Why Are You Still a Democrat?

A History Lesson

This little history lesson is mostly for my black friends and neighbors, but everybody ought to benefit from it.

I asked my brother-in-law “Why do you vote Democrat?”

He said “Because it’s the party of civil rights.”

I knew that was wrong, so I put together a little history lesson.

In 1776, slavery was the universal foundation of economies everywhere, and had been for millennia. When Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” it sent an earthquake throughout the world. Everybody knew that, eventually, slavery as an institution was doomed, especially in the United States of America.

When the Constitution was being developed, northern abolitionists didn't want to count slaves for purposes of determining the sizes of Congressional delegations. After all, they couldn't vote for their representatives — and if they could vote, they would vote for abolitionists. Slave-holding states feared that slavery might be abolished by legislation. They wanted to count all slaves. The compromise was the three-fifths rule. It wasn't “blacks are only three fifths of a man.” It was “Hey! They can't vote!” That rule magnified the sizes of slave-holding states’ Congressional delegations. Rather than a zero-fifths rule, it was more than anything else the reason that slavery was ended by the Civil War instead of by legislation. At least they were able to outlaw the slave trade as of January 1, 1809, the date that Frederick Douglass said blacks should celebrate as their independence day — not June 19, 1865, the date that news of Lee’s surrender reached Galveston, Texas, and Major General Gordon Grainger read Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation and proclaimed slaves in Texas to be free.

Democrat President Andrew Jackson and several other land speculators coveted Indian lands. He asked for, and got, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, granting land west of the Mississippi River, in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. He signed it into law on May 28, 1830. Some groups went willingly, but the Five Civilized Tribes, the Cherokee, Choktaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, who had largely adopted European living styles, instead of taking up arms, appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The court held in their favor, that the Act of 1830 was unconstitutional. President Jackson said “Mr. Chief Justice Marshall has handed down his opinion. Now let him enforce it.” Jackson’s hand-picked successor, Martin van Buren, enforced the act, forcibly removing tribes from their ancestral lands to Oklahoma, during the winter, by way of Ohio. One quarter of them died on the journey, now remembered as “The Trail of Tears.” When oil was discovered on their Oklahoma land, there were attempts to take that, too.

As far as I know, only one Republican ever owned a slave. Ulysses S. Grant’s family were avid abolitionists. He fell in love with Julia Dent, whose family held slaves. His family was much distressed when they married. Julia’s father, Frederick Dent, gave Ulysses a 26-acre farm in the slave state of Missouri, and one slave, named William Jones, as a wedding gift. Grant worked the farm shoulder-to-shoulder with William, as if they were business partners, not master and slave — which annoyed his slave-holding neighbors. When the farm business failed, Ulysses and William tried to make a business of cutting and hauling timber. When that failed too, instead of selling William to pay his debts, Ulysses signed the papers of manumission, making William a free man. His last words to his former business partner were “God protect you William.”

Democrats started the bloodiest war in American history so they could keep their slaves. General Grant admitted Black Americans to the Union Army, which was largely but gradually desegregated during the next thirty years, more in the west than in the east.

After they lost the Civil War, Democrats founded the Terrorist Wing of the Democrat Party, more precisely known as the Ku Klux Klan. One of its founders, the talented Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, left the group because it had become too violent — for a cavalry general! The Second Amendment was the only thing that prevented the KKK from murdering every freed slave.

As freed slaves migrated away from the rural south, labor unions — distinct from craft and trade guilds — were formed in the 1870’s to keep them out of the labor market. The practice is still remarkably effective. For example, in Philadelphia, blacks are 22% of the population, but less than 1% in the all-union construction jobs.

During the Grant Administration, on March 1, 1876, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It affirmed the “equality of all men before the law” and prohibited racial discrimination in public places, public facilities such as railroads and hotels, and the composition of juries.

Black Americans were elected to Federal office, and were employed in the Federal civil service.

In 1882 and 1883, five cases were brought to the Supreme Court, all by Democrats, to challenge the constitutionality of the 1875 Act. They were consolidated and became known as the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). On October 16, 1888 the Supreme Court handed down its opinion, overturning the 1875 Act by holding that the 13th and 14th Amendments did not give the Federal government authority to ban discrimination, that racial discrimination was not a “badge of slavery” prohibited by the 13th Amendment, and that the Federal government could not regulate such actions of private companies — the same argument being advanced today to allow Big Tech to censor online content. This largely nullified the effectiveness of those Amendments.

Nullification of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 cleared the way for Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and lynchings. Every Jim Crow law was passed by a Democrat legislative body, signed by a Democrat executive, and enforced by Democrat law enforcement. Republicans have repeatedly introduced anti-lynching laws, beginning during reconstruction. None of them ever passed, until March 29, 2022, when President Biden took credit for the accomplishment — many years after lynching had stopped, the last being the “high tech lynching” of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearing on October 11, 1991.

The decision in the 1883 cases perpetuated the dreaded “four S’s” of the Democrat party: Slavery, Secession, Segregation, and Socialism. It cleared the way for the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision in 1896, which upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine.

On April 11, 1913, shortly after taking office, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson accepted Postmaster General Albert Burleson’s plan to segregate the Railway Mail Service. Burleson argued that he found it “intolerable that white and Black employees had to work together and share drinking glasses and washrooms.” Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo argued that segregation was necessary “to remove the causes of complaint and irritation where white women have been forced unnecessarily to sit at desks with colored men.” By the end of 1913, Black employees in most federal departments had been relegated to separate or screened-off work areas, and segregated lavatories and lunchrooms. Black employees were appointed or reassigned to menial positions, or to divisions slated for elimination. The government began requiring photographs on civil service applications, to enable racial screening.

On March 21, 1915, the first movie was screened in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. It was a paean to the Ku Klux Klan, entitled The Birth of a Nation, based upon the novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. The premise of the book was that blacks, when free, would become savage and violent, committing crimes such as murder, rape, and robbery far out of proportion to their percentage of the population, and that the KKK was therefore founded as a vigilante justice organization. Wilson confirmed his racism by remarking “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Of course, what happened throughout the Democrats’ Jim Crow years was the opposite: Whites dominated blacks and assaulted black women.

The Birth of a Nation was a silent movie. One of the text slides was a quotation from Wilson’s book The History of the American People:

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern Country.

The military was re-segregated. Wilson defended segregation as being “in the best interest of Black workers,” claiming that harm was injected into the issue only when Black people were told that segregation was intended to inflict humiliation — which was, of course, his intent.

This was all predictable. Wilson bragged that during his tenure as President of Princeton University, not one black student had been admitted.

During World War II, in the European Theater of Operations, General Dwight David Eisenhower desegregated Red Cross clubs and USO clubs, and many units. When he sent black replacements into formerly all-white units, he reported that they “not only fought well, but also encountered little or no resentment from their comrades.” In 1948, Democrat President Harry Truman took credit for desegregating the military. Thoroughly Modern Millie and Lloyd Austin want to re-segregate it now.

On Easter Sunday in 1953, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower saw black children peering from outside the White House, and insisted that their families join the Easter Egg Roll, for the first time. Also in 1953, Republican President Eisenhower appointed Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon to chair a committee that sought to eliminate discrimination on the basis of race or color in the employment practices of government contractors. Of Nixon, Eisenhower said “He had been a troubleshooter in politics and in civil rights, and he had a special talent for understanding and summing up the views of others.”

On May 17, 1954, in the decision in Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the Supreme Court held that “separate” education is inherently not “equal,” effectively overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

On May 31, 1955, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 349 US 294 (1955) the Supreme Court reaffirmed this decision, holding that “all provisions of federal, state, or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle.”

President Eisenhower wrote that “since my boyhood I had accepted without qualification the right to equality before the law of all citizens of this country, whatever their race or color or creed.” After these Supreme Court decisions, he thought he had enough ammunition, so he asked Congress for a Civil Rights Act essentially identical to the 1875 Act. It passed the House of Representatives easily, but the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson, sent it to committees chaired by Southern Democrat segregationists such as Stuart Symington and J. William Fullbright, with the intent to kill it. It emerged from the committees, with all enforcement provisions removed, on the last day of the session, so no vote was taken on it.

President Eisenhower asked for the act again in 1956. When it emerged from the House of Representatives, instead of being as comprehensive as the 1875 Act, its focus was diluted only to increasing the protection of African American voting rights. It faced stiff opposition in the Senate again, but was finally passed on August 7, 1957. All of its enforcement provisions had been removed, so the Act was essentially meaningless. Some of the loopholes of the 1957 Act were closed by the Civil Rights Act of 1960, signed into law by President Eisenhower on May 6, 1960, which again focused primarily on voting rights, but included some enforcement provisions.

During the Presidential campaigns of 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy told the Democrat National Committee “if you do not nominate me, I shall campaign for Richard Nixon.” Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy were close personal friends. When there were allegations of voting fraud in Texas and Illinois, President Eisenhower volunteered to chair a committee to challenge the election. Vice President Nixon said “No, the country needs a President.”

In June 1963, President Kennedy again asked Congress for a Civil Rights act that was nearly identical to the 1875 Act, and the Acts that President Eisenhower had requested but not gotten. It would outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It would prohibit unequal application of voter registration requirements, and prohibit segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination. Democrat Senators, led by Robert Byrd mounted the longest filibuster in Senate history, but because of overwhelming Republican support, the Act passed. 74% of the “no” votes in the Senate were cast by Democrats. 74% of the “no” votes in the House of Representatives were cast by Democrats. Lyndon Johnson was widely known to be an unapologetic racist. But when the Act was passed on July 2, 1964, after the assassination of President Kennedy, he cynically took credit for it, despite having sabotaged the 1955 Act and castrated the 1956 Act. Southern Democrats successfully diluted the 1964 Act, but it was strengthened by the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Thus began the turnabout of the Democrat party, the co-opting of the eternal Republican positions on civil rights, to cast them as their own positions, and the casting of Republicans as the real racists.

Lyndon Johnson had always had his finger in the political wind, testing its direction. When the Supreme Court published their decisions in Brown v. Board of Education, and Congress grudgingly passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and 1964, he saw an opportunity to exploit the shifting winds. He asked Congress for a series of Great Society programs, that were advertised with the intent to eliminate poverty in America. After the programs were passed and he signed them into law, a journalist overheard him bragging on Air Force One “Ah’ll have them niggas votin’ Democrat fer a hunnerd yahrs.” Of course, this remark was not published until many years after his death.

American poverty generally, including among Black Americans, had been steadily declining since the end of World War II, from nearly 80% to barely above 20%.

Johnson asked Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, and Jack Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, to develop plans. Although both are remembered as cheerful good-hearted men, their plans had disastrous effect. So as not to be seen as encouraging laziness, welfare payments were prohibited to families that had an able-bodied man in the house. So fathers left their homes, and had to sneak back in the dark of night to visit their families. Vibrant black communities, led by committed black fathers, disintegrated. Before the Great Society, more than 80% of black families included a father living in the house. Today, fewer than 50% of black families do. Anthropologists everywhere in the world observe that fathers are indispensable to bringing up young men to join society as responsible productive members, not as criminals or lazy layabouts. Zoologists have observed the same phenomenon among animals, especially elephants. The Great Society programs, not rampant white racism or white supremacy, created the current disparities in prosperity and criminality between black communities and other communities.

On Sunday June 12, 2008, at the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago’s South Side, Barack Obama pointed out that this is a problem, but didn’t pin it on Johnson:

We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception…. Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.

The Great Society bulldozed old black neighborhoods, arguing that housing and businesses were dilapidated and ramshackle. They built new “stack and pack” housing projects that were supposed to be better than the old housing. But the effect was to concentrate racism, crime, poverty, and drug use and traffic. Former Representative Allan West wrote that Johnson’s Great Society programs “led to the destruction of the traditional nuclear black family and turned American inner city communities into new economic plantations. Today, the black community is plagued with high unemployment, rampant fatherlessness, the genocidal murdering of our unborn babies, substandard schools, and lagging small business entrepreneurship.“

Poverty stopped declining when the Great Society programs started “working.” Was the Great Society intended to end poverty, or was it a monstrous conspiracy to keep black Americans “in their place?” Was it designed to perpetuate poverty, so that Democrats could claim that they would “fix” poverty? Of course, if they actually “fixed” poverty and racism, they'd have nothing left to claim they could “fix” — so they both have to be perpetuated.

Democrats say “all those southern racist Democrats became Republicans.” But only one, James Strom Thurmond changed parties. He insisted his opposition to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 was not based on racism, but rather on states’ rights.

Democrat Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who stood on the steps of the Little Rock High School to prevent black children from entering, never changed his party affiliation. Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, 22-year Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama used fire hoses and police dogs to disperse civil rights demonstrators. He ensured that Birmingham remained, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., as “the most segregated city in America.” He never changed his party affiliation.

Alabama governor and Presidential candidate George Wallace left the Democrat party, but never became a Republican.

Racist segregationist Democrat Senators Al Gore, Sr., Stuart Symington, J. William Fullbright, Robert Byrd, James Eastland, and many others, never changed their party affiliation. West Virginia didn't have any KKK chapters. It had split from Virginia to join with the Union during the Civil War. Robert Byrd founded a chapter, and was named a Grand Kleagle. At his funeral, then-Vice President Joe Biden praised him as his mentor in the Senate. “We lost the dean of the United States Senate, but also the state of West Virginia lost its most fierce advocate and, as I said, I lost a dear friend.”

In a 1975 NPR interview, Joe Biden said “I think the concept of busing… that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride, … is a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful; black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, with their own individuality.”

In 1977, Joe Biden wrote that certain de-segregation policies would cause his children to grow up “in a racial jungle.” In the quote, which appears to come from a Congressional hearing related to anti-busing legislation, Biden emphasized wanting to “ensure we do have orderly integration of society,” adding he was “not just talking about education but all of society.” He then said “unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have to make some move on this.”

Once again, in other words, he supported segregation.

He boasted that he was “good friends” with segregationists. “I've been around so long, I worked with James Eastland.” On June 30, 1977, he wrote to Senator Eastland “I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week’s Committee meeting in attempting to bring anti-busing legislation to a vote.”

Once again, in other words, he supported segregation.

In a 1998 speech, he called 100,000 juveniles who had been arrested for violent crimes in the U.S. “predators” who “warrant exceptionally, exceptionally tough treatment…. There’s about 100,000 of them, if you want to be rhetorically extreme about it, who are the predators. There are 100,000 really bad apples out there, 100,000 of the kids you read about in the front page of the newspaper every day.”

Joe Biden is not a friend of black people. Every bit as much as Lyndon Johnson, he is a cynically opportunistic racist. He has some explaining to do on race, and racism, and bigotry.

One day on his way home from work, in a driving rainstorm, long before he had any political ambition, Donald Trump had a flat tire. As he was changing it, a black man stopped and helped him. After all was said and done, Mr. Trump offered to pay for his assistance. The man refused. A day later, a lovely floral arrangement arrived at the man’s house. The note on the card said “your mortgage has been paid off.”

Why did Donald Trump buy Mar A Lago? Because it prohibited Black and Jewish members. What was his first act as the new owner? He changed the rules to admit Black and Jewish members.

So much for Trump racism.

The best way out of poverty is education. Booker Taliaferro Washington knew this. Born a slave, instead of complaining or turning to crime, he educated himself, and founded the first historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama. Thomas Sowell is one of the best examples of how education elevates. How is education helping blacks today? Not at all, except in a very few places. Charter schools, with rules independent from public schools, are working. In several schools in Harlem that occupy the same buildings as public schools, but operate differently, black students are getting higher grades on SAT and other examinations than students in the best mostly-white schools, while both white and black kids taking the same classes from different teachers in the same building are utterly failing in every subject. But charter schools are only available to a small number of students, less than 10% in Harlem. They work so well that teachers’ unions hate them. Democrats everywhere, beholden to union financial support, oppose school choice. All parents, and especially black parents, want their kids to have the best opportunities. But teachers’ unions, led by communists such as Randi Weingarten, don't want that to happen.

Most opponents of school choice love the UN more than the USA. So when you meet one, quote Article 26.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

A contemporary of Frederick Douglass said “there is a class of men who do not want the disease to be healed.” Today’s well-known racism hustlers and extortionists know there’s a fortune to be made in keeping it alive, so they can complain about it. Without perpetuating racism, they would have to get honest jobs. You know who they are, and you know their political party affiliation.

The main crop of the new Democrat plantation is no longer tobacco or cotton. Now it’s votes. The chains are no longer iron, but rather lies, alluring but empty promises, and bribes.

Are you still voting Democrat? Why?