– May 22, 1856: Two years after the
Grand Old party’s birth, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner (R., Mass.) rose to decry
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.
– July 30, 1866: New Orleans’s
Democratic government ordered police to raid an integrated GOP meeting, killing
40 people and injuring 150.
– September 28, 1868: Democrats in
Opelousas, Louisiana killed nearly 300 blacks who tried to foil an assault on a
Republican newspaper editor.
– October 7, 1868: Republicans
criticized Democrats’ national slogan: “This is a white man’s country: Let
white men rule.”
– April 20, 1871: The GOP Congress
adopted the Ku Klux Klan Act, banning the pro-Democrat domestic terrorist
group.
– October 18, 1871: GOP President
Ulysses S. Grant dispatched federal troops to quell Klan violence in South
Carolina.
– September 14, 1874: Racist white
Democrats stormed Louisiana’s statehouse to oust GOP Governor William Kellogg’s
racially integrated administration; 27 are killed.
– August 17, 1937: Republicans
opposed Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Supreme Court nominee,
U.S. Senator Hugo Black (D., Al.), a former Klansman who defended Klansmen
against race-murder charges.
– February 2005: The Democrats’
Klan-coddling today is embodied by KKK alumnus Robert Byrd, West Virginia’s
logorrheic U.S. senator and, having served since January 3, 1959, that body’s
dean. Thirteen years earlier, Byrd wrote this to the KKK’s Imperial Wizard:
“The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth
here in West Virginia.” Byrd led Senate Democrats as late as December 1988. On
March 4, 2001, Byrd told Fox News’s Tony Snow: “There are white n*ggers. I’ve
seen a lot of white n*ggers in my time; I’m going to use that word.” National
Democrats never have arranged a primary challenge against or otherwise pressed
this one-time cross-burner to get lost.
Contrast the KKKozy Democrats with
the GOP. When former Klansman David Duke ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 as
a Republican, national GOP officials scorned him. Local Republicans endorsed
incumbent Democrat Edwin Edwards, despite his ethical baggage. As one Republican-created
bumper sticker pleaded: “Vote for the crook: It’s important!”
Republicans also have supported
legislation favorable to blacks, often against intense Democratic headwinds:
– In 1865, Congressional Republicans
unanimously backed the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional.
Among Democrats, 63 percent of senators and 78 percent of House members voted:
“No.”
– In 1866, 94 percent of GOP senators
and 96 percent of GOP House members approved the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing
all Americans equal protection of the law. Every congressional Democrat voted:
“No.”
– February 28, 1871: The GOP Congress
passed the Enforcement Act, giving black voters federal protection.
– February 8, 1894: Democratic
President Grover Cleveland and a Democratic Congress repealed the GOP’s
Enforcement Act, denying black voters federal protection.
– January 26, 1922: The U.S. House
adopted Rep. Leonidas Dyer’s (R., Mo.) bill making lynching a federal crime.
Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure.
– May 17, 1954: As chief justice,
former three-term governor Earl Warren (R., Calif.) led the U.S. Supreme
Court’s desegregation of government schools via the landmark Brown v. Board of
Education decision. GOP President Dwight Eisenhower’s Justice Department argued
for Topeka, Kansas’s black school children. Democrat John W. Davis, who lost a
presidential bid to incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924, defended
“separate but equal” classrooms.
– September 24, 1957: Eisenhower
deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock’s government
schools over the strenuous resistance of Governor Orval Faubus (D., Ark.).
– May 6, 1960: Eisenhower signs the
GOP’s 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour filibuster
by 18 Senate Democrats.
– July 2, 1964: Democratic President
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 measure. Illinois Republican
Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and
allow the bill’s passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003,
National Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of
Democrats.
True, Senator Barry Goldwater (R.,
Ariz.) opposed this bill the very year he became the GOP’s presidential
standard-bearer. However, Goldwater supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights
Acts and called for integrating Arizona’s National Guard two years before Truman
desegregated the military. Goldwater feared the 1964 Act would limit freedom of
association in the private sector, a controversial but principled libertarian
objection rooted in the First Amendment rather than racial hatred.
– June 29, 1982: President Ronald
Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Republican party also is the home
of numerous “firsts.” Among them:
– Until 1935, every black federal
legislator was Republican. America’s first black U.S. Representative, South Carolina’s
Joseph Rainey, and our first black senator, Mississippi’s Hiram Revels, both
reached Capitol Hill in 1870. On December 9, 1872, Louisiana Republican
Pinckney Benton Stewart “P.B.S.” Pinchback became America’s first black
governor.
– August 8, 1878: GOP supply-siders
may hate to admit it, but America’s first black Collector of Internal Revenue
was former U.S. Rep. James Rapier (R., Ala.).
– October 16, 1901: GOP President
Theodore Roosevelt invited to the White House as its first black dinner guest
Republican educator Booker T. Washington. The pro-Democrat Richmond Times
newspaper warned that consequently, “White women may receive attentions from
Negro men.” As Toni Marshall wrote in the November 9, 1995, Washington Times,
when Roosevelt sought reelection in 1904, Democrats produced a button that
showed their presidential nominee, Alton Parker, beside a white couple while
Roosevelt posed with a white bride and black groom. The button read: “The
Choice Is Yours.”
– GOP presidents Gerald Ford in 1975
and Ronald Reagan in 1982 promoted Daniel James and Roscoe Robinson to become,
respectively, the Air Force’s and Army’s first black four-star generals.
– November 2, 1983: President Reagan
established Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday, the
first such honor for a black American.
– President Reagan named Colin Powell
America’s first black national-security adviser while GOP President George W.
Bush appointed him our first black secretary of state.
– President G.W. Bush named Condoleezza Rice
America’s first black female NSC chief, then our second (consecutive) black
secretary of State. Just last month, one-time Klansman Robert Byrd and other
Senate Democrats stalled Rice’s confirmation for a week. Amid unanimous GOP
support, 12 Democrats and Vermont Independent James Jeffords opposed Rice �
the most “No” votes for a State designee since 14 senators frowned on Henry
Clay in 1825.”
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