Hanging by a Thread…
…the Democratic Party’s integrity, that is. The New Hampshire Union Leader spells out in print what we noted in our ‘lynching apology’ post last week. Only their eloquence quotient trumps ours, so we felt we had to share.
Shifting the blame for an atrocity
JUST WHO OWES lynching victims an apology?
Judging from some of the commentaries we’ve seen, you’d think the eight Republicans who did not cosponsor the Senate’s lynching apology — including Sens. Judd Gregg and John Sununu — had all been unmasked as former Ku Klux Klan members. (The bill passed on a voice vote with no objections.) But alas, the only former Klansman in the Senate is a Democrat, which brings us to the issue at hand.
Major Dad’s point is reiterated”…anti-lynching bills often had majority support in the Senate throughout the 20th century. What stopped them from passing was not the collective action of the entire Senate, but repeated filibusters by a minority of Southern senators.
Who were those senators? They were Democrats.”
Then the party is taken mightily to task…
…What of the Democratic Party?
It was the Democratic Party, not the U.S. Senate, that defended the institution of slavery, passed Jim Crow laws in the South, worked hand-in-hand with the Klan to repress, murder — and, yes, lynch — black Americans, and stood in the schoolhouse door to block black progress.
According to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, “Leading Democrats supported the Klan, and the party was largely indistinguishable from it. Klansmen beat, maimed, intimidated, and even killed Republicans of both colors who challenged them at the polls, or blacks and whites who tested the bounds of white supremacy by providing education or relief to the black freedmen.”
Frederick Douglass in 1892 urged all blacks to support only Republican politicians…
Good stuff and wowsahs.
Humanity...or the Lack Thereof | tree hugging sister | 
June 26, 2005 6:17 pm
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The Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow, and before that of slavery. But they get a pass because…umm…uhhh…someone want to remind me why, exactly?
BECAUSE McCHIMPOIL BUSHITLER LIED!!! YOU FOOL!!! DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THE SIMPLE AND ELEGANT LOGIC OF MY STATEMENT?!?!?!?!
/tin foil hat
Dave, because they are the ones who push the hardest to raise the pay of all the folks out there who don’t work for a living, but do vote every election. There may be something to be said for having to own land to vote. They just keep voting themselves a pay raise, at our expense.
Yep…a little of that action took place here in the days of Reconstruction…there’s a monument in our little down town area to the “Jaybird-Woodpecker War” that was essentially a showdown between the local Democrats and the Republicans who came in with a black man.
Crime on both sides of the fence in that little scuffle though. To this day, I can’t get a straight story from either side.
…ooopss forgot to complete that sentence “came in with a black man during an election.”
Sharon, that sounds like a great story!