idea to raise the minimum wage to $16 an hour!?

[modican]

Most blacks I talk to don't know, there was a real Martin Luther, M. L. King changed his name after him, a White German. Without knowing about Martin Luther, you will not understand Martin Luther King.

ca.1500

[DesScorp]

I’m not real proud of the fact that he was a Republican. Marxists have no place in the GOP.

[mo]

For interested Freepers..MLK WAS a Republican!

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1919430/posts