What Does History Tell Us About Slavery and Racism?

SlaveryChains2by Leigh Bravo4/20/15
Which political party really supported slavery and continue to further the cause of racism?  Most people will immediately point their finger at Republicans and Conservatives.  You know those evil old white folks who would rather see you encased in chains than an actual contributing citizen of the United States? Well if you believe this, then I have some swamp land in Florida I need to sell. If you look at  history, it will definitely prove you wrong.

Founded in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was committed to the violent intimidation of blacks, Republicans and northerners.  It was a group that was established by Democrats to fight against the political and economic freedoms for blacks.  The first leader of the KKK was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Democrat, who made his fortune as a cotton planter and a slave trader. He later fought in the civil war to protect his right to own slaves and was well-known for the Fort Pillow Massacre in 1864.  Forrest marched 1500-2500 troops to take over Ft. Pillow which was being guarded by about 600 Union soldiers, half of them black. When his confederate soldiers took the fort, the Union soldiers surrendered and instead of  taking them as prisoners, Forrest massacred all 300 black soldiers.  After the war ended, Forrest resisted the Reconstruction and became the first Grand Wizard of the KKK.

President Lincoln’s Republican victory for President, led to the addition of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution which called for the “utter and complete destruction” of slavery, and granted blacks freedom, citizenship and the right to vote. The Democratic party called for the restoration of State’s rights which would have given each state the right to enforce slavery if they saw fit.  As a result, Democrats started the KKK in a resistance measure against Reconstruction.

Why was the NAACP founded? In 1905, a group of thirty-two prominent African-American leaders met to discuss the challenges facing people of color and possible strategies and solutions.  Through the early 1900s, legislatures dominated by white Democrats ratified new constitutions and laws creating barriers to voter registration and more complex election rules. Black voter registration and turnout dropped markedly in the South as a result. Men who had been voting for thirty years in the South were told they did not “qualify” to register. As a result the Niagara Movement began and years later, 7 of the members joined the board of the NAACP. The NAACP spent a decade seeking federal legislation against lynching. However, Southern Democrats voted as a block against it or used the filibuster in the Senate to block its passage.  Southern states, at the time, were dominated by Democrats. They created “white only” primaries to block blacks from the political process.

Franklin Roosevelt was the Democratic President of the U.S from 1933 to 1945.  While in office, Roosevelt refused to support the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill that would have punished sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners from lynch mobs. Even after the lynching of Rubin Stacy in 1935, which drew National attention, Roosevelt refused to budge. Why? He was afraid of the political ramifications to his career.

In 1958, it was the Republican party and President Dwight Eisenhower who sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. He also established the Civil Rights Commission and appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the Supreme Court which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was finally passed under Lyndon Johnson, with a Republican majority.  LBJ asked Republican Senator Dirksen, the Senate minority leader to assist him in passing the bill, and as a result Dirksen played a pivotal role in the passage of the Act.  Prior to his assassination,  President Kennedy called the congressional leaders to the White House in 1963 to line up votes for the bill’s passage. A Democrat and avid segregationist from Virginia, Howard W. Smith,  indicated his intention to keep the bill bottled up indefinitely. When taking office for Kennedy, President Johnson asked for support from his friend and mentor Senator Richard Russell, who refused. A Democrat from Georgia, and the leader of the Southern Democrats in the Senate, Russell and his followers continued to oppose the civil rights bill to the very end. The final vote was 72-18. Republicans had the majority of the “yeas” and all the ‘nays, came from Democrats. If it had fallen on the shoulders of  Democrats alone to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it never would have passed.

Even Congressman Jessie Jackson Jr, former Democratic Congressman and African-American,  explained in an interview with Angela McGlowan on her book “Bamboozled,” that the Democrats were the party of segregation and said,


Now, lets talk about the Jim Crow laws. In 1885 a southern black journalist, T. McCants Stewart said,



The Republicans had passed amendments to the Constitution that had given blacks the vote, citizenship and equal protection under the law. However  a national Democratic party compromise to gain Southern support for the presidential election resulted in the government withdrawing federal troops from the South returning it to white rule. As the Republican party had fallen from national power, blacks would lose all the rights they had gained and their rights and freedoms would be made illegal through Jim Crow laws, passed by Southern, white Democrats.

Based on so much history in supporting slavery and Jim Crow laws, why do Democrats continue to win 95% of the black vote?  Stephen A. Smith recommends,

“For one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican.”

Why not? The majority of blacks have been voting for Democrats and have seen no improvements in their lives.  The statistics speak for themselves. President Obama’s approval ratings remains high within the black community, however, his policies have hurt them dramatically. The U.S labor force participation rate for blacks is currently at 61% and for black teenagers, it is 25.7%. The unemployment rate for black adults is over 10% and for teenagers is at 25%. The percentage of blacks below the poverty rate has also increased under Obama at 27.2%, and household incomes have fallen to $34,598. Home ownership has fallen and food stamp recipients have risen from 7.4 million to 12.2 million between 2008 and 2013 under Obama.

A black activist, Alfonzo Rachel explains in his recent video, where he speaks to the black community, why the Democrats are the party of slavery and victimization,

“You do realize that slavery was abolished like 150 years ago? Yet your mind is still in the fields, a place where you have never been. Yet you want to stay brain chained to a place where Democrats wanted to keep you and still want to keep you. You think the Democrats have changed and that Republicans are not the party of Lincoln anymore.  Democrats haven’t changed. They still want you to be dependent on the master and there still dependent on you, but now instead of using blacks to farm cotton they now use you to farm votes. And you have been suckered into believing that this off-balance circle of dependency is Democrats doing something for black folks. If Democrats do so much for you, why are you still so angry? Why are you still saying we shall overcome as if it hasn’t already  happened. I will tell you why  overcoming hasn’t happened for you, because you have been suckered into voting for the party that you were supposed to overcome.”

I think Stephen A. Smith’s recommendation makes sense. If blacks lives have not improved under Democratic rule, then why not make a change? Why not take a chance and try a vote for a Republican. You might be surprised.

Leigh Bravo blogs at The Trumpet. • (1154 views)

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9 Responses to What Does History Tell Us About Slavery and Racism?

  1. oldguy says:

    The left is made up of Orwell’s Winston Smith.

  2. Timothy Lane says:

    A nice summation, though you do confuse the Roosevelts (FDR was the Democrat, not Teddy). Also, there was no formal Union surrender at Fort Pillow, nor is there any evidence that Forrest ordered a massacre (though one certainly took place). Note that Sherman, told to investigate and retaliate if necessary, decided not to do so (though he did consider the Confederate troops’ behavior barbaric).

    Of course, the Demagogues insist that their past is irrelevant because now they’re on the blacks’ side (which isn’t really true, but that’s something for a different article). However, the same people often denounce the United States for its racist past and argue that any atonement in recent decades is irrelevant. The same logic should apply, of course, to the Democrats who were most responsible for that racist past — and would if liberal disputation were anything more than pure sophistry from Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

  3. Brad Nelson Brad Nelson says:

    I find the Democrats to be particularly devious…to the point of being organized evil. But there is a good lesson to draw from this: If you don’t fight back in the culture wars, the other side will successfully define both you and the issues.

    The Left has successfully re-written history.

    We’re a day late and a dollar short coming to this party now. No black in America (with the exception of the exceptional ones) will likely be able to see past the propaganda. The grievance is now too deep, the separatist impulse almost fully ingrained. And the rarely-spoken truth is just how much paranoia and bigotry has been successfully established in black culture.

    Whatever vision Booker T. Washington and his type had for blacks has been lost. As long as blacks remain psychologically the aggrieved victim, and are rewarded monetarily for doing so, this dark game won’t end. It is another facet of our society corrupted by the Left and corrupted by Big Government. There is only one practical way beyond this and it is through the uniting principle of Christian religion which sees color as a mere happenstance and all people as being children of God.

    Even this faces enormous problems because a sizable (approaching most) Christians (black or white) have converted their faith to accommodate various aspects of the underlying premises of Cultural Marxism and Black Liberation Theology. It’s like a virus taking over the immune system.

  4. Very informative, Leigh. This is such a frustrating thing; it’s hard to believe that the left has been so successful at shifting the blame for the plight of people of color. Thanks for summarizing this so succinctly.

    • Timothy Lane says:

      Pulling a Big Lie is easy if you control the communications media, which is how Dr. Goebbels pulled his biggest whoppers. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Always remember that liberals use 1984 as their guide, not as a cautionary tale.

  5. Brad Nelson Brad Nelson says:

    I still scan the headlines of American Thinker. I do so in hopes of coming across an outstanding article such as this one by Greg Richards: Alas, Baltimore. This one is a good read to go along with it: Liberalism and the point of no return.

    • Timothy Lane says:

      This would be a good place to mention John MacWhorter’s Daily Beast article on Baltimore, and how liberal politics helped cause the problems there. The link is:


      • Brad Nelson Brad Nelson says:

        Finally, the War on Drugs created a black market alternative to legal work for poor black men underserved by bad schools. Frankly, The Wire explained this dynamic better than any academic analysis.

        Really? Ya suppose this guy is a libertarian? What a narrow way to view this. While trying to debunk the left, we should be careful not to insert our own bogus narratives.

        Today, regardless of the complexities of how we got here, the main thing that keeps black America feeling alienated in its own land is the police. It’s what animated the Black Panthers. It’s what drove an entire genre of rap, celebrated by intellectuals as poetic prophecy. It’s what a black person brings up if asked why they think racism is important. It’s what has driven the arc of black history since last summer.

        In that light, there is a genuine conversation about the cops and black people going on these days in America, and that wouldn’t be true if there hadn’t been riots in Ferguson.

        I don’t get what he’s saying. He mentions that Baltimore has a black mayor and black chief of police. Isn’t the real problem that some blacks think they should be exempted from normal standards of lawful behavior? I wasn’t aware that police in Baltimore were pulling black people over and arresting them for doing nothing. If that’s the case, then fine. If not, then the clearer message would be for blacks to not do crime.

        I wasn’t abundantly impressed by this guy’s article. But thanks for the link, Timothy.

        • Timothy Lane says:

          Actually, Baltimore police do have a bad record, with a large number of judgments against them. Some departments really are bad. Ferguson might even be one of them, though I wouldn’t rely on Eric Holder’s claims for evidence.

          MacWhorter is good in many ways, but I’ve noticed before that he seems to have a weakness for believing the black attitude toward the police is justified. Nevertheless, there really is a need for discussion based on FACTS. I suspect those facts would disprove much of the anti-police case (which is one reason liberals have no interest in overall statistical evidence, preferring anecdotal evidence filtered through the synoptic media). But there are problems, and those problems do need to be solved. First and foremost, of course, we need to look at ALL the evidence to determine precisely what the problems are.

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