I was able to catch the beginning of the President’s speech at the NAACP. The President embraced any possible criticism of not having been there before and used humor well. Ever since Tony Snow has come into the circle it seems the President comes across much stronger and deals head on with possible criticism. Then I received this email about what the President could have said. I felt it was interesting enough to post. So here it is in its entirety.
No tags for this post.Addressing the NAACP’s annual meeting, President Bush made good progress in reaching out to African- American voters. The warm reception from the audience must have worried Democrats who consider themselves owners of the African-American vote. Even more important, however, than how the NAACP views the Republican Party is how the Republican Party views itself.
As Republicans embrace their heritage as “the party of Lincoln,” they will understand the true heritage of the Democrats to be “the party of slavery” and “the party of the Confederacy” and the party of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Laudable as his remarks were, President Bush talked about “the Civil Rights movement” as if there had only been one. In fact, the achievements of heroes such as Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall constituted our nation’s second civil rights movement. The first was a century before, when the Republican Party, smashing past obstacles thrown up by the Democrats, enacted a series of civil rights laws. What made a second civil rights movement necessary in the 1950s and 1960s was that Democrats had defeated the first civil rights movement back in the 1860’s and 1870s. Tragically, Democrats succeeded in postponing Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom.”
Once most Democrats in Congress walked out to join the Confederacy, Republicans were able to enact their civil rights agenda. With not one congressional Democrat voting in favor, in 1862 Republicans banned slavery in the territories and in the District of Columbia. With not one Democrat voting in favor, in 1865 the Republicans passed the 13th Amendment banning slavery. They then had to override Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto to enact the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which declared African- Americans to be citizens and with equal rights. Again, not one Democrat in Congress voted for it. To prevent the Democrats from ever repealing the 1866 Civil Rights Act, Republicans codified its principles into the Constitution, as the 14th Amendment. Once again, not a single Democrat in Congress voted for it.
Today, even most Republicans do not know that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Act were revised versions of Republican initiatives during the first civil rights movement. The Republicans’ 1875 Civil Rights Act banned racial discrimination in private as well as public accommodations for eight years before being struck down by the Supreme Court. To get around that 1883 decision is why the 1964 law was based on the interstate commerce clause rather than the 14th Amendment. The 1965 Voting Rights Act is not the law which guaranteed African- Americans the right to vote. The Republican Party had already accomplished that with the 15th Amendment, which unscrupulous Democrats throughout the South had learned to evade with literacy tests, poll taxes, and other schemes.
President Bush listed many horrors that African- Americans had to overcome, but left unstated who the villains were. The Jim Crow laws mentioned by President Bush? They were enacted by Democrat- controlled state legislatures. And the men who held the leashes of those police dogs and the nooses of those lynch mobs? Democrats, all of them.
The Republican Party should stop throwing away political capital, because the more we Republicans know about the history of our Party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs.
Michael Zak’s article is adapted from his book Back to Basics for the Republican Party, a history of the GOP from the civil rights perspective. His e-mail address is Grand_Old_Partisan@hotmail.com.
Contact Michael Zak (Grand_Old_Partisan@hotmail.com) to invite him to speak at Lincoln/Reagan dinners, conventions, and other Republican events. For more information, see: www.republicanbasics.com
