WASHINGTON, Feb. 19, 2005
GOP's Proud Black Legacy
NRO: Democrats Have History Of Stabbing Blacks In Back
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Today marks the 90th anniversary of a very special White House ceremony. President Woodrow Wilson hosted his Cabinet and the entire U.S. Supreme Court for a screening of D. W. Griffith's racist masterpiece, Birth of a Nation. The executive mansion's first film presentation depicted, according to Griffith, the Ku Klux Klan's heroic, post-Civil War struggle against the menace of emancipated blacks, portrayed by white actors in black face. As black civil-rights leader W.E.B. DuBois explained: In Griffith's 1915 motion picture, "The freed man was represented either as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful idiot."
Thumbs up, Wilson exclaimed. The film "is like writing history with lightning," he remarked, adding, "it is all so terribly true."
This vignette -- recently recounted in Ken Burns's PBS documentary, Unforgivable Blackness -- was neither the first nor last time a prominent Democrat plunged a hot knife in black America's collective back. Each February, Black History Month recalls Democrat Harry Truman's 1948 desegregation of the armed forces and Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson's signature on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the greatest black legislative victory since Republican Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1863. This annual commemoration, however, largely overlooks the many milestones Republicans and blacks have achieved together by overcoming reactionary Democrats.
The House Policy Committee's 2005 Republican Freedom Calendar offers 365 examples of GOP support for women, blacks, and other minorities, often over Democratic objections. Among its highlights:
Contemporary partisan hyperbole? Consider this 1866 comment from Governor Oliver Morton (R., Ind.), who is immortalized in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall: "Every one who shoots down Negroes in the streets, burns Negro school-houses and meeting-houses, and murders women and children by the light of their own flaming dwellings, calls himself a Democrat," Morton said. "Every New York rioter in 1863 who burned up little children in colored asylums, who robbed, ravished, and murdered indiscriminately in the midst of a blazing city for three days and nights, calls himself a Democrat."
White supremacists worked club in hand with Democrats for decades:
Contrast the KKKozy Democrats with the GOP. When former Klansman David Duke ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 as a Republican, national GOP officials scorned him. Local Republicans endorsed incumbent Democrat Edwin Edwards, despite his ethical baggage. As one Republican-created bumper sticker pleaded: "Vote for the crook: It's important!"
Republicans also have supported legislation favorable to blacks, often against intense Democratic headwinds:
True, Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) opposed this bill the very year he became the GOP's presidential standard-bearer. However, Goldwater supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and called for integrating Arizona's National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the military. Goldwater feared the 1964 Act would limit freedom of association in the private sector, a controversial but principled libertarian objection rooted in the First Amendment rather than racial hatred.
The Republican party also is the home of numerous "firsts." Among them:
"The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire," Rice has said. "He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."
"We started our party with the express intent of protecting the American people from the Democrats' pro-slavery policies that expressly made people inferior to the state," wrote Rep. Christopher Cox (R., Calif.), who authorized the calendar last year as House Policy chairman. "Today, the animating spirit of the Republican Party is exactly the same as it was then: free people, free minds, free markets, free expression, and unlimited opportunity."
"Leading the organized opposition to these ideas 150 years ago, just as today, was the Democratic Party," Cox continued. "Then, just as now, their hallmarks were politically correct speech; a preference for government control over individual initiative...and an insistence on seeing people as members of groups rather than as individuals."
But what about racial preferences? The GOP's embrace of color-neutral policies parallels Martin Luther King's dream of racial equality over racial scale tipping. "The constitutional amendments that the Republican party supported after the Civil War did not advance preferences by race," Cox told me. "They made government view every person as an individual, not as a member of a racial group."
Alas, even as Republicans promote work over welfare, educational choice, and personal retirement accounts, all of which would empower blacks, some 90 percent of blacks vote Democrat as reflexively as knees kick when tapped with rubber mallets. After inspecting the Democrats' handiwork -- e.g. the tar pit that is public assistance, the Dresden that is the ghetto school system, and the pyramid scheme that is Social Security (which robs too many blacks who die before recouping their "investment") -- black Americans should ask Democrats: "Yesterday's gone. What have you done for us lately?"
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is an advisory board member of Project 21, a Washington-based network of black free-market advocates.
By Deroy Murdock
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online
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