History Of The Democrats And The KKK.....(Why the Democrats started the KKK)

The original targets of the Ku Klux Klan were Republicans, both black and white, according to a new television program and book, which describe how the Democrats started the KKK and for decades harassed the GOP with lynchings and threats.

An estimated 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites died at the end of KKK ropes from 1882 to 1964.

The documentation has been assembled by David Barton of Wallbu More..ilders and published in his book "Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White," which reveals that not only did the Democrats work hand-in-glove with the Ku Klux Klan for generations, they started the KKK and endorsed its mayhem.

"Of all forms of violent intimidation, lynchings were by far the most effective," Barton said in his book. "Republicans often led the efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws and their platforms consistently called for a ban on lynching. Democrats successfully blocked those bills and their platforms never did condemn lynchings."

Further, the first grand wizard of the KKK was honored at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, no Democrats voted for the 14th Amendment to grant citizenship to former slaves and, to this day, the party website ignores those decades of racism, he said.

"Although it is relatively unreported today, historical documents are unequivocal that the Klan was established by Democrats and that the Klan played a prominent role in the Democratic Party," Barton writes in his book. "In fact, a 13-volume set of congressional investigations from 1872 conclusively and irrefutably documents that fact.

"The Klan terrorized black Americans through murders and public floggings; relief was granted only if individuals promised not to vote for Republican tickets, and violation of this oath was punishable by death," he said. "Since the Klan targeted Republicans in general, it did not limit its violence simply to black Republicans; white Republicans were also included."

Barton also has covered the subject in one episode of his American Heritage Series of television programs, which is being broadcast now on Trinity Broadcasting Network and Cornerstone Television.

Barton told WND his comments are not a condemnation or endorsement of any party or candidate, but rather a warning that voters even today should be aware of what their parties and candidates stand for.

His book outlines the aggressive pro-slavery agenda held by the Democratic Party for generations leading up to the Civil War, and how that did not die with the Union victory in that war of rebellion.

Even as the South was being rebuilt, the votes in Congress consistently revealed a continuing pro-slavery philosophy on the part of the Democrats, the book reveals.

Three years after Appomattox, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting blacks citizenship in the United States, came before Congress: 94 percent of Republicans endorsed it.

"The records of Congress reveal that not one Democrat � either in the House or the Senate � voted for the 14th Amendment," Barton wrote. "Three years after the Civil War, and the Democrats from the North as well as the South were still refusing to recognize any rights of citizenship for black Americans."

He also noted that South Carolina Gov. Wade Hampton at the 1868 Democratic National Convention inserted a clause in the party platform declaring the Congress' civil rights laws were "unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void."

It was the same convention when Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the KKK, was honored for his leadership.

Barton's book notes that in 1868, Congress heard testimony from election worker Robert Flournoy, who confessed while he was canvassing the state of Mississippi in support of the 13th and 14th Amendments, he could find only one black, in a population of 444,000 in the state, who admitted being a Democrat.

Nor is Barton the only person to raise such questions. In 2005, National Review published an article raising similar points. The publication said in 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate the Little Rock, Ark., schools over the resistance of Democrat Gov. Orval Faubus.

Further, three years later, Eisenhower signed the GOP's 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats, and in 1964, Democrat President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd's 14-hour filibuster, and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats, including Tennessee's Al Gore Sr., failed to scuttle the plan.

The current version of the "History" page on the party website lists a number of accomplishments � from 1792, 1798, 1800, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1824 and 1828, including its 1832 nomination of Andrew Jackson for president. It follows up with a name change, and the establishment of the Democratic National Committee, but then leaps over the Civil War and all of its issues to talk about the end of the 19th Century, William Jennings Bryan and women's suffrage.

A spokesman with the Democrats refused to comment for WND on any of the issues. "You're not going to get a comment," said the spokesman who identified himself as Luis.

"Why would Democrats skip over their own history from 1848 to 1900?" Barton asked. "Perhaps because it's not the kind of civil rights history they want to talk about � perhaps because it is not the kind of civil rights history they want to have on their website."

The National Review article by Deroy Murdock cited the 1866 comment from Indiana Republican Gov. Oliver Morton condemning Democrats for their racism.

"Every one who shoots down Negroes in the streets, burns Negro schoolhouses and meeting-houses, and murders women and children by the light of their own flaming dwellings, calls himself a Democrat," Morton said.

It also cited the 1856 criticism by U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner, R-Mass., of pro-slavery Democrats. "Congressman Preston Brooks (D-S.C.) responded by grabbing a stick and beating Sumner unconscious in the Senate chamber. Disabled, Sumner could not resume his duties for three years."

By the admission of the Democrats themselves, on their website, it wasn't until Harry Truman was elected that "Democrats began the fight to bring down the final barriers of race and gender."

"That is an accurate description," wrote Barton. "Starting with Harry Truman, Democrats began � that is, they made their first serious efforts � to fight against the barriers of race; yet � Truman's efforts were largely unsuccessful because of his own Democratic Party."

Even then, the opposition to rights for blacks was far from over. As recently as 1960, Mississippi Democratic Gov. Hugh White had requested Christian evangelist Billy Graham segregate his crusades, something Graham refused to do. "And when South Carolina Democratic Gov. George Timmerman learned Billy Graham had invited African Americans to a Reformation Rally at the state Capitol, he promptly denied use of the facilities to the evangelist," Barton wrote.

The National Review noted that the Democrats' "Klan-coddling" today is embodied in Byrd, who once wrote that, "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia."

The article suggested a contrast with the GOP, which, when former Klansman David Duke ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 as a Republican, was "scorned" by national GOP officials.

Until 1935, every black federal legislator was Republican, and it was Republicans who appointed the first black Air Force and Army four-star generals, established Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday, and named the first black national-security adviser, secretary of state, the research reveals.

Current Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has said: "The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."

Barton's documentation said the first opponents of slavery "and the chief advocates for racial equal rights were the churches (the Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc.). Furthermore, religious leaders such as Quaker Anthony Benezet were the leading spokesmen against slavery, and evangelical leaders such as Presbyterian signer of the Declaration Benjamin Rush were the founders of the nation's first abolition societies."

During the years surrounding the Civil War, "the most obvious difference between the Republican and Democrat parties was their stands on slavery," Barton said. Republicans called for its abolition, while Democrats declared: "All efforts of the abolitionists, or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient [to initiate] steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and all such efforts have the inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people."

Wallbuilders also cited John Alden's 1885 book, "A Brief History of the Republican Party" in noting that the KKK's early attacks were on Republicans as much as blacks, in that blacks were adopting the Republican identity en masse.

"In some places the Ku Klux Klan assaulted Republican officials in their houses or offices or upon the public roads; in others they attacked the meetings of negroes and displaced them," Alden wrote. "Its ostensible purpose at first was to keep the blacks in order and prevent them from committing small depredations upon the property of whites, but its real motives were essentially political � The negroes were invariable required to promise not to vote the Republican ticket, and threatened with death if they broke their promises."

Barton told WND the most cohesive group of political supporters in American now is African-Americans. He said most consider their affiliation with the Democratic party longterm.

But he said he interviewed a black pastor in Mississippi, who recalled his grandmother never "would let a Democrat in the house, and he never knew what she was talking about." After a review of history, he knew, Barton said.

Citing President George Washington's farewell address, Barton told WND, "Washington had a great section on the love of party, if you love party more than anything else, what it will do to a great nation."

"We shouldn't love a party [over] a candidate's principles or values," he told WND.

"Let me now � warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. � The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism," Washington said.

What do I say? I say the African-American race in America has been the victim of demagoguery and has suffered as no other race as a result.

I think the substance of the article is true. I've expressed my feelings as they relate to the Ku Klux Klan and General Forrest in my about page. Please note that page ends with what I hope is a transcendent note of repentance and forgiveness.

The irreplaceable predicate for forgiveness is repentance which my Bible tells me is a breaking of the heart, a true contrition, a turning away from sin, a change of behavior, and a new course. When the repentance is real and when the trespasser throws himself on the mercy of the eternal judge, the penitent absolutely receives forgiveness. I think this is applicable in the case of Nathan Bedford Forrest but is it applicable to the Democrat party and especially to the race pimps who demagogue this issue?

I'm not sure that it will avail anything by way of changing the black culture to recite the long course of American history in which the Democrat party condoned enslavement and segregation of African Americans. The time horizon of African-American voters is probably not more than a generation and I believe for most of them the world started with the inauguration of Barack Obama. But the author unaccountably fails to deal with more recent history. I don't think there are many community activists in the African-American world who will be easily moved by a review of 19th century politics. Nevertheless, a few reminders about more recent history would not be amiss for the rest of us.

In the sweep of American history the Democrat party as the other wrong side of slavery and the wrong side of segregation up until about the time of Franklin Roosevelt. Interestingly, it was Franklin Roosevelt cousin Teddy who scandalized society by entertaining at first African-American in the White House at dinner. Franklin Roosevelt himself was a patrician and probably a racist but his wife was the public face of the administration on the issue and she captured the hearts of America's Negroes. Harry Truman began seriously to take affirmative steps to undo Jim Crow, for example, he integrated the armed services and acted where he could on a federal level. Eisenhower was no less "correct" in his treatment of the subject but he was prudential and circumspect in the small steps of progress he made. He was nontheatrical, as distinguished from Eleanor Roosevelt, and so never won their hearts back. It was really not until John F. Kennedy, especially through the activities of his brother Robert, popularly understood through his phone call to Martin Luther King in jail that African-Americans began to move solidly into the Democratic camp. Lyndon Johnson, for all of his faults and crimes, was in fact the "Master of the Senate" and as majority leader and as President, Lyndon Johnson guided the great civil rights laws through the Congress-but only after having sabotaged them early on. As the article points out, Johnson had to make treaty with the Republicans against his own party and many instances to get his legislation through. But the popular perception among African-Americans is that it was Republicans who resisted civil right movement. And this impression has stuck to the point where nothing the Republicans can do it shake in the slightest this fixed opinion of 12% of our population about 10% of our voters.

Sensing this dichotomy, Johnson allegedly turned from signing the legislation into law and predicted, "we have lost the South for a generation." Nixon was accused by the left of concocting a Southern strategy based on bigotry. Actually Nixon was in many ways proactive on behalf of civil rights but the perception stood.

Much of this I think has to do with demographics and the great moves by Southern blacks off the sharecropping acres of the South to the great industrial factory towns of the North during the First and Second World Wars. At the end of that migration trail they found themselves in a new world in which the cities were utterly controlled by the bosses and the bosses were all Democrats. These bosses operated on patronage and the seduction of the African American race began as they were induced to become addicted to entitlements.

It is human nature to rationalize one's trespasses and it would be unnatural for a whole race to be possessed of the strength of character of a man like Nathan Bedford Forrest who demonstrated his physical courage and his moral convictions time and again throughout his tumultuous life. But such was his intellectual and moral honesty that in the end he came to the place where he honestly confronted his sins and repented of them. As the African-American "community" descended into a vortex of self-destruction fueled by entitlements, they were conveniently supplied with the demagoguery by their own preachers to rationalize the very behavior that was and is killing them.

It is not by accident that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are "reverends" because for generations the cloth was one of the very few paths out of the under class for blacks. If one thinks of the parish as a precinct and a preacher as a ward healer, the nexus from the Democrat bosses to the most important social institution in the African-American world becomes an easy connection. The bosses were corrupt and they were eager to suborn their ward healers. That meant that black preachers have to deliver the vote and to do that they have to engage in the demagoguery which we know only too well.

As the Democrats contrived to move control of patronage from city bosses to Congressional Committee Chairman, the allegiance of the African-American society moved to the national Democrat party from the local Democrat bosses. Every step of the transition was facilitated by demagoguery.

In the long sweep of American history the Democrat Party for most of its existence was on the wrong side of the original sin of America: slavery and segregation. Today, race demagoguery is big business and big politics. It becomes bigger and bigger as the Democrats manage to federalize everything. I believe it has just put an African-American in the White House. I know of no way that the demagoguery which so affects the African-American world can be washed clean because I see no disposition whatever in the demagogues to come clean.

That is another way of saying that I know of no way that African-Americans can be made to vote against the Democrat ticket for the foreseeable future. Therefore, Republicans and conservatives should look to different demographics. But most of all, Conservatives should articulate a conservative message which is so compelling that races of all flavors will be drawn to it.

The irony is that the Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan should present a model of repentance. The tragedy is that the men of God in the African American community do not.

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