KKK Shooter ran for Governor of North Carolina as a Democrat

And Fox News just ran a clip of Eric holder stating that the republicans are going after him over race. Ok... Those of us with common sense know who the racists are.

 

Another "fact" or once again just your opinion?

 

Seriously?

 

I know there are better sources but since this a message board, who cares, this is good enough. From last year, State Sen. Stephen Martin says Democratic Party created the Ku Klux Klan:

Details about the hate group’s founding are murky -- including the exact year it began. Some cite 1865 as its start, others say it was 1867. Historians generally agree it was founded by a handful of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tenn. as a social fraternity and it quickly changed into a violent group that terrorized newly empowered black and white Republicans in the South.

J. Michael Martinez, the author of a 2007 book "Carpetbaggers, Calvary and the KKK," told us many angry Southern whites during the 1860s and 1870s were Democrats and a smaller number of them joined the KKK.

So there is some historic link between Democrats and the KKK. But Martinez said it is misleading to say that the hate group was started by the Democratic Party because it was more of a grassroots creation.

There’s another point to consider.

"To say that the Ku Klux Klan was started by the Democratic Party -- it’s not the Democratic party of today," Martinez said. "(From the) 1930s until today, you think of the Democratic Party being considered the party of the disenfranchised."

Other historians had similar takes.

Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, wrote in an email that various "Klans" that sprung up around the South acted as a "strong arm" for many local Democratic politicians during Reconstruction. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest -- believed to be the KKK’s first Grand Dragon -- even spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, said Emberton, author of "Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence and the American South after the Civil War."

But Emberton added a major caveat:

"The party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today," she wrote to us. "Although the names stayed the same, the platforms of the two parties reversed each other in the mid-20th century, due in large part to white ‘Dixiecrats’ flight out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By then, the Democratic Party had become the party of ‘reform,’ supporting a variety of ‘liberal’ causes, including civil rights, women’s rights, etc. whereas this had been the banner of the Republican Party in the nineteenth century."

Elaine Frantz Parsons, an associate professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh said that most post-Civil War southern whites were Democrats who were unhappy with Republican policies on Reconstruction while large numbers of newly-freed slaves were Republicans.

"So it is not surprising that the Reconstruction era Klan would have been very largely Democrats attacking Republicans," Parsons said in an e-mail. "But this simply does not map well at all onto the party structure we know today. Among other things, the Republicans (during Reconstruction) were condemned as the party of big government and as wanting to centralize authority on the federal level."

Historians say the KKK consisted of a group of Southern whites after the Civil War who were Democrats. But there’s no evidence the KKK was created by their political party.

It should also be noted that the anti-black Democratic Party of the 1860s and 1870s bears no similarity to the party of today.

 

Yes and this site is a perfect example. The most hate filled when talking about black people and calling them names are the far right extremists.

 

Just curious, but is there some information that shows that or are you going off what you feel to be correct?

 

This is much closer to the reality

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-new/907796/posts

Credit Where Credit Is Due: The Republicans Passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act

by Michael Zak

During the Kennedy administration, the Republican minority in Congress introduced many bills to protect the constitutional rights of blacks, including a comprehensive new civil rights bill. In February 1963, to head off a return by most blacks to the party of Lincoln, Kennedy abruptly decided to submit to Congress a new civil rights bill. Hastily drafted in a single all-nighter, the Kennedy bill fell well short of what our Party had introduced into Congress the month before. Over the next several months, Democrat racists in Congress geared up for a protracted filibuster against the civil rights bill. The bill was before a committee in the House of Representatives when John Kennedy was murdered in November 1963.

Invoking his slain predecessor, Lyndon Johnson made passage of the bill his top priority, and in his first speech to Congress he urged Representatives and Senators to do "more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined". Though he shared Johnson’s convictions on safeguarding the constitutional rights of blacks, if Nixon had been in the White House then instead, Democrats in favor of segregation and those unwilling to see a Republican achieve the victory would have blocked his legislative initiative in Congress.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was an update of Republican Senator Charles Sumner’s 1875 Civil Rights Act. In striking down that law in 1883, the Supreme Court had ruled that the 14th amendment was not sufficient constitutional authorization, so the 1964 version had to be written in such a way as to rely instead on the interstate commerce clause for its constitutional underpinning.

Mindful of how Democrat opposition had forced the Republicans to weaken their 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, President Johnson warned Democrats in Congress that this time it was all or nothing. To ensure support from Republicans, he had to promise them that he would not accept any weakening of the bill and also that he would publicly credit our Party for its role in securing congressional approval. Johnson played no direct role in the legislative fight, so that it would not be perceived as a partisan struggle. There was no doubt that the House of Representatives would pass the bill.

In the Senate, Minority Leader Everett Dirksen had little trouble rounding up the votes of most Republicans, and former presidential candidate Richard Nixon also lobbied hard for the bill. Senate Majority Leader Michael Mansfield and Senator Hubert Humphrey led the Democrat drive for passage, while the chief opponents were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, of later Watergate fame, Albert Gore Sr., and Robert Byrd. Senator Byrd, a former Klansman whom Democrats still call "the conscience of the Senate", filibustered against the civil rights bill for fourteen straight hours before the final vote. The House of Representatives passed the bill by 289 to 126, a vote in which 79% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats voted yes. The Senate vote was 73 to 27, with 21 Democrats and only 6 Republicans voting no. President Johnson signed the new Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.

Overall, there was little overt resistance to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The struggle was not yet over, however, as most southern state governments remained under the control of segregationist Democrats. It was a Republican federal judge who was most responsible for desegregating the South’s public schools. Appointed by President Eisenhower in 1955, Frank Johnson had overturned Montgomery, Alabama’s infamous “blacks in the back of the bus” law in his very first decision. During the 1960s, Judge Johnson continued to advance civil rights despite opposition from George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and other Democrat Governors.

 

in fairness to bigarrow with respect to this site... he has been hammered. I was not really thinking about the internet when I made my statements above.

 

You are attempting to revise the mind of a willing victim of revisionist history. Good luck with that.

 

Says the guy who admits he never hires blacks for his own business. Step back and take a breath of reality man.