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Five Decades of Lies Help Democrats Create Monolithic Black Vote

By Larry Elder

As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted Republican in that year’s presidential election. After the Civil War, Abe Lincoln’s Republican Party easily carried the black vote — where blacks were allowed to vote. Unwelcome in the Democratic Party, most blacks voted Republican and continued to do so through the early part of the 20th century. It wasn’t until 1948, when 77 percent of the black vote went to Harry Truman, who had desegregated the military, that a majority of blacks identified themselves as Democrats.

Yet, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats. For his key role breaking the Democrats’ filibuster and getting the act to pass the stalled Senate, Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, a conservative from Illinois, landed on the cover of Time magazine. President Lyndon Johnson called Dirksen “the hero of the nation.” The Chicago Defender, then the country’s largest black daily newspaper, applauded Dirksen’s “generalship” for helping to successfully push through the bill.

Older black voters sometimes explain they’re opposed to Republicans because of the “racist” Southern strategy. But Richard Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchannan, credited with inventing the “Southern strategy,” considered the Democratic Party the party of the racists. Buchanan said: “We would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states’ rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the ‘party of [Democratic Georgia Gov. Lester] Maddox, [1966 Democratic challenger against Spiro Agnew for Maryland governor George] Mahoney and [Democratic Alabama Gov. George] Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.’”

But before that, another pivotal event occurred that helped the GOP-as-racist meme. In 1960, during the presidential campaign, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested following a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Atlanta. Hundreds of other protestors were released, but King was jailed on a trumped-up probation violation for failing to have a Georgia driver’s license.

King’s aides reached out to then-Vice President and Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon. They also reached out to the Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy called the Atlanta judge handling the case. Shortly after that call, the judge released King. Nixon, according to Harry Belafonte, a King supporter, “did nothing.” Is that true?

Nixon, it turns out, had a much closer relationship with King than did Kennedy.

In the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., records show considerable handwritten notes and correspondence between Nixon and King. This includes a 1957 letter from King acknowledging their previous meetings, which thanked Nixon for his “assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality,” and praised him for his “devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.”

But in 1960, on the eve of the election, Nixon was in a tough spot. Nixon’s public silence might be misconstrued as acceptance of King’s arrest. On the other hand, as a candidate for his boss’s job, Nixon worried about the political costs of appearing ungrateful if he chastised President Dwight Eisenhower for not taking stronger action. Eisenhower, however, was content to let the Justice Department handle the matter.

According to historian and presidential biographer Stephen Ambrose, while Nixon made no public comments, he telephoned Attorney General William Rogers to find out if King’s constitutional rights were being infringed, thus opening the door for federal involvement. Nixon, a lawyer, was concerned about the ethics of calling a judge to get him to release someone.

Nixon, writes Ambrose, told his press secretary: “I think Dr. King is getting a bum rap. But despite my strong feelings in this respect, it would be completely improper for me or any other lawyer to call the judge. And Robert Kennedy should have known better than to do so.” That Bobby Kennedy, also a lawyer, nevertheless made a phone call to the judge did not alter the issue of whether it was appropriate. In retrospect, an easy call, but not at the time.

Two million pamphlets titled, “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy,” were distributed in black churches. Never mind that in 1956 Nixon revealed he was an honorary member of the NAACP. Or that Nixon pushed for passage of the ’57 civil rights bill in the Senate. Or that Time magazine wrote that Nixon’s support for civil rights incurred the wrath of one of his segregationist opponents, Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., who sarcastically called Nixon the NAACP’s “most distinguished member.”

But the GOP-is-racist meme can be heard nightly on MSNB-Hee Haw and in political science and history classes all over the country. Actor Morgan Freeman calls the tea party racist. Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., tells us that the GOP wants to “literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.”

Keeping blacks ignorant of history remains crucial to this caricature of the Republican Party — and to the monolithic Democratic black vote. Not so black and white, is it?

subgenius wrote:Jim Crow laws were written by and passed by the Democrats...the irony

When Richard Nixon courted voters with his Southern Strategy, many Democrats became Republicans and the South became fertile ground for the GOP, which conversely was becoming more conservative as the Democrats were becoming more liberal. However, Democratic incumbents still held sway over voters in many states, especially those of the Deep South. Although Republicans won most presidential elections in Southern states starting in 1964, Democrats controlled nearly every Southern state legislature until the mid-1990s and had a moderate(although not huge) amount of members in state legislatures until 2010. In fact, until 2002, Democrats still had much control over Southern politics. It wasn't until the 1990s that Democratic control gradually collapsed, starting with the elections of 1994, in which Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, through the rest of the decade. Republicans first dominated presidential elections in the South, then controlled Southern gubernatorial and U.S. Congress elections, then took control of elections to state legislatures and lastly came to control local offices in the South. Southern Democrats of today who vote for the Democratic ticket are mostly urban liberals. Rural residents tend to vote for the Republican ticket, although there are a sizable number of Conservative Democrats.

beastie wrote:Of course, one mustn't remember that the racist Democrats fled the democratic party and became... republicans.

ldsfaqs wrote:

beastie wrote:Of course, one mustn't remember that the racist Democrats fled the democratic party and became... republicans.

Actually, you and Quasi need to remember the actual facts of history instead of liberal propaganda.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3LqPedoxSk

Further, the people of the South actually started to LOSE their "racism". After all, don't the Democrat's claim they are no longer racists?

FYI, there are no "racist republicans" moron! We are the same people we've always been.
Liberal lying like anti-mormon lying isn't truth and fact. I've only seem maybe literally "1" actual racist republican out of a 100,000, and even most of those is because of their "morality" not their race, so it sounds like they are attacking race, but instead attacking the morality and character of the race, a.k.a. their liberalism, criminality, etc.

Anyway, I know Republicans, and we are not and never have been "racists".
We simply don't have to lie about others to lead, like liberals do. I mean really, Democrat's changing their name from Progressive to Liberal because progressive became a bad word, co-opting classical liberalism "libertarianism" a.k.a. republicanism is clear indication the Liars you people are.

beastie wrote:
Seriously, this is why our government can no longer function.

We have government officials who are actually catering to people like ldsfaq and droopy. Worse, they may even be like them.

ldsfaqs wrote:
1. You are seriously confused. Republican/Conservative values are what created this country and made it great. Liberalism has only ever been gradually destroying it.

Liberalism has caused us to basically "lose" the last several wars.
Liberalism has caused state and city economy's to be thrashed and made people poor and dependent.
Liberalism has thrashed the Health Care system, and the latest version is going to destroy it even more.
Liberalism has turned blacks and other minorities into a "new kind" of "slave".
Liberalism has murdered millions of innocent children but won't lift a finger to populate control animals.
on and on.....

There is nothing "good" with liberalism that conservatism doesn't already have.

2. Why don't you provide an actual rebuttal well thought out, reasoned, and based on the facts instead of personal attacks if your position is so "superior"?

Liberalism has murdered millions of innocent children but won't lift a finger to populate control animals.

But by 1968 Nixon was still not guaranteed the loyalty of Southern Republicans. Thurmond had installed Dent as chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, and Dent had organized his fellow Southern chairmen in a scheme to vote their delegations as a block at the convention. But first they would play hard to get, making the three top contenders — Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller — come down South and beg for their hand. According to legend, Rockefeller, despised by them anyway as a civil rights liberal, nearly disqualified himself by trying to pour sugar on his grits. Reagan, the sentimental favorite, ruled himself out by refusing to say whether he was officially running. Nixon met the state chairmen on May 31, 1968, in Atlanta, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was interred six weeks earlier. He walked off with the prize after pledging to appoint “strict constructionist” Supreme Court justices and choose a running mate “acceptable to all sections of the party” — in other words, one signed off on by Thurmond. The South was now not just a player in Republican politics. It was calling the tune.

“Four years ago it would never have occurred to Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller to go politicking in the South,” Richard Dougherty of The Los Angeles Times wrote, marveling at the accomplishment of South Carolina’s “conservative and articulate” state chairman. That one word — “articulate” — spoke volumes. Dent claimed his truest passion was healing the South’s wounded regional pride: the shame at being condescended to by Yankees. At the 1968 Republican National Convention, Dent deployed his mastery of wounded Southern pride to keep restless Dixie convention delegates united behind Nixon instead of Reagan. Then, in the general election, he ran the “Thurmond Speaks for Nixon-Agnew” committee, which was ostensibly “independent” of the official campaign, lest Nixon be excoriated by pundits for campaigning in the South, as one internal memo put it, “in regional code words.” President Nixon rewarded Dent with a White House job as his keeper of those same regional code words, the man in charge of demonstrating to the South that the White House would not be working to enforce federal civil rights laws, while appearing publicly to endorse them. That move would soon be enshrined in the press as the “Southern Strategy.”

Most of Dent’s days were spent working the back channels, assuring Southerners that the administration would stonewall federal court desegregation decisions. After Nixon’s first Supreme Court nominee, South Carolina’s Clement Haynsworth, withdrew under a cloud of corruption allegations, the president ordered Dent to “find a good federal judge further South and further to the right.” Dent obliged him with G. Harrold Carswell, who once campaigned for the Georgia State Legislature with the credo, “I believe that segregation of the races is proper and the ONLY practical and correct way of life in our states.” Nixon, following Dent’s example, argued that the opposition to Carswell’s nomination was mere regional bigotry against the South. Liberals, not without reason, regarded Dent, Time reported, as “a Southern-fried Rasputin in the Nixon administration.”

The lay preacher in Dent suffered from a guilty conscience. In his 1978 memoir, “The Prodigal South Returns to Power,” Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. “The aim of the Southern strategy,” he claimed, was merely “to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A.” Three years later, when he retired from law to preach the Gospel full time, he came clean. Yes, he admitted, of course he had exploited race to aggrandize Southern power. “When I look back,” he said, “my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people.”

beastie wrote:
So I took twenty or so minutes of my time this morning to actually try and reason with you. I predict it will be a complete and utter waste of time. That's why I usually just dismiss your comments with a groan. Is this what you want?

ldsfaq:
Liberals are evil liars!

beastie rebutall:
No, liberals are not evil liars. Liberals, like conservatives, genuinely believe that their ideas will better serve the country.

ldsfaq:
LIAR!

Do you really imagine that any sane person would want to engage in such a dialogue after that same person realizes this is what dialogue with you looks like?

Obama's policies haven't taken effect like he wanted because the Republicans have to water down or flat out reject everything he proposes. Because the well being of this nation and its economy isn't important to them. They unwittingly admitted that when they said from the beginning that their #1 priority is to make sure Obama doesn't see a second term. Now how do you think politicians in Congress can manage to accomplish something like this? Well, there is only one way. They have to fight tooth and nail against everything he proposes, even if it is something they agree with, which has happened several times already. And after making sure nothing he wants gets accomplished, they bitch and moan about how he hasn't accomplished anything. It is a deceptive tactic that works on the feeble minded, which usually means Right Wingers. It is just a play to their base, and isn't working to sway the undecided.

They don't care about America. They care only about their power grabs.

Brackite wrote: Both sides have been guilty of this here beastie.

Obama's policies haven't taken effect like he wanted because the Republicans have to water down or flat out reject everything he proposes. Because the well being of this nation and its economy isn't important to them. They unwittingly admitted that when they said from the beginning that their #1 priority is to make sure Obama doesn't see a second term. Now how do you think politicians in Congress can manage to accomplish something like this? Well, there is only one way. They have to fight tooth and nail against everything he proposes, even if it is something they agree with, which has happened several times already. And after making sure nothing he wants gets accomplished, they bitch and moan about how he hasn't accomplished anything. It is a deceptive tactic that works on the feeble minded, which usually means Right Wingers. It is just a play to their base, and isn't working to sway the undecided.

They don't care about America. They care only about their power grabs.

http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... 66#p635266