[Sam the Sham]

True.

But the Civil Rights movement was the logical outcome of the New Deal. Remember Eleanor Roosevelt's public embrace of Marian Anderson after the DAR would not let her use their hall for a concert because she was black. Remember Truman's desegregation of the armed forces and early civil rights moves.

A conservative, night-watchman state would never have instituted the Voting Rights Act or what amounted to upending the traditional social hierarchy of an entire culture. Successive GOP administrations did not even pass an anti-lynching law.

[vanmorrison]

"But the Civil Rights movement was the logical outcome of the New Deal."

The "Civil Rights movement" may have been the logical outcome of the "New Deal". But I don't get how any movement that embraced the concept of total governmental control of every aspect of our lives, such as Communism, Fascism, or the "New Deal", could by any stretch of the imagination be labeled a force for individual rights and freedom.

The people who might have attended the DAR concert had every right to refuse to participate in this exclusionary activity of a PRIVATE organization by NOT ATTENDING, or staging their own concert WITH Marion Anderson. Today's blacks need to appreciate, as Booker T. Washington did, that you can't have individual freedom and liberty without private property rights.

And, yes, Truman did the right thing by integrating the military. But even Roosevelt, the Democrats' demigod, didn't go that far.

"A conservative, night-watchman state would never have instituted the Voting Rights Act or what amounted to upending the traditional social hierarchy of an entire culture."

The fact is the Voting Rights Act was passed with the majority of the Republicans supporting it and the majority of the Democrats opposing it. The notion that Democrats were responsible for the success of the "Civil Rights movement" is the biggest case of national historical amnesia in existence! That is, excepting the national historical amnesia concerning the fact that the Republicans were also responsible the Emancipation Proclamation!

"Successive GOP administrations did not even pass an anti-lynching law."

The notion of passing a special anti-lynching law as some sort of litmus test of support of "Civil Rights" is patently ridiculous, on a par with "Hate Crime" legislation. The law already identified MURDER ITSELF as a heinous crime. Besides, all of the lynching was happening in the south, which was the land of the Democrats!

Your positions are further examples of how woefully ignorant today's Americans generally, and blacks specifically, are of their own history.

[colorado tanker]

Roosevelt was a master politician. He made everyone think he favored civil rights (and in his heart he probably did), and Eleanor (and even Franklin) made several public gestures, but he wasn't going to take the step that he knew could break up the Solid South. It was up to his successor to do that.

The Republicans wouldn't pass Civil Rights legislation? How about the Eisenhower era civil rights bill?

Republicans supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act in higher percentages than the Dems. But ever since 1932 and the Dem dominance of Congress everyone knew that the final action to end Jim Crow and segregation had to come from the Dems and that would only happen when the northern liberals were ready to take on the southern conservatives, a step Roosevelt always avoided.

Republicans didn't outlaw lynching? Silly me, I thought murder was illegal in the 1920's.