BY JAY BRYANT
The old ‘massahs’ of the antebellum South were Democrats. So were their whip-toting overseers. So were the post-bellum white supremacists, the KKK, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, separate but unequal schools and racism in all its hideous manifestations: lunch counters, bus seats, rest rooms and, well, everything.
The Chicago Cubs’ Cap Anson, the greatest baseball player of the 19th century and a hateful bigot, personally saw to it that the National League was a whites-only operation by refusing to play against any team that had a black player, as some did in the 1880’s; But for his racial intransigence, Jackie Robinson’s heroism might have been unnecessary.
When Anson hung up his cleats, he ran and won, as a Democrat, the office of City Clerk of Chicago. (The greatest Cub of the 20th Century, by the way, was Ernie Banks, a black man, and like Robinson a Republican. Banks was defeated in a race for Chicago City Council.)
In 1888, another hideous bigot named Furnifold M. Simmons lost a North Carolina congressional race to a former slave named Henry Cheatham, the candidate of a bi-racial coalition of Republicans and populists that was becoming a dominant force in state politics. Seething with rage and humiliation, Simmons vowed to make North Carolina a white supremacist state, and with the able assistance of Josephus Daniels, founder and editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, he succeeded.
By 1900, after a series of slanderous campaigns and the worst race riot in state history, Simmons had succeeded in disenfranchising black voters and winning election to the United States Senate where he served until the 1930’s.
Daniels’ newspaper is still published and still the propaganda arm of the North Carolina Democrat Party. It still honors its racist founder, with a statue and a daily quote on the editorial page. Daniels himself eventually became Secretary of the Navy in the Woodrow Wilson administration (and thus, young Franklin Roosevelt’s boss). Wilson, indeed, represents an important transition for his party. As do today’s leftists, he liked to call himself a “progressive.” In fact, he was a thoroughgoing racist who segregated the Federal government and hounded black Federal workers from their jobs, and demonstrated that racism was perfectly compatible with liberal politics.
Many black voters – in the North, of course, where they could still vote – had supported Wilson in 1912, and even more went over to FDR’s side in 1932. But all the new deal programs were strictly segregated, and Roosevelt even refused to support an anti-lynching law which Republican Presidents (but not Democrats Cleveland and Wilson) had backed since the 1880’s.
By the 1930’s black migration from the South to the urban North had begun. There they came under the influence of the machine politicians who were already at work turning big cities into cesspools of corruption and crime. The machine leaders didn’t really care as long as they and their cronies prospered.
Under the thumb of the ward bosses, seduced by left-wing rhetoric that blamed the Depression on the Republicans, and bought off by menial jobs on the segregated urban plantation, blacks became Democrats. It was to be a disastrous mistake on their part. But you can’t really blame them. For twenty fateful years from 1932 to 1952, the Democrats ran everything in America. Blacks may have gotten nothing but crumbs, but the Republicans didn’t even have any crumbs to offer.
Then, in the 1950’s, the political cycle turned again, and the ascendant Republicans reached out to African-American voters in a brave attempt to win them back to the party that had lifted them up from slavery. The Warren Court ended school segregation and Eisenhower enforced the new rules. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, with the strong backing of Vice President Nixon, wrote a landmark civil rights bill, which passed the House. Between the Republicans and liberal Northern Democrats, there were enough votes to break a threatened filibuster by Southern Democrats and end segregation, Jim Crow laws and the whole racist kit and caboodle.
But the Northern Democrats decided to put partisanship ahead of civil rights principles. Instead of filibustering, they cooperated – just enough – with the white supremacist wing of their party to water down the enforcement provisions so as to take all the teeth out of the law. There probably was some good old fashioned logrolling involved, but the main reason the liberals sold out the blacks was simply to keep the Republicans from being able to reestablish their credentials as the party of civil rights. They knew if black voters went back to the Republicans, their own electoral future was bleak.
So civil rights had to wait until the 1960’s, when the political wind had again changed direction, and the Democrats could use their media advantage to take credit for the new legislation – in spite of the fact that Republican lawmakers supported it in greater percentages than did Democrats, and the filibusterers, including many who continued to serve in party leadership posts for decades, were all Democrats.
Meanwhile, the destruction of urban America – another Democrat monopoly – marched on: crime, drugs, poverty, dilapidated housing, and worst of all the destruction of the black family, which had been the strength of the African-American people. In addition, blacks were taught by their new white urban massahs to reject the newfound access they had gained to mainstream American culture. The liberals of the Democrat Party shamefully turned their backs on Martin Luther King’s dream of a world where people were judged by the content of their character. Instead, they pushed a radical new ideology under which nobody would be judged at all – except American traditions and institutions.
They taught a hate-America doctrine, and promoted any black person who could adopt its rhetoric. “God Damn America!” Jeremiah Wright would scream, and white liberal Democrats would nod and smile.
And, aided and abetted by their labor union cronies, who had discriminated against blacks far more than business corporations, the liberal but still racist Democrats ran America’s cities like a legal extortion ring, and into the ground.
Leftist education, culture, media and municipal government have made 21st Century life in the black ghetto a murder-filled, poverty-stricken hell, with officially bankrupt Detroit as the Dantean icon.
Democrats have been oppressing black people in America since the party was founded. And moving to the extreme left hasn’t changed that a bit.
Editor’s Note: Jay Bryant served in top staff positions on both sides of Hill and helped win more than 50 Senate and House races as a media consultant. He was a moderator of the Capitol Hill Workshop, and has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His articles and commentaries have also been featured in numerous magazines and newspapers and on many leading websites including TownHall and RealClearPolitics. He has taught courses in communications at American University and the University of Maine, and has lectured throughout the country and on cruise ships. He is the author of two novels, The Sugar Rat, with Gregory H. Bohlen, and Earth and Water.