There is a plaque on the Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies of Northwestern Illinois University that reads: “This building is dedicated to public service honoring the memory of Abraham Lincoln Democrat.”
Indeed, the left-leaning media and the educational system in this country have fed the American public a steady diet of misinformation designed to rewrite its history. To set the record straight, let us review the true history of the Democratic party, the Republican party, and their role in civil rights in America.
Under the British system, a system where the king could do no wrong, and all subjects were essentially his private property, indentured servitude and slavery were common. It is how many young people escaped the class poverty of Europe, by indenturing themselves until the age of 18, or later, then receiving their freedom. Others were indentured to repay family debt. Many of these became successful free citizens under the system, while many never escaped the bonds of servitude. Europeans had developed quite a system of slave trading before the foundations of America, and under the British Empire slaves were tasked with working the vast agricultural holdings of the colonies, including those in the New World.
Most of the founders were very hostile to the system of servitude, and although they existed within it, they sought to extinguish it. When the founders declared our liberty from Great Britain, they did so with the intent of retaining the new nation’s faith and credit. Huge holdings were offered as guarantee of repayment of war loans, including vast agricultural empires, which included the slaves that worked them. The slavery question was hotly debated in the forming nation, and it is the one failing of the founders that they were unable to win the day against slavery—due mainly to the collateralization of debt issue—but could only “kick the can down the road,” as our current government does daily.
Plaque on the exterior of The Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies of Northwestern Illinois University that reads: “This building is dedicated to public service honoring the memory of Abraham Lincoln Democrat”
The intent of the founders was to phase out slavery, but agricultural interests in the southern states resisted all attempts. Finally, the Republican Party was formed and at the peril of national civil war, its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, ran on the platform that slavery must finally be abolished. Over a half million Americans lost their lives in the ensuing conflict, but the issue was officially, if not finally settled. In fact, hundreds of Republican whites and blacks were murdered in the South even after the Civil War, during “Reconstruction.”
Republicans in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to enforce voting and civil rights to the descendants of African slaves emancipated during the Civil War, but they were blocked by the Democrats and Southern state “Dixiecrats,” who blocked passage while they blocked black students from entering Southern universities. Who were these Democrats who filibustered and voted against civil rights and voting rights for blacks? John F. Kennedy, Al Gore, Sr., Lyndon B. Johnson, George Wallace, and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, otherwise known as the Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, to name a few.
It was when “progressives” adopted the charlatan policy that they “adopted” African Americans and other “minorities” as their charges. In the name of the oppressed, the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, most of whom were that way because of the old prejudices of the Southern Democrats or have become that way through the taxation and confiscatory policies of the expanded left leaning US government, “progressives” have created a fatherless and helpless nation of minorities in America. Once all left leaning politicians received the Memo that all things were possible in the name of the downtrodden, those very politicians who had so vehemently opposed voting and civil rights for American minorities suddenly became their “champions.”
The Republican voting and civil rights bills were immediately redubbed Democratic legislation, and were passed, with several new powers being given to the federal government in the deal. The “Great Society” was born and American blacks instantly went from struggling to get into the middle class to dropping directly into the abyss. American minorities are well on their way to becoming completely dependent on government handouts, and feel beholden to politicians who keep them on the public dole.
Does every American liberal or moderate set out with these leftist results as their goal? No. They are fooled by their leadership, who have their own secret agenda, as recently lamented by Bob Beckel, Liberal Commentator:
“We liberals made a terrible mistake, going back 30 years ago. We made a dependent society because we thought we were doing the right thing. We had things like public housing, and we had welfare payments, and all that bred dependence.”
African-Americans would do well to return their support to those who have their collective well-being and personal liberty at heart.
Publius
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