There is a violent and vocal debate raging in America today about the current legal system’s treatment of minorities in the United States.
To understand today’s argument, a proper view of the history of Civil Rights in America will help provide appropriate context to the debate.
Who are the true champions of Civil Rights in America both today and yesterday?
Is the American legal system based on a racist document that codified black Americans as lesser people?
The answers to those questions largely depend on whom you ask.
Let’s ask those who were there when it all began.
CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICA
There is an active culture among the Democratic party and the radical left who want to white-wash (pun intended) our real history in order to hide their party’s past sins and current political objectives.
They want to tear down statues and burn flags because when you truly study American history, as written by those who lived it, you are left with the burning question:
If the Democratic party did not so actively impede the progress of black Americans, for generations upon generations, how much richer could our history have been?
RACISM IN THE OPEN
This active attempt at erasing history is meant to stifle the accuracy of the annals of American history so as to continue the exploitation of black Americans without any legal repercussions. The subjugation of people of color has long been the objective of the American left.
Consider this…
The modern Democratic party is undoubtedly (and they admit) the party of big government. It is also the party which gave us Medicare, legalized Unions, minimum wage and Obamacare.
But few would know that it is also the party of Jim Crow, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan.
The argument is often parroted in political discourses in our day that the Republican party is the racist, anti-black, anti-immigrant party with no history of helping anybody outside of rich white men who run large corporations.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The following is based on four texts: American History in Black and White, A Patriot’s History of the United States, Dred Scott’s Revenge and The Legacy of Arab Islam in Africa.
Let’s start at the very beginning of black America. A story whose truth is rarely told. A story of betrayal, warfare and the freedom of education and learning.
Let’s examine the truth of the voyage that brought the first African slaves to America.
SLAVERY IN AMERICA
Slavery was introduced to European colonists in the New World by Hispanics. Slave traders had routes originating in Spain, moving to the West Coast of Africa and then onward to the North American continent.
The first slaves documented in the States came to Virginia in 1619, but they are only considered the first because (unlike the Pilgrims of Massachusetts) the people of Virginia chose to purchase and keep the slaves.
The first slave ship to arrive and greet the Pilgrims of Massachusetts found their captain and crew arrested and Africans on board were sent back to their homeland on the colony’s dime. Not a story you’re likely to hear in school.
On a separate note of equal importance, only five percent of Africans bought and sold during the slave trade actually came to the North American continent. Many ended up in the Caribbean islands and most became sex slaves to masters in the Arab states.
But to be clear: five percent is still five percent too much. Slavery was an abhorrent practice which should have been shunned by America’s automatic reflex, and to think that it was not will forever be a burden of regret for our country.
SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
What follows is not designed to assuage any guilt or to cast any blame. It is, however, designed to shed light on the true history of the oppression of black Americans. Through the words that follow, and not my words, but those of former slaves and black officials elected in the early nineteenth century, the goal is to expose you to some new information. To show you that the oppression of black Americans and those that would choose to support them has not ended; it has only transformed.
Big Government programs and a continual stream of false information leads some to believe that dependance on the government is the only way to freedom. But as we examine the real history of black Americans, and as we meet the men who studied American jurisprudence for themselves and forged their own path to greatness, we will see that the real oppression of black America is not colored in black and white; it’s colored in red and blue. Neither side has been perfect, but only one side has truly tried to help while the other has been significant in its opposition to liberating black Americans.
DOES THE US CONSTITUTION CONDONE SLAVERY?
The three-fifths clause has been used historically to suggest that the American founding fathers viewed African slaves as less than whole human beings.
That’s simply not the case.
Some will argue that the Constitution of the United States condones slavery by use of its three-fifths clause. That age-old argument is as wrong as those who forced it into our founding documents. One of the first people to argue against racism in our Constitution was Frederick Douglass.
A black slave who fled to the North for freedom in 1838 Frederick Douglass studied with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who taught him that the Constitution was indeed a pro-slavery document. Frederick bought into that notion until he examined the document himself which led him to later write,
“I was, on the anti-slavery question, fully committed to the doctrine touching the pro-slavery character of the Constitution…I advocated it with pen and tongue, according to the best of my ability…Upon a reconsideration of the whole subject, I became convinced that the Constitution of the U.S. not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but on the contrary, it is in its letter and spirit an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence as the supreme law of the land.”
To be sure, many founders opposed slavery and argued against the idea of slave states. The act of “slave-trading” was outlawed in 1808 by passage of the Northwest Ordinance and the hope was that slavery would soon end in its entirety. But capitulation to Democratic demands would inhibit such ideals. Democratic Southern states wanted to count their slaves when it came time to determine Congressional representation. However, since the slave states counted their slaves as “property” and not people the abolitionists argued for freedom for the slaves. Gouverneur Morris put his signature on the Constitution and was an outspoken critic of slavery, saying:
“Upon what principle is it that slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote! But the admission of slaves into the representation comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and – in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity – tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice.”
Founding father and President John Quincy Adams said,
“The first step of the slaveholder to justify by argument the peculiar institutions of slavery is to deny the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. He denies that all men are created equal. He denies that they have inalienable rights.”
It took nearly two hundred years for black Americans to find real freedom in the United States which seems strange considering that only a few years after our Constitution was ratified slavery was nullified in new territories by passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. The Northwest Ordinance forbade slavery in any federal territory and allowed Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin to enter the Union as free states, and in 1808 Congress officially abolished the slave trade.
From Our Documents:
The Northwest Ordinance, adopted July 13, 1787, by the Second Continental Congress,
chartered a government for the Northwest Territory, provided a method for admitting
new states to the Union from the territory, and listed a bill of rights guaranteed
in the territory. Following the principles outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the
Ordinance of 1784, the authors of the Northwest Ordinance (probably Nathan Dane
and Rufus King) spelled out a plan that was subsequently used as the country
expanded to the Pacific.
The bill included “a bill of rights protecting religious freedom, the right to a writ of habeas corpus, the benefit of trial by jury, and other individual rights. In addition the ordinance encouraged education and forbade slavery.”
The path to freedom was paved. The path to success was about to be blazed.
But some legislators would continue their efforts to subjugate black Americans with the Missouri Compromise, The Nebraska/Kansas Act and the Fugitive Slave Law.
Allow me to introduce you to a few of the great black Americans of our early history.
Andrew Jackson Beard was born as a slave in Jefferson County Alabama. Mr. Beard patented a plow in 1881 and later sold the patent for $4,000. Quite a sum in 1881. He was an avid inventor and had saved a small fortune by the 1890’s having stashed away some $30,000 before deciding to enter the real estate market. At that time the railroad industry was a seriously dangerous place to work. Railroad cars were joined together by hand. A process which cost the loss of many hands and fingers for the hard working railroad crew members. Andrew Jackson Beard developed the Jenny Coupler, a metal device which worked like reverse “hands”which would fold backward on contact and then latch like hands shaking. Variants of the device are still used in the railroad industry to this day, and it have saved countless employees from abominable injury.
Frederick Douglas was a former slave who taught himself to read and write and left slavery to become an adviser to multiple presidents. Douglas worked for the Massachusetts anti-slavery society and helped recruit the first black regiment to fight for the Union. Not only did Douglas work closely with Abraham Lincoln to draft the Emancipation Proclamation, he also received Presidential appointments from Republican Presidents Ulysses S. grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and James Garfield. When Democratic President Grover Cleveland took office he ousted Douglas only to see him re-appointed when Republican President Benjamin Harrison took office.
Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell fought alongside George Washington during the American Revolution helping him safely cross the Delaware. Some people fail to realize that the armies of the Revolution were fully integrated. Unlike the armies of the later Civil War.
Peter Salem fought at Bunker Hill.
James Armistead was a black patriot spy who was crucial in securing victory at Yorktown which pushed America to victory as an independent nation.
My personal favorite, Hiram Rhodes Revels.
Senator Revels was America’s first black Senator. He took the seat of Jefferson Davis of Mississippi who left office to be the President of the Confederate Slave States. Senator Stockton, a Democrat from New Jersey, argued against seating Senator Revels alleging he did not have proper credentials to serve. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted straight along party lines on Senator Revels. Every Republican supported him; each Democrat opposed.
Consider as well that all seven of the first black Americans elected to Congress were Republicans. And the trend continued. Republicans worked hard to show their support for black Americans as the election of blacks gave the Republican party a strong majority in Congress and helped them regain political clout in the South. The first 42 black legislators from Texas were all Republicans. In Louisiana the first 95 black Representatives were Republicans, the first 32 black Senators as well. In Alabama the first 103 blacks elected to the state legislature were Republicans; in Mississippi the first 112; in South Carolina, the first 190; in Virginia the first 46; in Florida the first 30; North Carolina’s first 30 black state legislators were Republicans as well; and in Georgia, 41 blacks were elected to the State legislature. – All as Republicans.
The thought of free black men in America did not sit well with Democrats at the time. It could be argued that it still does not sit well today. President Barack Hussein Obama is only the second black Democrat elected to the Senate in the history of our nation.
But not all Democrats were bad. Some of them even had strokes of genius when it came to ways to combat slavery and establish equality in America. One such notion struck in 1854 when a number of anti-slavery Democrats in Congress joined forces with Whigs, Free-Soilers and Emancipationists to fight slavery and work toward equal rights for black Americans. They did so by forming a new political party, a coalition of the free, a party they would call Republican because they wanted so badly to return to the founding principles of the Republic. Freedom and equality for all. Free choice cloaked in individual liberty. Inalienable rights granted to all men by God Himself.
Some of their friends strongly disagreed.
One of the founders of the new party was Charles Sumner the Senator from Massachusetts who had won the seat of founding father Daniel Webster. Sumner fought for the integration of public schools and argued the issue before the State Supreme Court in Boston.
In 1856 Sumner gave a speech that took two days to take on slavery. While Sumner argued that civility and liberty be offered equally to all men as is accorded in the Constitution, Democratic Representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina came from the House, across the Capitol Rotunda, burst into the Senate chamber and began to beat Senator Sumner mercilessly, using a club to violently pound Sumner within an inch of his life.
It would take Sumner three and a half years to recover. When he regained his strength he rejoined the Senate and immediately delivered a return address focused on the inhumanity of slavery.
The 1856 Democratic platform, the same year of the Sumner beating, would read:
“All efforts of the abolitionists…are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences and all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people.”
But Democrats have historically shown they do not have any trust in the people. Leave it to them to always take things into their own hands.
By 1866 things were beginning to go the way of the Democrat. They had taken back some seats in Congress and were on their way to a majority. Just a year after their hate filled platform in 1856 a Democratically controlled Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott by saying that black people were still considered property. They had put the Fugitive Slave Law into effect and were working hard to prevent blacks from voting since blacks tended to vote Republican.
David Barton points out that
“It is worth noting that for over a century and a half, Democrats often have taken a position that human life is disposable – as they did in the Dred Scott decision. In that instance, a black individual was not a life, it was property; and an individual could do with his property as he wished. Today, Democrats have largely taken that same position on unborn human life – that an unborn human is disposable property to do with as one wishes.”
Indeed.
But new seats in Congress and black people as property was not quite enough for the Democrats. They had to make sure that they kept control.
In 1866 Democrats correlated with a corrupt New Orleans police force and the Democratic Mayor at the time to attack the Republican Convention. Literally, attack. The Democrats rushed the convention swinging, mauling and beating Republicans black and white alike. In the end, forty black and twenty white Republicans lay dead while 150 of their fellow party members were wounded. Nine years later Democrats would rush the floor of the Louisiana’s legislature and violently force out the elected black Republicans. Federal troops arrived to restore order and returned the black Congressmen to their lawful positions.
In 1866 the Democrats formed another coalition. It was a group that would eventually become national and gain and whose stated purpose was to “break down the Republican government and pave the way for Democrats to regain control in the elections.” Thirteen volumes compose the Congressional investigation of 1872 into the founding of this group. And testimony from South Carolina Democrat E.W. Seibels’ 1871 appearance before Congress reads “they belong to the reform party – that is, to our party, the democratic Party.”
Who is the “they” the Congressman spoke so fondly of? What name did the Democrats choose for their new contingency?
The Ku Klux Klan, of course.
The violence and rage of the Klan was not limited to black Americans.
Republican US Representative Joseph H. Rainey related the story of a white Republican shot down in his yard by a dozen or so Klansmen. Rainey said,
“Because he has dared become a Republican…he has become the doomed victim of the murderous Ku Klux Klan.”
In 1868 the Ku Klux Klan issued a small postcard with the names and faces of sixty-three “radicals” from South Carolina on it. those “radicals” were actually just Republicans, but since they had a tendency to accept black Americans into their ranks the Klan decided to put the pressure on all sixty three. This way if any local Klansmen wanted to play dress up and pay a visit to one of the Republicans of South Carolina at home at three thirty in the morning, they had an easy way to access what they would look like and what name they would go by.
Three years after the Civil War the 14th Amendment came up for a vote in Congress. This amendment would allow all former slaves full rights of citizenship in their home state. Ninety four percent of the Republicans in Congress voted for the amendment. Not a single Democrat would support the legislation. If that brings up some questions for you, your answers are likely found in the makeup of the Democratic leadership of that time. Some notables of the 1868 Democratic Convention included –
25 – Rebel Generals
30 – Rebel Colonels
10 -Rebel Majors
20 – Rebel Captains and other Minor Rebel Officers
5 – Rebel Governors
15 – Rebel Congressmen
105 – Total Rebel Members
That made one-fifth of the Democratic Convention Members people who had fought for the slave states to remain free from the Union.
It took Republicans ten years after the Civil War to pass almost two dozen Civil Rights laws (the first three were all vetoed by Democratic President Andrew Johnson but overturned by a two-thirds vote).
That work was all undone by Democrats who opposed the freedom of black Americans through the Missouri Compromise, The Nebraska/Kansas Act and the Fugitive Slave Law.
In 1871 Congress took up legislation that would have allowed the federal government to punish Klan violence. It passed without a single vote of support from any Democrat in either the North or the South.
Representative Joseph Rainey of South Carolina told his Democratic colleagues who opposed civil rights,
“When we call to mind the fact that this Klan persecution is waged against men for the simple reason that they dare vote with the [Republican] Party…I can only say that we love freedom more – vastly more – than slavery; consequently we hope to keep clear of the Democrats! I say to the entire membership of the Democratic Party, that upon your hands rests the blood of the loyal men of the South. Disclaim it as you will; the stain is there to prove your criminality before God and the world in the day of retribution.”
To this day, democrats have never allowed a black American to preside over their national convention.
REALIGNMENT THEORY
Sean Trende is the Senior Election Analyst for Real Clear Politics. Trende explains that the realignment theory, “has been a staple of American history and political science lectures for decades. It posits that there is an enduring shift in the major parties’ power relationships every 30 to 40 years. For example, the election of 1896 realigned our politics in favor of the Republican Party; the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 began a new era of Democratic dominance; and so on.”
The American left would have you believe that the Civil Rights movement shifted the political dominance toward the Democrat Party due to its overwhelming support for the movement. They usually try to tack on the idea that the truly racist Democrats left the party to join Republicans in opposition of the Civil Rights movement. They will suggest that the Republicans who freed the slaves through blood and toil are not the same Republicans of today, but are actually more aligned with modern-day Democrats.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
CONGRESSIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS VOTING RECORD
In 1957 HR 6127 was voted on by the Senate. That piece of legislation “created prohibitions against intimidating, coercing or otherwise interfering with the rights of persons to vote for the President and Members of Congress.”
EVERY opposing vote on HR 6127, all 18 of them, were cast by a Democrat. There was zero opposition from the Republican side. 43 Republican Senators voted in support of the bill. 29 Democrats joined them.
Same bill. Different chamber. HR 6127 cut a divide in Democratic House members with 119 showing support and 107 opposing. Luckily a strong majority of Republicans (167) supported the bill while only 19 opposed.
In totality that made 125 Democratic votes OPPOSED to legislation to protect black Americans from radicals like the KKK, and only 19 Republicans.
While 148 Democrats supported the bill and 210 Republicans did the same.
In other words, in 1957, Democrats were seven times more likely to OPPOSE Civil Rights than Republicans.
But wait! There’s more!
THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964
“A landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.”
Sounds great.
When it came time to make that the law of the land, here’s how it played out.
In the Senate (where Democrats held a stunning 67 seats) the vote was 46 Democrats in favor, 27 Republicans in favor, 21 Democrats opposed (nearly one third of their members) and 6 Republicans opposed.
While in the House the vote was 167 Republicans in favor, 109 Democrats in favor, 19 Republicans opposed, 107 Democrats opposed.
In totality that makes 128 Democrats opposed as well as 25 Republicans. A margin of five to one.
For a more broad view, let’s add the 1957 and 1964 votes together and see that 253 Democrats voted in opposition to the historic legislation in 1957 and 1964 while only 44 Republicans did so.
Seven years and four houses of Congress between them, and Democrats are still nearly six times MORE LIKELY to oppose Civil Rights legislation than Republicans.
Anyone who would dare suggest that support for Civil Rights is a Democrat Party stronghold is either naive or a liar.
RACISM IN TODAY’S AMERICAN POLITICS
The hatred towards black Americans continues as a steady tone in the Democratic Party.
Think of all the nice things you heard about Democrat Senator Robert Byrd when he passed away.
How many people pointed out his membership with the Ku Klux Klan?
Think about 1954 when the Supreme Court favored Brown in Brown vs The Board of Education. 100 Democrats in Congress – 19 Senators and 81 Representatives – passed the “Southern Manifesto” denouncing the Court’s decision.
In 1956 Democratic governors in Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and Arkansas all spoke out against integration. It took action from Republican President Dwight D.Eisenhower to assure black children received proper education in states where Democrats had control of the Governor’s mansion.
Democratic governors also rebelled when the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law. In 1964.
It was 1884 when the first black American presided over a Republican National Convention.
Representative John Lynch presided over the Republican Convention in Chicago.
To this day, democrats have never allowed a black American to preside over their national convention.
Through ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter, the Democrats are fighting to erase certain elements of American history while quieting any dissent against their Communist agenda.
And it’s not hyperbole to call them Communists.
Antifa openly embraces Communist ideology. Enforcing its views through violence and intimidation.
The founders of Black Lives Matter do the same.
It’s no coincidence that it’s their own history they want erased. It’s no coincidence that ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter are thriving in Democrat-controlled communities.
Their new goal is to end the individual. To make anyone not willing to think the way they should think the outsider, the danger to a peaceful society.
The outsider’s opinion is the reason they riot. The minute he or she apologizes and promises to think the way they should think, the rioting can end. Peace can be maintained. But only for as long as those dangerous opinions and beliefs are kept quiet.
Groupthink is becoming mandatory.
Bowing and praying for forgiveness from a political ideology is the new normal.
What comes next is an insurrection by an extreme group of fascists.
The Democrats know this, and it’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they can’t wait.
They’ve been vying for it the entire time, and they have the votes to prove it.
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