These past couple of weeks have been some of the saddest I’ve seen in my lifetime as an African-American. It began with the tragic, needless, death of George Floyd, but then quickly escalated into some of the most vicious, violent rioting our country has seen in decades.
The Democratic Party, true to form, never lets a crisis go to waste. It has seized on what should be a time of healing and instead made the conversation more divisive by lecturing us all about how systemic racism is supposedly rampant in the United States. The great irony here is that yes, there’s plenty of systemic racism in our country; it’s all wrapped up in the history of the Democratic Party.
The rot goes deep, back to the post-Civil War era. Former slaves and their children were forced for decades to endure the cruel, wretched Jim Crow laws that kept them from advancing in the South. And who was all too happy to keep those laws in place? The Democrats.
The Republican Party had planks in its party platforms addressing the rights of African-Americans in the early 20th century. The Democrats, meanwhile, used the KKK as their stormtroopers, lynching and terrorizing blacks in the South beginning just after the Civil War and continued this practice for a century.
As early as 1888, the Republican platform included a plank affirming the “sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections, and to have that ballot duly counted.”
In 1892, the Republican platform specifically condemned the “inhuman outrages perpetrated upon American citizens for political reasons in certain Southern States of the Union.” The Democrats, those paragons of virtue, refused to include anti-lynching planks or planks addressing racial rights in their platform for all of the early 20th century.
This was the era of Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic president who modern Democrats like to conveniently forget re-segregated different federal government agencies during his presidency. There was also a little racist movie called “Birth of a Nation.” Wilson loved it so much he thought it would be a great idea to screen it at the White House and viewed the film multiple times.
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