April 11, 2013 By Larry Elder Comments (1)
As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted Republican in that year’s presidential election. After the Civil War, Abe Lincoln’s Republican Party easily carried the black vote — where blacks were allowed to vote. Unwelcome in the Democratic Party, most blacks voted Republican and continued to do so through the early part of the 20th century. It wasn’t until 1948, when 77 percent of the black vote went to Harry Truman, who had desegregated the military, that a majority of blacks identified themselves as Democrats.
Yet, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats. For his key role breaking the Democrats’ filibuster and getting the act to pass the stalled Senate, Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, a conservative from Illinois, landed on the cover of Time magazine. President Lyndon Johnson called Dirksen “the hero of the nation.” The Chicago Defender, then the country’s largest black daily newspaper, applauded Dirksen’s “generalship” for helping to successfully push through the bill.......But the GOP-is-racist meme can be heard nightly on MSNB-Hee Haw and in political science and history classes all over the country. Actor Morgan Freeman calls the tea party racist. Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., tells us that the GOP wants to “literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.”
Keeping blacks ignorant of history remains crucial to this caricature of the Republican Party — and to the monolithic Democratic black vote. Not so black and white, is it?
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Keeping blacks ignorant of history remains crucial to this caricature of the Republican Party — and to the monolithic Democratic black vote. Not so black and white, is it?
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