Posted on 05/23/2008 5:04:36 PM PDT by kingattax
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 1860's, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950's and 1960's.
During the civil rights era of the 1960's, 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 vs. 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 President Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalblackrepublicans.com ...
There are a number of useful idiot "conservatives" on FR (mostly the neo-confederates and "paleo-libertarian" types) who actually agree with the MSM and the Dems on this exact talking point.
They will both argue that the segregation loving bigoted southern RATs of the 30s & 40s were the "true conservatives" and all the card-carrying Republicans back then were liberals. The MSM/Democrats have different moivations for making this absurb claim -- the media does so to whitewash (no pun intended) the Democrat Party's abhorrant record on civil rights and convince voters that those Democrats were really closet Republicans and all the Republicans who stood up for blacks were RINOs. The neo-confederates continue to spew this garbage to justify why their "true conservative" granddaddy's in their state were voting for the policies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR. They can't bring themselves to admit that the south supported economic liberals, or that the socialist Dems they put in power were motivated by racism and bigotry.
Of course anyone who studies history knows it's more complex than that. There were actual conservative Dems in the south back then, mainly because the south had a one-party system in place. In order for a conservative to get elected in the south pre-1964, you HAD to put a D next to your name as a ballot. This doesn't mean the Democrat party as a whole was "conservative" in that era, and I would make a good case that the Dem Party has been majority socialist since at least 1900. This includes prominent powerful southern Dem officials like Huey Long, who controlled the whole state of Louisiana.
I would say the GOP from that era was pretty simular to way it is today, with the liberal Republicans being from New England and the conseratives being from the midwest (with some exceptions in both camps). There more liberal RINOs in the party than their is today, and since the GOP was locked out of the south, the New England and Midwest Republicans often found themselves to be the minority party. Note that there also prominent northern Republicans who were both consrevative and pro-civil rights, like U.S. Senator Ev Dirksen (R-IL). The idea that all Republicans who believed in civil rights back then would be Howard Dean clones today is ridiculous.
Of course the book "Back to Basics for the Republican Party" makes this basic point, that the GOP never really changed their positions on racial issues, gender, civil rights, etc. from the 1860s to today, it was the RATs that changed theirs.
And fieldmarshaldj is right, the GOP has a much more impressive track record when it comes to being on the right side of civil rights during critical points in history, but articles like these trying to claim MLK Jr. as a card-carrying Republican are just embarrassing because they're not true and is just as silly as the gay rights activists claiming every major figure in history was gay. You will note the article doesn't go on to cite any examples of MLK Jr. being "Republican", because there aren't any. He probably leaned conservative in the 50s but he was never much of a party person in any era, and by the late 60s it was clear he considered conservative Republicans to be the enemy.
Another one that peeves me is the "Abraham Lincoln was elected President on a third party ticket" myth that keeps getting posted over and over again by the "conservatives should quit the GOP and form a third party" crowd. The "Lincoln was in a third party" has likewise been debunked numerous times but continues to be posted. The GOP was not a "third party' in 1860, you could make a case that it was from 1854-1856, but Lincoln never ran for office as a "Republican" during that time.
I started in the first thread where I replied at post #5, but it becomes a running discussion.
Noteworthy was that the last Black Republican elected from a majority Black district in the North to Congress, Chicago’s Oscar Stanton DePriest, was no “liberal.” Indeed, it was because of his firm belief that embracing the welfare-state policies of FDR would have a horrific impact in the Black community and discourage self-reliance for dependence (visionary, anybody ?) that he narrowly lost reelection to a 4th term in 1934 (Blacks were still supporting the GOP up until that point, both North and South) for a Black Dem who saw no problem with the welfare policies. To this date, that district (IL-1) has never elected a Congressmember favoring self-reliance and opposition to welfare state policies ever since.
Indeed, it was the “racial” issue that forestalled a potential political alliance between Republicans and anti-FDR Southern Democrats (where they would agree on foreign policy and other aspects of big government, the Republicans simply couldn’t understand the mindset of the Southern Dems and their antipathy towards racial equality). One of the most prominent Southern Republican officeholders from my state of TN, Carroll Reece, who served aside from a few terms from 1921-1961, became the first RNC Chairman from the South and presided over the party when it won back Congress in 1946, was a solid Conservative and 100% pro-Civil Rights. It’s a name almost forgotten today. He had hoped to turn my state Republican as it entered the ‘50s, but it would be a decade after his death before the GOP would live up to that.
The problem, too, is that the Dems went from opposing many Civil Rights reforms to favoring radical measures that would end up creating devastating impacts (welfare state, the driving-away of Black fathers, etc.) with no timetable to reassess the impact and open pandering and race-baiting for those that would issue intellectual objections to the measures (witness the vilification of Goldwater, who was a non-racist and pro-Civil Rights, but believed the CRAs were overreaches that would have negative impact and were an affront to states rights, not the right to defend racism, but as with any heavy-handed federal mandate).
As is said, history is a bit more complex than it is often portrayed and full of facts we can use to our advantage (such as the DePriest example above) without having to resort to making up dubious conclusions about MLK that have no proof to back them up (and even if MLK WAS proven a Republican until his death in 1968, do we think somebody that favored federal-based, Socialist solutions to the Black community’s problems is something we should be crowing about ? Those conclusions deserve widespread condemnation after seeing decades of their negative impact).
This is excellent!
Bookmarked.
Keep scrolling down.
Yeah, but if we’re fighting back with lies, we’re still liars. This issue shouldn’t even be about MLK, it ought to be about the 200 years of collective damage the Democrats have done to Blacks. From Slavery on the plantations until the 1860s to violent assassinations and political coup d’etat of newly empowered Blacks in the Reconstruction era to Jim Crow and the Klan from Reconstruction to the 1960s and to the welfare plantation and crime ridden neighborhoods, economic cesspools, drugs and dismantled families from the 1960s to today. All Democrat policy.
I agree; we're on the same page.
The article does primarily concentrate on the inexplicable support that blacks have given to the party that has used them like prison ho's for decades, so there isn't any need for the MLK stuff anyway.
The GOP, until recent times, has always represented the entire population. FieldmarshalDJ is usually right. Both parties were alarmed at the following MLK garnered in the 60’s and the kneejerk influence from the Black Muslim movement. That almost all of that and the tragedies resultant has been thoroughly coated with conspiracy pretty much tells the tale. Power always wins.
NOW: We have the first black guy running for President unable to acknowledge patriotism or love for his country; a harridan pseudo-wife of a sleazy ex-president trying to pretend what she’s not and an unstable Vietnam POW who may or may have not been brainwashed during his extensive captivity.
This myth that "Democrats were conservative" is pushed by neoconfederates to justify the ideology of their ancestors, forgetting the fact that it was SOUTHERN DEMOCRATS who pushed for the income tax (to soak northern industrialists) and for the redistribution of wealth away from the north.
Of course, it turned out Bilbo was also a crook (in fact, he had so audaciously accepted a bribe in voting for a particular Senate candidate that a resolution denouncing him "unfit to sit with honest, upright men in a respectable legislative body" was passed. Of course, in keeping with what we observe that the trash rises to the top in the Dem party, that didn't stop his rise to Governor and Senator). When more bribery allegations came to light (regarding WW2 contractors) and that he openly incited violence against Blacks at the polls in 1946, the GOP majority Senate refused to seat him. He died before the body could expel him for malfeasence (the cause being cancer of the mouth, which Black Republican Charles Evers, Medgar's brother, described as being "poetic justice").
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