Some Famous Black Republicans:
Martin Luther King Sr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Archibald Carey ( "I have a dream" speech)
Carter Woodson
Frederick Douglass
Alveda C. King (Martin's daughter)
Denzel Washington
Sammy Davis Jr
George Washington Carver
Harriet Tubman
Sojourner Truth
William Thaddeus Coleman
Booker T Washington
Martin Luther King was a Republican
by Frances Rice
It
should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a
Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans.
Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today,
the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for
blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is
as it always has been, the party of the four S’s: Slavery, Secession,
Segregation and now Socialism.
It was the Democrats who fought
to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and
Jim Crow laws. 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 1860’s,
and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
During
the civil rights era of the 1960’s, 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. It was Republican President Dwight
Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent
troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also
appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court which
resulted in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision ending
school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman’s
issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not
mentioned is the fact that it was President Eisenhower who actually
took action to effectively end segregation in the military.
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 Senator Al Gore, Sr. And after he became
president, John F. 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 Attorney General
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, Tennessee
after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Senator
Robert Byrd, 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.
Given the circumstances of
that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was
the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the
Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship
(14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans
passed the civil rights laws of the 1860’s, including the Civil Rights
Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to
establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one
that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and
affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1969
Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set
the nation’s first goals and timetables. Although affirmative action
now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system,
affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to
blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the
blacks out of federal government jobs.
Few black Americans know
that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and
Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Senator Everett
Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights
legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media
stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that
Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the
language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited
discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have
achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of
Republicans.
Critics of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater who
ran for president against Democrat President Lyndon Johnson in 1964,
ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the
South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to
continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.
Those who
wrongly criticize Goldwater, also ignore the fact that President
Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on January
4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only thirty
five words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word
about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King’s
protest against the Viet Nam War, President Johnson referred to Dr.
King as “that Nigger preacher.”
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 known as the party for blacks. Today, some of those
“Dixiecrats” continue their political careers as Democrats, including
Democrat Senator Robert Byrd who is well known for having been a
“Keagle” in the Ku Klux Klan.
Another former “Dixiecrat” is
Democrat Senator 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 Senator Christopher Dodd praised Senator
Byrd as someone who would have been “a great senator for any moment,”
including the Civil War. Democrats denounced Senator Trent Lott for his
remarks about Senator Strom Thurmond. Senator Thurmond was never in the
Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the
discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Senator
Byrd and Senator Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had
his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.
The thirty-year
odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the
1970’s with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which was an
effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop
voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still
discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be
black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states,
including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.
Today,
Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep
blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how
egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.
After
wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a
good thing, the Democrats on August 3rd kept their promise and killed
the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29th. The
blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years
that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black
Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004 blocked passage of a bill
to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and
vetoed twice by President Bill Clinton before he finally signed it.
Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had
passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed
by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would
help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security
reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current
system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for
blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).
Democrats have been running
inner-cities for the past 30-40 years, and blacks are still complaining
about the same problems. Over $7 trillion dollars have been spent on
poverty programs since President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with
little, if any, impact on poverty.
**************
MLK told Vice President Nixon publicly that he had voted Republican
in 1956, but after not voting in 1960 he actually campaigned for Lyndon
Johnson in 1964. See <link> for more information.
**************
As Robert Caro pointed out in his extensive biography of LBJ,
shortly after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in a phone
conversation (on tape at the LBJ Library) with Senator Richard Russell
of Georgia, LBJ said, "That'll keep the niggars voting Democrat for the
next 200 years." That is just part of it.
The real secret is the
penetration of the Democrat Party in the early 20th century by
Communists. Learn more about their techniques, their goals, and their
overall strategy for taking over the USA and dominating the world. They
have achieved many of their aims through the Democrat Party.
Google "Psychopolitics" and "Communist Goals". Read Thomas Fleming's book, The New Dealers' War, the war within WWII
and most anything by David horowitz. Fleming shows that through the
influence of the Communists in FDR's inner circle, including his wife
Eleanor, many of the decisions before and during WWII were made to
assist Joseph Stalin and the USSR, including the decision to enter the
war.
***************
By the 1940s-50s, most Northern Blacks were Democrats (and some were
drawn to radical Communist "Progressives" of the Henry Wallace/Paul
Robeson vintage, of whom were the most vocal about Civil Rights), and
had been that way since about midway through FDR's 1st term (Both
Northern and Southern Blacks had stayed with Hoover in 1932, but began
to shift following the 1934 defeat of the lone Black Republican in
Congress, Chicago's Oscar Stanton DePriest, by a Black Democrat, Arthur
Wergs Mitchell - the first ever elected to federal office). Another
reason was due to the Democrat-run political machines in northern
cities. If you were poor and Black, to align yourself with a minority
party that was out of power meant you'd have little to gain
(ironically, if that mindset were in place today, Blacks would be
substantially Republican).
Southern Blacks, what few could
vote, voted almost polar opposite to their Northern counterparts in
support of Republicans, and did so all the way up until the 1960s. In Tennessee, Black voters were part of a bloc that helped
deliver the state to Nixon over JFK in 1960. The King family, of
course, were Republicans because it was almost unthinkable for a
Southern Black to be a Democrat up until that point. Unfortunately,
once Southern Blacks started to register to vote in larger numbers,
they almost uniformly went to the Democrats.
The NY GOP was vastly different in those days, even
having candidates, such as Vito Marcantonio, whom eventually left to be
the highest-profile American Labor Party member of Congress, was a
Stalinist.
