The Democratic Party’s History with African Americans
Our Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These promises were finally granted to African Americans at the end of the Civil War. Then a battle began as these new citizens worked to exercise their newly acquired rights. At the same time, one institution in the United States has fought against these promises to all Americans for most of our history, the Democratic Party.
The conclusion of the Civil War brought an end to slavery and the loss of over 600,000 American lives.
This was done at a time when the total population of the United States was only 32 million at the start of the war. By the year 1867 the book “The Lost Cause” was written by Edward Pollard, a Democratic Party apologist in an attempt to revise Southern history. In his writing he attempted to justify the war and uphold slavery as a good institution and its benefit to the black population who had to live under it. Fredrick Douglass, a black leader in the abolitionist movement, said this revisionist history was the first step to try to regain in peace what they lost in the war. But by 1867 about 80% of black men were registered to vote in 10 of the 11 confederate states. They were sending delegates to state constitutional conventions on the basis of equal citizenship. As a block, they provided sufficient popular vote margin to send Ulysses S. Grant to the White House in 1869 and gave their states the political power that resulted in the creation of state wide school systems and other infrastructure investments. No one anticipated this level of interest in their right to vote. This right to vote also resulted in over 2,000 newly elected black office holders including Alonzo Ransier, the first black Lt. Governor of South Carolina.
But to the Democratic Party, this had to be stopped. When voter intimidation did not work, they instigated the “Mississippi Plan.” The plan called for new state conventions that were designed to subvert the 15th amendment’s ban on racial discrimination and return Democratic White Supremacy control to Mississippi and South Carolina in particular. To do this, these state conventions implemented poll taxes, literacy tests and residency requirements to suppress the black vote. With the implementation of Jim Crow segregation laws and biased Supreme Court decisions under the Democratic Party, segregation continued and voting was suppressed.
Then in 1912 the Democrats got Woodrow Wilson elected as president. He was the first southern president since the end of the Civil War. He re-segregated federal agency workplaces. With the help of a full length movie, “The Birth of a Nation”, the resulting revitalization of the KKK and Wilson’s executive powers as president, he managed to implement the doctrine of “Separate but Equal.” For this and many other Democratic controlled decisions, Wilson was very unpopular in the end of his term. As a result, the Democratic Party took a terrible beating in the next three presidential elections. Black voters were finally bought off with public funds injected into the economy during the great depression by President Franklin Roosevelt, who did so based on the political needs of the Democratic Party, not the people’s most critical needs.
By 1950 it was estimated that there had been over 4,000 black lives lost by lynching. But despite this and the eugenic work of Planned Parenthood, the black population was over 28,000,000 by 1965 where it had been 4,500,000 at the beginning of the civil war according to the 1860 census. So now the black voters that the Democratic Party had spent a hundred years trying to destroy, would be needed if they ever wanted to win another national election.
The first step was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which was passed with more Republican support than Democratic) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With this the War on Poverty was initiated resulting in the devastating effects on black families. This was a complete turn-around for the Democratic Party to solicit black votes and was followed up by telling black Americans that they were all victims and needed the support of the Democratic Party whose history included the support of “White Supremacy” some fifty years before. This was the same message the Democratic Party had given to the American Indians and later to women in order to secure the woman’s vote. Neither group ever received any benefit for their Democratic support. Then there was the War on Poverty which incentivized blacks not to have the fathers of their children living in the same home. The result was an out of wedlock birth rate of 80% in black families, up from 4% in 1900. This destruction of the black family was an essential element to create their dependency on the government.
A well-known highly educated black man said that there will always be black men who will work to perpetuate the “black struggle” just to keep their jobs as race agitators. Who said this? It was Booker T. Washington, who died in 1915, years before the birth of today’s agitators. But he was right on target. We do not have systemic racism. We did when the Democratic Party fought for slavery. And we did when the Democratic-Republican Party, the predecessors of today’s Democrat party, fought for the three-fifths compromise in the constitution. But fortunately those days are behind us. What we have now is the same party who perpetuated these lies calling everyone else racist when they are in fact holders of a total racist history. Democrats fight the police who are trying to make black neighborhoods safe and Joe Biden’s supporters help the rioters by paying their bail. At the same time, President Trump’s supporters are helping black businesses get back up and operating.
Is it any wonder that many blacks feel like second rate citizens in a country where equality is promised to every citizen? Looking at this history, is it any wonder why black Americans can feel intimidated if stopped by police? This should have never been the case. Or do blacks wonder where the police are when rioters are destroying their businesses and their communities?
In summary, after the most costly war in terms of lives lost of any conflict in American History, the Democrats spent the next century and a half trying to subvert the rights of black Americans in the land of the free and home of the brave where our Founding Fathers mantra was that “all men are created equal.” From their attempted rewrite of history, they tried to justify slavery, racist Democratic judicial rulings, voter suppression, Jim Crow laws, white supremacy, forced segregation, KKK, lynchings and now today’s orchestrated riots by a Democratic affiliated organization such as ANTIFA (Anti-Fascist) and BLM (Black Lives Matter). Is it any wonder why black Americans feel like second class citizens? They deserve better. Enter Donald Trump. He achieved full employment of black Americans with rising wages, returned funding to historic black schools and finally gives African Americans the blessings of liberty they were promised in the founding of this country. And for these reasons the Democratic Party believes President Trump must be destroyed at all costs.
Encouraging you to stand up for the truth
Robert Harrison
Copyright 2020
