But you won't see this on your 6 o'clock news!

Source: CNS News

Jim Crow and The Donkey: A True History the Left Loves To Ignore

By Ken Blackwell

You know you've hit a sore spot when the Left starts screeching.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's producer, Steve Benen, just took a whack at the American Civil Rights Union's new booklet, "The Truth About Jim Crow," (TTAJC) which National Review Online writer John Fund wrote about in a recent column.

Benen cites a critique from the Atlanta Journal Constitution blogger Jay Bookman: "Jay Bookman took a closer look at the pamphlet Fund's piece was promoting, highlighting some of its more glaring errors of fact and judgment."

And what errors of fact would those be, Steve? Bookman did not point out a single factual error. Instead, regarding TTAJC's three main points, that Jim Crow was "dehumanizing, deadly and Democratic," he painfully admitted the paper's accuracy: "that is true as far as it goes." Apparently, Benen believes if you can't find a factual error yourself, it's okay to claim falsely that somebody else did.

Benen also suggests Fund is a hypocrite because he dares to write about civil rights for NRO. In 1957, you see, William F. Buckley of National Review wrote an article supporting segregation. But, Buckley wasn't by himself in 1957. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson was busy gutting GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1957 Civil Rights Act, and John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, was voting against it. If Fund is responsible for Buckley, aren't Barack Obama and Harry Reid responsible for Kennedy and Johnson, as well?

If Benen and Bookman can't find any factual errors in TTAJC, then what are they complaining about? The goring of their sacred ox. Benen and Bookman devote their columns to reaffirming the Left's standard dogma about Jim Crow, which TTAJC contradicts. Such heresy cannot be tolerated.

According to Bookman:

"I read the entire pamphlet, and there's a single word that is notable by its absence from a document put out by such a highly conservative organization. That word is "conservative," and there's a very good reason for its absence:

Conservatives - conservatives in the Democratic Party, and conservatives in the Republican Party -- fought against civil rights. They fought hard, they fought bitterly, and in end they lost. The very magazine in which Fund's piece appears, National Review, is a conservative publication that stridently defended segregation.

Liberals and moderates -- again, liberals and moderates from both parties, Republicans and Democrats alike -- fought FOR civil rights.

That is the plain, unvarnished, uncontestable truth. It was never a fight between Democrats and Republicans, it was a fight between liberals and conservatives. Fund knows it. The authors of the ACRU pamphlet know it. And the whole purpose of the pamphlet and similar efforts to rewrite history is to make that truth go away."

Benen adds that the Democrats "dispatched the racists to the GOP," and "segregationists made a new home in the Republican Party in the latter half of the 20th century."

That's the Left's narrative on Jim Crow, and it's dead wrong in both fact and analysis.

Here is the heart of the issue, where the left has hijacked the true history of Jim Crow. The dividing line over Jim Crow was never liberals vs. conservatives; it's far more accurate to describe it as Democrats versus Republicans. Not only in the 1800s, when the KKK served as the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, but right into the 1950s and 1960s. Bookman's assertion that "conservatives in the Republican Party ... fought against civil rights" is utterly false. As historian Dr. John Fonte noted on NRO in 2003, staunchly conservative Republicans led the fight for civil rights in the Senate, including Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, and California Senator Bill Knowland.

In contrast, liberal Democrats remained divided, and liberal senators like William Fulbright and Al Gore, Sr. continued to fight for Jim Crow and white supremacy until the bitter end. One of those incontestably liberal Democrats who fought civil rights tooth and nail was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who switched sides only because he believed supporting civil rights for blacks would cement black support for the Democratic Party. And, how many of the people reading this column knew that the greatest icon of the Democratic Party, liberal John F. Kennedy, voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act?

Further contradicting the Left's narrative, there was no sudden shift of segregationists from Democrat to Republican after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The truth is, white Southerners continued to vote in large numbers for the Democratic Party until the advent of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Democrats never "dispatched" segregationists from their party, as Benen claims. It's more accurate to say Southern Democratic segregationists died off than that they switched parties. In any case, no Southerners shifted from the Democrats to the GOP because the GOP offered shelter to racism. Republicans never adopted racist policies, as Democrats had for more than a century; they did oppose dubious progressive notions like racial quotas as affirmative action. Democrats to this day accuse Republicans of racism for opposing racial preferences, even though, as Fonte notes, liberals including Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, and Adam Clayton Powell all spoke against racial preferences during the Congressional debate on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now there's true hypocrisy.

Certainly, the most rabid segregationist politicians remained in the Democratic Party. Only one Southern Democratic senator who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act switched to the GOP, and that was ironic, considering that a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Act than Democrats. The rest of the segregationists remained comfortably at home in the Democratic Party, which, in 1977, elected former Ku Klux Klan officer Robert Byrd to be its Senate Majority Leader.

Finally, the Leftist narrative about civil rights overlooks the fact that race is not the only issue in America. There are many reasons Southern voters rejected the Democratic Party, which lurched sharply to the left in 1968 and has never come back. Here are a few examples: its blame-America-first foreign policy, its hostility toward business, its promotion of welfare dependency, its hostility to God and religion, its sexual radicalism, and, last but not least, its ongoing identity politics and fanning of the flames of racial division.

Bookman whines, "I'm not sure that 'Jim Crow was Democratic' is really one of the three most important things that we should know about that era."

Actually, it is. There is a reason why Jim Crow, which ended fifty years ago, continues to elicit such strong emotions today, and it's all about partisan politics.

In the 1950s and 1960s, political ideology cut across party lines far more so than it does nowadays. Liberals and conservatives were found in both parties. Today's Democrats range from liberal to far left, while Republicans range from moderate to conservative. The Left benefits from rewriting the history of Jim Crow as a liberal vs. conservative struggle so that it can tar the contemporary, moderately conservative GOP as racist, at least in the eyes of black Democrats.

Jim Crow is also a useful tool for tarring conservative efforts to root out voter fraud as "racist." Both Benen and Bookman take aim at photo ID measures, Benen describing them as "discriminatory." What, exactly, is discriminatory about requiring every American to produce a photo ID before voting? As a longtime international election observer, I can report that virtually every country in the industrialized world requires photo ID for voting. Also, the argument that photo IDs deny people the right to vote is long since disproven. In fact, the UN and the State Department both recommend use of photo IDs to forestall vote fraud in both developed nations and the Third World. The Left's claims that voter ID laws are racist are nothing more than efforts to cloud the real issue, vote fraud, while stirring up racial division and motivating their base.

It all comes down to identity politics, which the Democrats have been practicing since the end of the Civil War, especially when they created Jim Crow. All by themselves.

Editor's Note: Mr. Blackwell is a member of the Policy Board of the American Civil Rights Union.
End of CNS News Editorial

Begin Storm'n Norm'n commentary
I have come to the conclusion that the Democratic Party is the party of Marx, Alinsky, Mao, Hamas, and a host of other anti-American zealots who have lost the honesty of Truman and the integrity of -------  ...I have to leave a blank space here, for at the moment no one comes to mind.  Everything and everybody the party supports stinks of Communism and/or Socialism...and lets not forget racism, a term they like to toss at anyone not supporting their agenda.  You may recall I posted this ↓ not long ago:

While everything depicted in the above collage is true (especially the part about "shaped and molded"), the Democratic Party and their one-party press ignores the facts by simply not reporting to the general public.  Sometimes when one of their kind vehemently expresses the party's innermost feelings they do so without any hestitations .  One such proud member of the Democratic Party as seen here ↓ lets his innermost racist motives go wild:

But you won't see this on your 6 o'clock news!

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And this IS NOT a conspiracy theory...

...it's FACT !!!

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Some more interesting stuff...(from an earlier post):

They all look alike in their robes but underneath they're all Democrats

by Norman E. Hooben Care2 Causes is an extreme Left Wing website that sends out a daily newsletter that exemplifies the twisted mind set of those on the left. I say that they are extreme in that they attempt to persuade their readers by statements that cannot be backed up by facts... like painting a picture of something that does not exist. Their commentary today, Racism Goes Mainstream On Campus is one such attempt. And sadly to say, based on the comments section, that some readers actually believe the words in the newsletter...and I'm not sure if the comments are truly legitimate. Comments can be added by the author of the article under an assumed name to further their cause. The picture (above) can be found (without the added statement) as a lead in to Care2 Causes commentary as if it part of the story (nothing can be further from the truth).

Left Wing writers, instead of simply stating the facts, have a habit of injecting their ideological hate themes into their editorials. One such writer (and I promise I won't veer off track too much) is John Kays, a contributor to the New Blaze. Kays writes an op-ed about Timothy McVeigh where he summarizes his thoughts on the Okalahoma City bombing some years ago. Nowhere in the over 2300 word document is there any realtionship between Timothy McVeigh, the TEA party, and Sarah Palin except in the last paragraph. Kay writes:

Finally, in recent days anti-government sentiment only grows. The Tea-Party
movement is moving further to the right. Could be that they are being
infiltrated with militia and Patriot groups, or that the venom of Sarah Palin, a
mouthpiece for extremists, is just naturally unifying all the multitudinous
factions of the right. Worship of TM is just over the horizon for these
disparate groups who righteously spew hatred for the government no matter what!
A day of reckoning is near at hand-Red Dawn on the shores of the Potomac...

Now I haven't said a whole lot about Sarah Palin but she seems like a decent well rounded patriotic American but militia and venom...give me a break. Now where was I... Oh yeah, that picture that was used by Care2 Causes to illustrate their point...let me illustrate the real story behind that picture...

History shows that the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party. This ugly fact about the Democrat Party is detailed in the book, A Short History of Reconstruction, (Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1990) by Dr. Eric Foner, the renown liberal historian who is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. As a further testament to his impeccable credentials, Professor Foner is only the second person to serve as president of the three major professional organizations: the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians.
Democrats in the last century did not hide their connections to the Ku Klux Klan. Georgia-born Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan wrote on page 21 of the September 1928 edition of the Klan's The Kourier Magazine: "I have never voted for any man who was not a regular Democrat. My father … never voted for any man who was not a Democrat. My grandfather was …the head of the Ku Klux Klan in reconstruction days…. My great-grandfather was a life-long Democrat…. My great-great-grandfather was…one of the founders of the Democratic party."
Dr. Foner in his book explores the history of the origins of Ku Klux Klan and provides a chilling account of the atrocities committed by Democrats against Republicans, black and white.

On page 146 of his book, Professor Foner wrote: "Founded in 1866 as a Tennessee social club, the Ku Klux Klan spread into nearly every Southern state, launching a 'reign of terror' against Republican leaders black and white." Page 184 of his book contains the definitive statements: "In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. It aimed to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life."
Heartbreaking are Professor Foner's recitations of the horrific acts of terror inflicted by Democrats on black and white Republicans. Recounted on pages 184-185 of his book is one such act of terror: "Jack Dupree, a victim of a particularly brutal murder in Monroe County, Mississippi - assailants cut his throat and disemboweled him, all within sight of his wife, who had just given birth to twins - was 'president of a republican club' and known as a man who 'would speak his mind.'"

"White gangs roamed New Orleans, intimidating blacks and breaking up Republican meetings," wrote Dr. Foner on page 146 of his book. On page 186, he wrote: "An even more extensive 'reign of terror' engulfed Jackson, a plantation county in Florida's panhandle. 'That is where Santa has his seat,' remarked a black clergyman; all told over 150 persons were killed, among them black leaders and Jewish merchant Samuel Fleischman, resented for his Republican views and for dealing fairly with black customers."
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. 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.
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.
And then there's this...

The Long, Sad, Violent History of Democrats'
Racial Hatred for Blacks

Perry Drake - May 2003

It has always seemed unnatural and unwise to me whenever I hear someone who's been slandered by a particularly egregious lie reply that they're not going to dignify that accusation with a response. For it has always been crystal clear to me that whenever your honor, integrity and reputation are called into question that you should be quick, thorough and – when circumstances demand – quite loud in defense of them. Otherwise, people will assume that the accusation must carry some weight and the falsity levied against you just might end up sticking. That's what has happened to the political party that I belong to – the Republicans. For decades the Party of Lincoln has been under almost constant assault for being "racist" and "openly hostile" to blacks. However, nothing could be further from the truth – but you would never know it by the party's spineless, practically nonexistent defense of its record on race and civil rights. From the days of Lincoln until the present, blacks have had no better friend, party-wise, than the Republicans. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, the GOP has built an exemplary record on civil rights, particularly if you want to use the Democrat Party as a comparison. The party's first president, Abraham Lincoln, issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, the height of the Civil War, squelching any chance that the European powers of the day would intervene in the conflict in favor of the Confederacy. With the stroke of his pen, Lincoln destroyed the last real hope the Confederacy had for a victory. Soon after the war ended, it was a Republican-controlled Congress that rammed through the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution that, among other things, abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection and due process and addressed blacks' right to vote. In the late 19th century, Democrat governors and Democrat-controlled state legislatures in the South couldn't pass Jim Crow laws fast enough. Those Democrats created a nearly century-long, legal racial caste system that relegated blacks to the lowest educational, political, economic and social strata. I have family members who grew up under Jim Crow. To hear them tell it, it weren't no joke. And let us not forget that during the same period it was Democrats throughout the United States who organized and ran America's premier terrorist organization – the Ku Klux Klan. And speaking of the Klan, remember the great Democrat President Woodrow Wilson? After a screening of D.W. Griffith's paean to the Ku Klux Klan, "Birth of a Nation," Wilson, turned-movie critic, said of the film: "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Needless to say, the NAACP had a different outlook. After its viewing, the civil rights organization was mortified to the point of launching a nationwide protest in 1915 against the film. The group was equally appalled by President Wilson's comments and it launched a public protest against him. Before we move on, one more thing about President Wilson. He was the president who led our nation into WWI with the ringing declaration that it was to make the world "safe for democracy." In Woodrow's mind, though, "democracy" applied to everyone except those annoying little dark-skinned people in America who are always clamoring for civil rights. In 1913, Wilson introduced segregation into the federal government. Yes, dear readers, the man who is worshipped as the utmost "progressive" (where and by who have you heard that term used lately?) of his time allowed federal officials to segregate "toilets, cafeterias and work" areas of various federal departments. It was left to Wilson's successor, Republican Warren G. Harding to scrap the segregation policy. And Warren G. didn't stop there. In 1922, Harding delivered a bold speech in Birmingham, Ala., (A Democrat stronghold that was later known by blacks as "Bombingham") in which he called for black equality. Up to then, no U.S. president had ever spoken so forcefully about civil rights. Harding was elected in 1920. Funny thing about the Republican Party platform that Harding ran under. It called for federal anti-lynching legislation. Guess which party didn't? If you said Democrat, go to the head of the line. Moving on, in answer to the burgeoning civil rights movement in the '50s, it was Democrat governors and Democrat-controlled state legislatures in the South that placed the Confederate battle flag on their state capitol flags. It's an issue that continues to inflame racial passions even today. In 1957, Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, called out his state's National Guard to prevent the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. In response, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent U.S. troops to the city to escort nine frightened black teens into the school past riotous mobs inflamed by Faubus' defiance of a federal court order. Faubus was a Democrat. Eisenhower was a Republican. On June 11, 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block its integration. Wallace was a Democrat. Now, I grant you, John F. Kennedy was the Democrat president who federalized the Alabama National Guard and ordered its units to the university to force its doors open to black students. But it's not generally known that the then-Sen. Kennedy – with an eye on the Democrat presidential nomination for 1960 – voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the law that really got the ball rolling on federal civil rights legislation. And it was Kennedy's brother, Robert, who in 1964 assisted the FBI's efforts to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by approving the wiretapping of the man considered the heart and soul of the civil rights movement. And to think at one time you could find in black homes across the nation what I used to call the Black Person's Trinity: chintzy, black-velvet portraits of JFK, RFK and Dr. King painted side by side. As far as other important civil rights legislation, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would never have became law if not for Republican senators and congressmen whose overwhelming support offset extreme Democrat opposition. Now honesty demands that I admit that I have never been in favor of affirmative action programs. As a black man I find them demeaning, and as an American, divisive. But that's an argument for another day. However, the fact remains that it was President Nixon who implemented the first affirmative action program with the Philadelphia Plan in the late 1960s. The plan required government contractors to set goals and timetables for hiring minorities. Nixon was a Republican. Sure, some will say that it's all well and good to cite the historical record, but what about now? What have the Republicans done of late? I begin by pointing out that Democrats continue to demonstrate a curious affinity for standing in schoolhouse doors, especially when black children are involved. But of late, Democrats are not trying to keep black children out, but in. In public opinion polls on school choice, blacks overwhelmingly favor vouchers to rescue their children from failing schools. No one knows better the damage that poor schools can do to their children's future and communities than blacks. Republicans are in favor of school choice. Democrats aren't. Also in more contemporary times, President Bush appointed two blacks to the highest positions in government ever occupied by blacks in America. Today, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell are very powerful, influential members of the Bush administration. Powell, in fact, is fourth in the succession line for the presidency. Oh, by the way, do you know who is third in line? Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Old "Sheets" himself. The same Byrd of the "white niggers" comments on March 5, 2001, and who was a member of the KKK. And Sen. Byrd was not just any old member. No, sir. He was a "grand kleagle" – a recruiter! Does anyone remember the late war with Iraq? It lasted about a minute but you may have had a chance to notice that the vice chief of operations at Central Command was a brotha – Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks. And let's not let the "fair and free" press off the hook. Back when Jim Crow and segregation were "the law of the land" in the South, the press served as cheerleaders for all those kind, compassionate Democrats as they lovingly lynched black people by the hundreds on a yearly basis. Small wonder that the press behaved as badly as it did, though. The people who ran those papers, which proudly featured the brutalized and desecrated bodies of black lynching victims on their front pages quite frequently, were all Democrats. Today, whenever a Republican says anything that can be twisted by Democrats and race hustlers to smack the least bit of racism, the press is quick to pounce on him like Jesse Jackson on a bag of stolen federal dollars. The hypocrisy of the press on matters of race is appalling. Just take a walk into your average newsroom and tell me what you see? Wait, I'll save you the trip – a sea of white faces and sprinkled here and there, a black face or two. Or better still, tune in to any one of the numerous weekly Sunday news shows and what you'll find is overwhelming white. Now here's a homework assignment – what political party do you think most of the members of the press belong to? Here's a hint – Democrat. I need not end here. I could go on all day citing example after example on this matter (Does the name Bull Connor ring a bell, for instance? A Democrat. Hah!). But it would be heartening indeed if the next time accusations of racism are hurled against them, that Republicans would grow a spine and quickly, thoroughly and – when circumstances demand – quite loudly defend their honor, integrity and reputation.

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Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. – Winston Churchill

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