Whenever I write about the Democratic Party’s abysmal history regarding race in America, I get told that it is all ancient history. In reality, the oppression of black Americans by Democrat political machines is as contemporary as yesterday’s news. It is hopefully the last vestiges of the Party’s more than two hundred years of racism and black oppression in America.
We should all keep in mind that slavery was a defining issue between the Democratic Party’s dedication to that evil institution – with all its grotesque human brutalities – and the Republican Party’s devotion to abolition. Virtually every abolitionist – politicians, activists, free blacks and common folk – were Republicans. Conversely, virtually every person and organization supporting slavery – and later oppressive segregation — were Democrats. That is an undeniable fact.
Following the Compromise of 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the defeated Confederacy, the Democratic Party took control of the south by force and imposed a reign of terror on black Americans for another 100 years – a reign of terror, at times, bordered on genocide.
All the horrific stories about lynchings, murders, beatings, and social, civic and political oppression – from violently denying the to vote to denial of equal justice under the law – were the product of one-party Democrat rule.
Every historic horror story – from the murder of Emmett Till to the massacre at Black Wall Street – was at the hands of the Democratic Party. The brutal paramilitary enforcers for Democrat rule – the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Councils, Knights of the White Camellia, the Red Shirts, etc. – were all formed, sponsored and empowered by the Democratic Party. The attacks on blacks by dogs and cow prods were the acts of the Democrat officials.
Take every horrific act that we reflect upon during Black History Month, and they are the work of the Democratic Party and its minions. But the oppression of blacks did not end in the distant past.
As late as the 1960s, Democrats led the fight against civil rights and school integration. During those days, Democrats filibustered to stop the passage of civil rights legislation. They mounted the Resistance Movement to stop school integration and protect the separate – but unequal – school systems. It was in the 1960s. that the Democratic Party showed its contempt for black Americans and civil rights by adding the Confederate battle flag to the southern state banners and emblems.
The names in the pantheon of racial infamy are all Democrats – Wallace, Byrd, Eastland, Long, Barnett, Maddox, Connors, Pettus, Black and many many more. A former member of the KKK served in the Senate until his death in 2010. That was Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
It was the Democratic Party that imposed institutional racism in the major cities they ruled over for generations – creating a policy of generational urban segregation in which millions of black Americans suffer from the deprivation of education, jobs, healthcare, housing and public safety TO THIS DAY.
If you think that is an exaggeration or some political bias, let us look at examples of contemporary racism in Democrat run cities.
Since the 1960s virtually every Democrat-run city has suffered repeated demonstrations, protests and riots by frustrated black residents suffering the oppression of racism. Today, New York City schools are more segregated than in the 1960s. Segregation is the reality in every city run by Democrat political machines. Every act of protest led by Martin Luther King was against a Democrat establishment – Democrat politicians, from Selma to Chicago.
Let’s go deeper into the weeds with some examples of modern day Democrat institutional racism. Here is just one excerpt from my manuscript on American racism.
“Police Take over Homan Square”
In more recent times, Homan Square would become connected with the continuing institutional racism of the Chicago machine. Within the Homan Square development was a large police detention and interrogation facility. Various reports allege Homan Square operates like a CIA black site, where prisoners are held, questioned and even tortured.
The headline in an August 5, 2015 article by Spencer Ackerman and Zach Safford in The Guardian read “Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility.”
It claimed that:
At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.
In a later article, The Guardian reported that the real number was more than 7,000 from August of 2004 to June of 2015, with only 68 allowed access to attorneys. There was no public notice of their whereabouts as required by law. Eighty-six percent of those taken to Homan Square interrogation facility were black. Most of the remainder were white Hispanics.
The article gave examples of how individuals were “abducted by masked officers, shackled, and held on false charges without access to food, water or attorneys at the behest of an authority referred to only as “covert operations.” Media reports and a subsequent lawsuit by The Guardian have delineated a horrific array of illegal enhanced interrogation techniques, including beatings and sleep deprivation.”
Note that the article from The Guardian was only seven years ago. And another excerpt:
“Baltimore Riot – 2015
On April 12, 2015, several Baltimore police arrested Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man with a rap sheet of largely petty offenses. Why they wanted to take him into custody and why he chose to run was never convincingly explained, one way or the other. Gray had to be forcibly restrained and was placed in a police van to be taken to the police station. In that process, Gray suffered a broken neck and died from his injuries a few days later.
The fury in the black ghetto of East Baltimore was not to be restrained. As was often the case in such outbursts of public frustration and anger, the peaceful demonstrations quickly led to full scale rioting characterized by the same type of looting and arson that was seen in Ferguson – only on a grander scale.
In the aftermath of one night of rioting, some 600 small businesses and residences, mostly belonging to members of the local black community, were burned to the ground. Scores of motor vehicles were torched, including police cars. More than 400 residents were arrested. The negative economic impact was between $20 and $30.5 million dollars, according to various estimates.
Another Failure of long-term Democratic Leadership
The Democratic Party had ruled over Baltimore for 48 years – essentially since the launch of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The white mayor, who governed over Baltimore during the Martin Luther King riots, was Thomas J. D’Alesandro III – the brother of Nancy Pelosi, the former Democrat Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and Minority Leader at the time of this writing. Democrats have ruled Baltimore for 71 of the past 75 years.”
There are just two of hundreds – thousands – of examples of urban institutional racism that had characterized Democrat rule in America’s big cities since blacks participated in the Great Migration to the north at the turn of the 20th Century.
The examples of urban racism could go on and on for thousands of pages. The point, however, is that we still see a stark divide between Republican policies and the harsh, dangerous, and too often deadly consequences of Democrat institutional racism in America’s cities TODAY.
While the vast majority of the American public are not racists, the remnants of the Democratic Party’s long, long history of INSTITUTIONAL racism can still be found in the urban centers that the Party has ruled over for generations. It is a racism that is not only based on skin color, but on the maintenance of a political system that rewards the overlords with power, prestige and profit. It is a racial subjugation that has benefited virtually exclusively Democrat politicians for generations.
That may seem rather blunt … but the facts are the facts – no matter how the modern Democratic Party tries to dodge, distract and deflect, it has been – and is – the oppressor of millions of black Americans confined to those segregated communites.
So, there ‘tis.