American Minute with Bill Federer
In-depth: Civil Rights & Politics of Race-It's not black and white
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In 1857, the
Supreme Court,
with 7 of the 9 Justices being
Democrat,
decided that
Dred Scott
was not a citizen, but
property.
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Chief Justice Roger Taney
was
appointed by the first
Democrat
President, Andrew Jackson.
Taney
wrote in his
Dred Scott decision
that slaves were:
"so far inferior ... that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for their own benefit."
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Abraham Lincoln
did not believe in
"s
tare decisis" - that he had to honor the precedent of the
Dred Scott decision,
stating June 28, 1857:
"We think the
Dred Scott decision
is
erroneous.
We know
the court
that made it, has
often over-ruled its own decisions,
and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this ..."
Lincoln added:
"Why this same
Supreme Court
once decided a national bank to be constitutional; but
Gen. Jackson,
as
President of the United States,
disregarded the decision
... (stating in) his veto message:
'It is maintained by the advocates of the bank, that its constitutionality ... ought to be considered as
settled by precedent,
and by the
decision of the Supreme Court.
... To this conclusion
I cannot assent.
Mere
precedent is a dangerous source of authority,
and
should not be regarded
as deciding questions of constitutional power."
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Lincoln,
the
first Republican President,
referenced the
Dred Scott decisio
n in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861:
"If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by
decisions of the Supreme Court,
the instant they are made ... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers."
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Though
Lincoln
issued the
Emancipation Proclamation,
January 1, 1863, it was considered an overreach of Presidential power.
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He then resorted to supporting the
Republican Congress
in their passage of the
13TH AMENDMENT abolishing slavery throughout America
effective
December 6, 1865.
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Once
Southern Democrats
were forced to free their slaves, they attempted to effectively re-enslave them by passing
Black Codes
which required former slaves to be "apprenticed" to "employers" and punished those who left.
In many cases, the fate of sharecroppers was little better than slavery.
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Black Codes
were also called
"Jim Crow Laws,"
referring to an 1828 New Orleans riverboat song called
"Jump Jim Crow,"
in which a blackfaced performer appeared in a mocking caricature and danced:
"Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."
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Many
Black Codes
prohibited blacks from owning guns,
such as in Mississippi, 1865:
"No freedman, Negro, or mulatto shall carry or keep firearms or ammunition."
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On November 22, 1865,
Republicans
denounced Mississippi's
Democrat
legislature for enacting
Black Codes
as they institutionalized discrimination.
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On February 5, 1866,
Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens i
ntroduced legislation to give former slaves "40 acres and a mule," but
Democrats
opposed it, led by
President Andrew Johnson.
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On April 9, 1866,
Republicans
in Congress
overrode President Johnson's veto
and passed the
Civil Rights Act of 1866,
conferring
rights of citizenship on freed slaves.
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To force
Southern States
to extend
State citizenship rights to former slaves, Republicans
in the U.S. House passed the
14TH AMENDMENT,
May 10, 1866, as did the Senate, June 8, 1866.
One hundred percent of
Democrats voted against it.
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The
14TH AMENDMENT
was adopted by the States on JULY 28, 1868.
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Republican Congressman John Farnsworth
of Illinois stated, March 31, 1871:
"The reason for the adoption (of the 14TH AMENDMENT) ... was because of ...
discriminating ... legislation
of those States ... by which they were
punishing one class of men under different laws from another class."
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Along with
Jim Crow laws, Southern Democrats
attempted to
keep former slaves from voting.
On January 8, 1867,
Republicans
granted
voting rights
to
former slaves
in the
District of Columbia
by
overriding President Andrew Johnson's veto.
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On July 19, 1867,
Republicans
passed more legislation
protecting voting rights
of
all freed slaves
after
overriding again President Andrew Johnson's veto.
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On March 30, 1868,
Republicans
began
impeachment proceedings
against
President Andrew Johnson.
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On September 12, 1868,
Democrats
in Georgia's Senate
expelled civil rights activist Tunis Campbell
and
24 other Republican African-Americans,
who would later be
reinstated by a Republican Congress.
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On October 22, 1868, while campaigning for re-election,
Republican Congressman James Hinds
was assassinated by
Democrats
who had organized
vigilante groups.
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The
15TH AMENDMENT,
granting the
right to vote
to all men regardless of race was passed February 3, 1870, overcoming
97 percent Democrat opposition.
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Once
Southern Democrats
could no longer keep former slaves from voting, they attempted to intimidate them through
KKK-type vigilante mobs and lynchings.
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Republican
President U.S. Grant
signed the Enforcement Act, May 31, 1870, which imposed stiff penalties for depriving any American of their civil rights.
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The
Republican Congress,
June 22, 1870, created the
U.S. Department of Justice
to safeguard civil rights
against Democrats
in the South.
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The
Republican
Congress passed another Enforcement Act, February 28, 1871, which provided
federal protection for Black voters.
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The
Republican
Congress enacted the
Ku Klux Klan Act,
April 20, 1871,
outlawing the Democrat-affiliated intimidation group
which oppressed and terrorized black neighborhoods.
The secretive group took its name from "kuklos," the Greek word for "circle."
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A Black Republican civil rights leader
in Philadelphia was
Octavius V. Catto,
an eloquent intellectual, trained in classical languages.
He
was repeatedly threaten for advocating for equality.
Catto
was murdered by
a Democratic Party operative
on October 10, 1871.
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Republican
President Ulysses S. Grant
deployed U.S. troops on October 18, 1871, to combat violence against African Americans.
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Democrats
called
white Republicans "radicals,"
and
lynched them
along with blacks.
The Tuskegee Institute recorded that from 1882-1968,
3,446 blacks
and
1,297 whites
were
lynched
- the
whites
being
"radical" Republicans
who were caught registering freed blacks to vote."
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Republican President Theodore
Roosevelt stated December 3, 1906:
"White men
are
lynched,
but
the crime
is peculiarly
frequent
in respect to
black men ...
... Governor Candler, of Georgia, stated ...
'I can say of a verity that I have, within the last month, saved the lives of half a dozen innocent Negroes who were pursued by the mob, and brought them to trial in a court of law in which they were acquitted.'
... As Bishop Galloway, of Mississippi, has finely said:
'The mob lynches a Negro charged with rape will in a little while lynch a white man suspected of crime. Every Christian patriot in America needs to lift up his voice in loud and eternal protest against the mob spirit that is threatening the integrity of this Republic.'"
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Roosevelt
continued:
"There is but one safe rule ... that is, to treat each man, whatever his color, his creed, or his social position, with even-handed justice ...
Reward or punish the individual on his merits as an individual. Evil will surely come in the end to both races if we substitute for this ...
Every lynching represents ... a loosening of the bands of civilization ... No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered.
Every lynching means just so much moral deterioration in all the children who have any knowledge of it, and therefore just so much additional trouble for the next generation of Americans."
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One of the
Black Codes
was that blacks had to ride separate, and often inferior, railroad cars.
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In 1892, a black man,
Homer Plessy, was arrested for violating the
Louisiana Separate Car Act.
The Supreme Court upheld the
racial discrimination in
Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, calling it "separate but equal."
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During the
Spanish-American War,
black and white soldiers and sailors were integrated.
Democrat President Woodrow Wilson considered the
Plessy v. Ferguson decision
as "stare decisis"- settled law, and proceeded to segregate
the U.S. Navy and other Federal offices.
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Wilson
told a protest delegation in 1914, led by their black representative
Monroe Trotter:
"Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.
If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is ... a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation ..."
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Monroe Trotter
replied:
"Soon after your inauguration began, segregation was drastically introduced in the Treasury and Postal departments by your appointees ..."
President Wilson
replied to
Monroe Trotter:
"If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me ... Your tone, with its background of passion."
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Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt
appointed former KKK member,
Senator Hugo Black
of Alabama, to be a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Regarding proposed civil rights program,
Democrat Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson
from Texas stated:
"(This civil rights bill) is a farce and a sham ... in the guise of liberty. I am opposed to that program. I have voted against the so-called poll tax repeal bill ... I have voted against the so-called anti-lynching bill.”
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During World War II,
General Dwight Eisenhower
forbade racism
and made the decision to arm black American soldiers with weapons.
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In 1952 and 1956, a majority of black Americans voted for
Republican
President Eisenhower.
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In 1954,
Supreme Court Justices rejected
the
"s
tare decisis" of
Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal"
and
gave its
Brown v. Board of Education decision,
prohibiting racial discrimination.
Eisenhower immediately ordered the desegregation of Washington, D.C. public schools.
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Southern
Democrat
Governors resisted desegregation.
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Alabama's
Democrat Governor George Wallace,
in 1963, blocked the entrance to the University of Alabama, stating: "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
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Republican Eisenhower
sent Federal troops to force racial integration of southern public schools.
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Federal troops escorted black students to class.
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In 1953, Eisenhower's
Vice President, Republican Richard Nixon
chaired a committee which sought to eliminate discrimination on the basis of race or color in the employment practices of government contractors.
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In 1957,
Eisenhower
proposed a civil rights bill to enforce the 15th Amendment, strengthening the rights of blacks to vote.
Instead of voting for it,
Democrat Senator John F. Kennedy delayed it
by voting to have it sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin, in
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream: The Most Revealing Portrait of a President and Presidential Power Ever Written
(NY: New American Library, 1977, p. 155), quoted
Democrat Senator Lyndon Johnson
telling Democrat Senator Richard Russell regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957:
"These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness.
Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.
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... For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.
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In 1958,
Republican President Eisenhower
met with
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,
in the White house.
Eisenhower
proposed a Civil Rights bill in 1959, but Senate
Democrats
filibustered it and watered it down.
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In 1959, when Southern
Democrats
demanded the proposed civil rights bill include a provision, that if anyone violate the law, they should be tried before an all-white jury,
Republican
Vice-President Nixon
gave the deciding vote in the Senate to kill the Southern amendment.
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Southern
Democrats
who opposed desegregation included
former KKK klansman Senator Robert Byrd
and
Birmingham Commissioner Bull Connor,
who stated in 1957:
"(Segregation) laws are still constitutional and I promise you that until they are removed from the ordinance books of
Birmingham
and the statute books of
Alabama,
they will be enforced in
Birmingham
to the utmost of my ability and by all lawful means.”
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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
stated on
The View,
March 1, 2018:
"Let me tell you why I’m a defender of the Second Amendment.
I was a little girl growing up in
Birmingham, Alabama,
in the late fifties, early sixties. There was no way that
Bull Connor
and the
Birmingham
Police were going to protect you.
And so when White Knight Riders would come through our neighborhood, my father and his friends would take their guns and they’d go to the head of the neighborhood, it’s a little cul-de-sac and they would fire in the air, if anybody came through.
I don’t think they actually ever hit anybody. But they protected the neighborhood.
And I’m sure if
Bull Connor
had known where those guns were he would have rounded them up. And so, I don’t favor some things like gun registration."
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In the
Democrat
south, after the
Birmingham Children's Crusade Protest
where police dogs and fire hoses were used against blacks,
President Kennedy
called for a bill emulating the
Republican Civil Rights Act of 1875.
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Southern
Democrats
fervently opposed it, as
Democrat
Senator Richard Russell
in 1964:
"We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states."
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Democrat Senator Robert Byrd
filibustered the Civil Rights Bill for 14 hours and 13 minutes on June 10, 1964.
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Democrat Senator Strom Thurmond
stated in 1964:
"This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason.
This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is
reminiscent of the Reconstruction
proposals and actions of the
radical Republican Congress."
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The phrase "the bribe or the bullet" refers to
positive or negative human motivations,
as generations of parents motivated children with a piece candy for obedience or discipline for disobedience.
From the Civil War to Lyndon Johnson,
Southern Democrats
were accused of utilizing
negative motivation intimidation tactics
to keep African Americas from voting.
As television and media coverage of these tactics grew, it resulted in bad press for the Democrat Party.
Political strategists proposed
a switch
from
"the bullet" to "the bribe";
from
"intimidation"
to
"entitlement."
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In other words, if the African American vote could no longer be suppressed, then maybe it could be manipulated and controlled through dependency on entitlement programs.
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Even though
Democrat
Senators filibustered the Civil Rights legislation nonstop for 71 days, from March 30 to June 10,
President Lyndon Johnson
persuaded the leaders of his Party to support of watered-down compromise bill, which he signed July 2, 1964.
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According to Ronald Kessler's book,
Inside The White House
(1996),
Lyndon Johnson,
who had a reputation for vulgarity in private conversations, explained his abrupt change in strategy to two Democrat governors aboard Air Force One, saying:
"I'll have those n****rs voting Democratic for the next 200 years."
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Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Welfare State
proceeded to enroll large numbers of minorities into entitlement programs, leading to a dependency and a strong inclination to vote for the Party promising a continuance of those entitlements:
more dependents, more votes.
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This method of
building a voter base
was predicted back in 1857, in a letter
Britain's Lord Thomas MacCauley
wrote to New York's Democrat Secretary of State, Henry S. Randall:
"Distress ... makes the laborer ... discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal ...
The day will come when, in the State of New York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast ... will choose a Legislature ...
On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith.
On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists ... and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries.
Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for more bread?"
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Lyndon Johnson,
with the help of
Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy, also
changed immigration quotas to bring in large numbers of immigrants from
poorer countries
who would enroll in
entitlement programs
and thus be more likely to vote for Democrat candidates who promised to continue entitlements.
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This initiated a demographic transformation reminiscent of the Fall of Rome, as
Will and Ariel Durant
wrote in
The Story of Civilization
(Vol. 3-Caesar and Christ, Simon & Schuster, 1944, p. 366):
"If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time ... if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimilation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West."
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Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Welfare State
provided more money to a household if a father was not present in the home.
This adversely affected the strong church-centered Black families and neighborhoods.
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As lower income voters grew in their dependency on government programs it proportionally increased the Democrat Party's voting constituency.
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What has been the impact of the
Welfare State?
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Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, writing for The Heritage Foundation, stated in "Backgrounder #2955 on Poverty and Inequality" that
prior to LBJ's "War on Poverty,"
less than
2 percent
of the Federal Budget was on
welfare spending.
Fifty years later,
spending on anti-poverty programs mushroomed to
27 percent of the Federal Budget,
costing $22 trillion (adjusted for inflation), three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the Revolution, yet the percentage of people in poverty has not improved.
Before LBJ's "War on Poverty,"
less than
5 percent
of children were born to
unmarried parents.
50 year later
it has skyrocketed to
40 percent.
Before LBJ's "War on Poverty,"
less than
10 percent
of U.S. children lived in single parent households.
50 years later
that number has exploded to
33 percent,
with the poverty rate of single female parent households growing to 37.1 percent.
In
1965,
Labor Department sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan reported that
25 percent
of all
black children
were
born illegitimately.
In
2015,
that number had grown to
72 percent.
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Tim Goeglein, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison 2001-2008,
writing for
Focus on the Family Citizen Magazine
(2016), stated:
"This is perhaps the most dismal legacy of the Johnson years, and a sad testament to the vision of social planners who believed more government would mean stronger families and marriages."
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African American
Republican Rep. J.C. Watts, Jr.,
stated February 5, 1997:
"For the past 30 years our nation's spent $5 trillion trying to erase poverty, and the result, as you know, is that
we didn't get rid of it at all. In fact, we spread it.
We destroyed the self-esteem of millions of people, grinding them down in a
welfare system
that
penalizes moms for wanting to marry the father of their children,
and penalizes moms for wanting to save money. Friends, that's not right."
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Internationally renown Pediatric Neurosurgeon
Dr. Ben Carson
was appointed
U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
He stated:
"My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn't want to be on welfare.
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She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that ...
But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like."
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Dr. Carson
added:
"The more solid the family foundation, the more likely you are to be able to resist peer pressure. Human beings are social creatures.
We all want to belong, we all have that desire, and we will belong, one way or another. If the family doesn't provide that, the peers will, or a gang will, or you will find something to belong to.
That's why it becomes so critical for families with young children to understand what a critical anchor they are."
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Beginning in the 1960s, educational emphasis transitioned from academic achievement to behavior modification.
Voters who were less educated could be more easily manipulated and controlled, as was the case in the Democrat pre-Civil War South.
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North Carolina passed in 1831 an
Act to Prevent Teaching Slaves to Read:
"Any free person, who shall hereafter teach ... any slave within the State to read or write ... or shall give or sell to such slave ... any books or pamphlets, shall ... be fined not less than one hundred dollars ... imprisoned, or whipped."
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More recently, "racism" has been redefined to mean anyone opposing big government dependency welfare programs.
In a tragic irony, growing dependency on government entitlements and handouts is reminiscent of the dependency which existed on Southern Democrat plantations where slaves waited for handouts from their masters.
This has been pointed out by many black leaders.
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Star Parker,
founder of
CURE (Center for Urban Renewal)
wrote
Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can Do About It.
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Rev. C.L. Bryant
produced a documentary
Runaway Slave Movie,
stating: "I am a 'Runaway Slave' from the Democrats' plantation."
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C. Mason Weaver
wrote
It's OK to Leave the Plantation: The New Underground Railroad.
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Wayne Perryman
wrote
Unfounded Loyalty: An In-Depth Look Into The Love Affair Between Blacks and Democrats.
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Increasingly, media, music and entertainment is employed to
stir racial prejudices
and passions
for political purposes,
as President William Henry Harrison warned in his Inaugural, 1841:
"Understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices."
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Political organizers employ race-baiting tactics to incite racial tensions for political purposes.
Saul Alinsky
wrote in
Rules for Radicals:
"The organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems ...
"The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community ...
"The organizer ... polarizes the issue ... and helps to lead his forces into conflict ... An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent ...
"Fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression ...
He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them ... for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act."
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This was observed by
Republican Booker T. Washington
, who had written in
My Larger Education-Being Chapters from My Experience
(1911, ch. V: The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob, p. 118):
"There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.
Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.
Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs ..."
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Washington
stated:
"There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
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Rep. J.C. Watts, Jr.,
stated February 5, 1997:
"Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide ...
Republicans and Democrats - red, yellow, black and white - have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility ...
It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator.
And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what's immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance ..."
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Watts
continued:
"We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within.
And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does ..."
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J.C. Watts
concluded:
"I've often told the story of a boy and his father.
The father was trying to get some work done, and the boy wanted the daddy's attention, but the father was busy at his desk with so much to do.
To occupy the boy, this father .... remembered that he had seen a picture of the world in this magazine.
In what he thought was a stroke of genius, the father tore out the picture and tore it into 20 different pieces, and he said, 'Here son. Go put the world back together.'
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And you know what happened? Five minutes later the little Michelangelo was back, saying, 'Daddy, look what I've done.'
The father looked, and he said, 'Son, how did you do it so quickly? How did you put the world back together so quickly?'
And the little boy answered, 'Dad, it was easy. There was a picture of a man on the back of the map, on the back of the world. And once I put the man back together, the world fell into place.'
And friends, this is our agenda: to put our men and women back together, and, in that way, get our country back together."
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American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
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Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
wjfederer@gmail.com
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