Today in our society, so much of the political and cultural buzz centers around civil rights. Entire political groups and organizations are built around defending an oppressed people group and demanding equity for that same group. All of this is done in the name of civil rights.
What if I told you that the civil rights movement would never have happened had it not been for the Republican Party? What would your response be? Maybe, shock, awe, disbelief or even skepticism?
The story of the Republican Party may seem a little obscure today, but there is a good reason why George W. Bush has a more ethnically diverse Cabinet than any other President in history. One only has to look to the Republican Party’s first President, Abraham Lincoln, for the party’s foundational principles.
In the early 1850’s, President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, broke his promise to the Congress by not restricting slavery in the newly founded western states of America. Pierce allowed slavery to expand in these western states and members of his own party as well as the Whig party made him pay dearly for his turncoat policy.
In 1854, Abraham Lincoln and some of his friends in the Whig Party, along with some disgruntled Democrats, created the Republican Party for the purposes of ending slavery and upholding a conservative interpretation to the U.S. Constitution. At the time, no one could have predicted the growth and influence of this new political movement.
In 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was first elected as President of the United States, he swept into office Republican majorities in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In that same election of 1860, every major northern state elected a Republican Governor. Truly, a political revolution had begun.
Following Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which made all slaves legal citizens of the United States, these same Republican members of Congress passed Constitutional Amendments banning slavery and extending all the rights found in the U.S. Constitution to all citizens of all states. Doing so affirmed that the equal protection and due process rights in the U.S. Constitution extended to all citizens, as did the right to vote.
The Republican members of Congress also wrote and enacted the nation’s first Civil Rights Act which made equal rights the law for all U.S. citizens regardless of race, color or creed.
Building upon their party’s civil rights victories, a Republican Senator, Aaron Sargent, wrote the Women’s Suffrage Amendment of 1878. The amendment would allow women the same right to vote as men. The amendment failed due to strong opposition by members of the Democrat Party.
That’s right, members of the Democrat Party strongly opposed voting rights for women. American women would have to wait another 40 years to obtain the right to vote.
You may find this surprising, but it was the Democrat Party who opposed every single civil rights legislation brought forth by the Republican members of Congress just after the Civil War. Without the majority vote in Congress, these same Democrats had little ability to derail the Republican efforts for true equality. Instead, they turned to more nefarious activities to re-enslave the African-Americans set free by the Republicans.
This may be difficult to swallow, but the truth is the Southern Democrats created a mafia style organization that sought to punish all African-Americans who engaged in their newfound freedoms. Through violence, abuse and murder, this organization became the battering ram of the Southern Democrat Party. What was the name of this organization? It was none other than the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
Does this sound too hard to believe? Well, it’s all too true and it’s only the beginning of the story.
As it turns out, the African-American people, who were the chief benefactors of the Republican-led policies, pressed on in spite of the KKK. In fact, the first ever African-American members of Congress, both in the House of Representatives and Senate, were Republicans.
In 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina became the nation’s first ever African-American Congressman. Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the nation’s first ever African-American Senator that same year.
As a result of strong Democrat opposition to liberty, the Republican Party drew more and more African-Americans to its membership for almost two generations. As a matter of fact, every single African-American member of the United States Congress was a Republican until 1935.
The New Deal, as President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) called it, drove a stake right through the heart of the Republican civil rights revolution. From that point on, the Democrat Party began to overtake the Republican Party’s efforts to embrace African-Americans.
Before we honor FDR as a great civil libertarian, let’s take a look at one of his most notorious judicial nominations to the Supreme Court.
Hugo Black, the man FDR named to the Supreme Court, became famous for his re-writing of the U.S. Constitution concerning prayer in schools (a clear violation of Article One, Section One of the U.S. Constitution). Hugo Black misrepresented Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danville Baptists in 1804 and used it as a wedge against religious liberty (for the full story, see my column, “The Truth About Separation of Church and State”).
Just a little background here - Hugo Black was also a member of that mafia like organization, the KKK.
As an attorney, Hugo Black defended a member of the Klan who was charged with murdering a Catholic priest. What was this Catholic priest guilty of as far as the KKK was concerned? Speaking out against them.
Surely, this is old history some might say. The Democrats supported the end of Segregation after all, right? Unfortunately, the facts are not so cut and dry.
While 69% of the Democrat members of Congress did vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended Segregation nationwide, the other 31% of Democrats who voted against the bill kept it from passing. The Democrat members of the U.S. Senate in 1964 even began to filibuster in order to keep Segregation legal.
It took the Republican members of Congress, a full 82% of whom voted to end Segregation nationwide, to pass the bill. Segregation ended nationwide when a larger percentage of Republicans voted in favor of Civil Rights. This is an amazing feat when you consider that Congressional Republicans were the minority party in 1964.
Rather than engage in class-warfare, the history of the Republican Party shows a party that has made it a practice to measure all Americans by their conduct, not by the color of their skin. That would explain why Mr. Lincoln so eloquently said, “You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds.”
A novel principle both yesterday and today, amazingly simple, yet profound.
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