The Democrats Are Trying to Destroy the Nation Again
September 16, 2020
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
“..it was Democrats who fought against black civil rights every step of the way.”
I am not a political person, meaning that I am not involved in politics, beyond voting, because I know that politics can’t solve the fundamental problems of a nation, and I have more important things to do with my short life. Politics is dirty, manipulative, compromising business at best. The vast majority of politicians don’t even know what the fundamental issues are.
Preaching the gospel and building New Testament churches are far more important endeavors than political activity. These address a nation’s spiritual and moral fundamentals and have eternal consequences. This present world system is passing away and will soon be gone. What good is it to win an election and lose your soul?
But politics do have a major effect in this present world, and it is important for God’s people to know what is happening.
THE FIRST TIME THE DEMOCRATS TRIED TO DESTROY THE NATION
The first time the Democrats tried to destroy America was in the 19th century.
It was the Democratic Party that split the country by its white supremacy.
It was the Democratic Party that advertised itself in a political poster in 1856 as “for the White man” and mocked the Republican Party as “for the Negro.”
It was seven Democrat Supreme Court judges who ruled in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that a descendent from an African slave, whether slave or free, cannot be a U.S. citizen.
Every state that seceded from the Union in 1860-61 was a Democrat-ruled state.
The Confederate officers were Democrats, including commanding general Robert E. Lee.
For all practical purposes, the Confederate flag was a Democrat flag. (Not to be confused with the official flag of the Confederate States which was called the “Stars and Bars,” the flag popularly known as the Confederate flag features a blue diagonal cross emblazoned with 13 white stars on a field of red.) Called “the Southern Cross” and “the Stainless Banner,” it was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Savannah Morning News editor William T. Thompson, said, “As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism” (Savannah Morning News, May 4, 1863). (The Confederate flag was promoted the the Democrat politicians who passed the Jim Crow segregation laws. They also erected hundreds of Confederate monuments. In 1948, Democrat Strom Thurmond used the Confederate flag as a symbol of his presidential candidacy and of the Dixiecrats’ rejection of civil rights for blacks. In 1956, Democrat lawmakers of the state of Georgia incorporated the Confederate flag into its state flag “as a symbol of resistance to integration.” In 1963, Alabama Democrat Gov. George Wallace flew the Confederate flag over the statehouse to protest integration. At his inauguration that year, he said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In 1987, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton signed Act 116 that described the state flag: “The blue star above the word ‘ARKANSAS’ is to commemorate the Confederate States of America.” When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 and 1996 and Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, some of their campaign buttons and other paraphernalia featured Confederate flags.)
Reconstruction (1865-1877)
After the Union was restored in 1865, it was Democrats who fought against black civil rights every step of the way.
At the end of the war, Republicans in Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery (the Senate in April 1864 and the House in January 1865). The overall vote was 100% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats. This shows that a large number of white people cared for the rights of black people and wanted to help them. A great many whites gave their lives for this cause, both before, during, and after the war.
In 1866, Republicans in Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment granting citizenship to former slaves and equal protection under the law. 94% of Republicans voted for the amendment and 100% of Democrats voted against it. When it was submitted to the states for ratification, it was rejected by the southern Democrat governments. “These new governments accepted the emancipation of the Negro but accorded him only varying degrees of limited citizenship, always excluding the ballot” (Chalmers, Hooded Americanism). The amendment was finally ratified in 1868.
Under President Ulysses Grant (1868-1876), Republicans, backed by federal troops, sought to “Reconstruct” the South by enforcing federal laws granting liberties to blacks. “To entrench the Civil Rights Act’s statutory equalization of citizenship in the nation’s basic law, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1866, then submitted it to the states for ratification. Republicans campaigned on this program in the 1866 midterm elections. Voters rewarded them with veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress. In 1867, Congress passed three Reconstruction Acts ... The laws grouped ten of the eleven formerly seceded Southern states into five military districts, with each district governed by an Army general and patrolled by several thousand troops. (Tennessee had already returned to the Union through a separate process.) The ten states would be excluded from congressional representation pending the rewriting of their constitutions by state conventions. The conventions, in turn, would be elected by black and white male voters, except for former Confederate leaders, who would be ineligible based on their past role in the rebellion. Then voters would go to the polls again in April 1868, to ratify the constitutions in statewide elections. Only after its voters ratified a new constitution, and its legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, could any of these ten former Confederate states be restored to the Union and send representatives to Congress. By early 1868, it seemed Congress might indeed accomplish what had come to be called ‘radical’ Reconstruction. Originally an exclusively Northern antislavery movement, the Republican Party would achieve national viability, based on black votes in the Southern states. That, in turn, would help sustain the great legislative achievements of the postwar Republican Congresses--equal rights, regardless of race or caste, for every man in every state. What had been an agglomeration of fractious states would at last be a true nation-state, steered by a federal government responsible for security and the economy, and, above all rededicated to the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth, ‘that all men are created equal’” (Charles Lane, Freedom’s Detective: The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan and the Man Who Masterminded America’s First War on Terror, p. 19).
Republicans gained majorities in the new southern state governments. They were called “Radicals” by the Democrats. Nearly 800 black men served in the legislatures. In Georgia, a Republican congress and governor were elected in 1868, with the 188,000 votes evenly divided between whites and blacks (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 30), thus demonstrating that large numbers of whites in the South supported equal rights for blacks.
In 1869, Republicans in Congress passed the 15th Amendment granting the right to vote to all men regardless of race. 100% of Republicans voted for it and 100% of Democrats voted against it. It was ratified by the states in 1870 under Republican majorities.
In 1872, the first seven black members of the United States Congress were seated. All were Republicans. Between then and 1900, nearly 40 blacks would serve in Congress, all Republicans.
A Republican-controlled Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, including inns, theaters, public conveyances on land or water, and other places of public amusement. The act was approved by 100% of Republicans and opposed by 100% of Democrats.
Blacks made great progress in the decades after the Civil War, in spite of starting out from the depraved condition created by 200 years of slavery. The following is from Congressman George H. White’s farewell speech of 1901:
“Since that time we have reduced the illiteracy of the race at least 45 percent. We have written and published nearly 500 books. We have nearly 800 newspapers, three of which are dailies. We have now in practice over 2,000 lawyers, and a corresponding number of doctors. We have accumulated over $12,000,000 worth of school property and about $40,000,000 worth of church property. We have about 140,000 farms and homes, valued in the neighborhood of $750,000,000, and personal property valued about $170,000,000. We have raised about $11,000,000 for educational purposes, and the property per-capita for every colored man, woman and child in the United States is estimated at $75. We are operating successfully several banks, commercial enterprises among our people in the South land, including one silk mill and one cotton factory. We have 32,000 teachers in the schools of the country; we have built, with the aid of our friends, about 20,000 churches, and support 7 colleges, 17 academies, 50 high schools, 5 law schools, 5 medical schools and 25 theological seminaries. We have over 600,000 acres of land in the South alone. The cotton produced, mainly by black labor, has increased from 4,669,770 bales in 1860 to 11,235,000 in 1899. All this was done under the most adverse circumstances. We have done it in the face of lynching, burning at the stake, with the humiliation of ‘Jim Crow’ laws, the disfranchisement of our male citizens, slander and degradation of our women, with the factories closed against us, no Negro permitted to be conductor on the railway cars…no Negro permitted to run as engineer on a locomotive, most of the mines closed against us. Labor unions–carpenters, painters, brick masons, machinists, hackmen and those supplying nearly every conceivable avocation for livelihood–have banded themselves together to better their condition, but, with few exceptions, the black face has been left out. The Negroes are seldom employed in our mercantile stores. With all these odds against us, we are forging our way ahead, slowly, perhaps, but surely.”
White concluded that speech with the plea that his people simply be given the same opportunity as other Americans.
“Mr. Chairman, before concluding my remarks I want to submit a brief recipe for the solution of the so-called ‘American Negro problem.’ He asks no special favors, but simply demands that he be given the same chance for existence, for earning a livelihood, for raising himself in the scales of manhood and womanhood, that are accorded to kindred nationalities. Treat him as a man; open the doors of industry to him. Help him to overcome his weaknesses, punish the crime-committing class by the courts of the land, measure the standard of the race by its best material, cease to mold prejudicial and unjust public sentiment against him, and he will learn to support and join in with that political party, that institution, whether secular or religious, in every community where he lives, which is destined to do the greatest good for the greatest number. Obliterate race hatred, party prejudice, and help us to achieve nobler ends, greater results and become satisfactory citizens to our brother in white.”
The Dismantling of Reconstruction
Southern Democrats hated reconstruction. Ryland Randolph, editor of the Independent Monitor of Alabama, wrote of the “galling despotism that broods like a nightmare over these southern states ... a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources, and all powers, to degrade the white man by the establishment of Negro supremacy.”
Democrats formed terrorist organizations to destroy reconstruction.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed in 1865, but it didn’t prosper until 1867 when it came under the leadership of Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest, former Confederate cavalry commander. “In April of 1867, representatives met in Nashville, at the Maxwell House, and turned out a flavor more to their liking. With much talk of unity of purpose, concert of action, proper limits, and authority to the prudent, a Constitution or prescript was drawn up. ... Nathan Bedford Forrest, lately of the armies of the Confederacy was elected Grand Wizard, and his Empire divided into realms, dominions, provinces, and dens, headed by Grand Dragons, titans, Giants, and Cyclopes, and composed of Ghouls” (David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan).
In 1868, Forrest was a delegate to the Democratic Convention in New York City. Horatio Seymour was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, and Frank Blair, Jr., a friend of Forrest, was nominated vice presidential candidate. Their campaign slogan was, “Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.” The Democratic Party called for termination of the Freedman’s Bureau and “any government policy designed to aid blacks in the South” (Charles Calhoun, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant).
“Their goal would be to disrupt radical Reconstruction through intimidation of Republican voters and politicians, starting with the 1868 elections. The new Klan leaders formalized the hierarchy of the ‘Invisible Empire,’ as it would come to be known, with a ‘Grand Wizard.’ Forrest, at the top, commanding rank-and-file ‘ghouls’ initiated in secret grips, passwords, and rituals. [Forrest was a] slave trader before the Civil War, and a commander of forces notorious for massacring surrendered black Union soldiers during the conflict ... New Klansmen swore to support ‘a white man’s government,’ and to maintain absolute secrecy about Klan activities, upon pain of death” (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 23). “Henceforth it was to be war between the Klan and Radical rule” (Chalmers, Hooded Americanism).
“The Ku Klux Klan--numbering tens of thousands of sworn members across the southeastern United States, and enjoying the informal support of many times that number in the white population--constituted the Democratic party’s terrorist wing” (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 134).
The violence began under Forrest’s leadership. “In the spring of 1867, Forrest and his dragoons launched a campaign of midnight parades; 'ghost' masquerades; and 'whipping' and even 'killing Negro voters and white Republicans, to scare blacks off voting and running for office’” (Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre, p. 386).
During the election campaign of 1868, there were 336 murders or attempted murders of blacks in Georgia alone to suppress Republican voting (Jonathan Bryant, “Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era,” georgiaencyclopedia.org).
Hundreds more were killed that year in Louisiana (not only by the KKK, but also by other white terrorist groups such as the Knights of the White Camellia). In one rampage that occurred in September in the town of Opelousas in the St. Landry parish, more than 200 blacks were killed. The violence began with the vicious beating of 18-year-old Emerson Bentley, a white school teacher from Ohio who also worked at the Republican paper The St. Landry Progress. Beaten in front of his young students by three Democrats, including James Dickson who later became a judge, Bentley escaped with his life, but that episode began an open season on black Republicans. “The bloodshed continued for two weeks, with African-American families killed in their homes, shot in public, and chased down by vigilante groups. C.E. Durand, the other editor of the St. Landry Progress, was murdered in the early days of the massacre and his body displayed outside the Opelousas drug store. By the end of the two weeks, estimates of the number killed were around 250 people, the vast majority of them African-American. ... The groups managed to achieve their ultimate purpose, as was borne out by the results of the November presidential elections. Even though Republican nominee Ulysses Grant won, not a single Republican vote was counted in St. Landry Parish. Those who oversaw the election felt “fully convinced that no man on that day could have voted any other than the democratic ticket and not been killed inside of 24 hours thereafter” (“The Deadliest Massacre in Reconstruction-Era Louisiana,” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 28, 2018).
The first KKK political assassination was that of George Ashburn, a leading white Republican in Georgia who assisted in writing Georgia’s new reconstructionist constitution. He was among the white minority in the South who opposed succession. Before the Civil War, he came to see slavery as evil and quit his job as a plantation overseer. He fought on the side of the Union and returned home to Georgia after the war with the following dream: “I only hope to live to see Georgia reconstructed and to lay my bones in soil consecrated to liberty, within her borders” (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 17). Ashburn was appointed a judge by the military governor George Meade and called to order the Georgia Constitutional Convention of 1867 to remove restrictions on the civil rights of African Americans. Ashburn was shot to death on the evening of March 30, 1868, in his boarding room by four KKK shooters. All were Democrats. One was the chairman of the local Democratic Party; another was the Democratic clerk of the Muscogee County court. They were captured and brought to trial in a federal court. One of the defense lawyers was Alexander Stephen, former vice president of the Confederate States. In his “Cornerstone Speech” in favor of secession in March 1861, he said the Confederacy is “founded upon ... the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” The federal government made a deal with the Georgia Democrats to stop the trial in exchange for Georgia’s ratification of the 14th Amendment. No one was ever punished for the assassination.
The Ku Klux Klan was one of several paramilitary groups that were founded to overturn the black civil rights that were guaranteed by federal law. “They used organization, intimidation and force to achieve political purposes of restoring the Democrats to power, overturning Republicans, and repressing civil and voting rights of freedmen” (Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, p. 76). These groups were “the military arm of the Democratic Party” (George Rable, But There Was No Peace, 1984, p. 132). The White League (also called the White Man’s League) was founded in 1874 in Louisiana. Its purpose was to defend a “hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization.” In 1874, League members murdered 17-year-old Julia Hayden, a black schoolteacher in Hartsville, Tennessee. That same year, the League murdered six white Republican officeholders and between five and twenty black witnesses. “Through violence and intimidation, its members reduced Republican voting and contributed to the Democrats' taking over control of the Louisiana Legislature in 1876" (Americanhistoryusa.com.). The Red Shirts was another white supremacist movement formed to destroy Reconstruction. They originated in Mississippi in 1875. They also operated in the Carolinas. The founders were “southern brigadiers of the Democratic Party.” Freedmen who voted were driven from their homes, whipped, and some were murdered. During elections, they rode around the black-majority precincts on horses, brandishing rifles and shotguns and threatening black voters. After helping Democrats win in North Carolina in 1898, Red Shirt leader Josephus Daniels cheered “white supremacy and rescuing the state from Negro-rule.” The Knights of the White Camelia were formed in 1867 in Louisiana by Democrat-Confederate Colonel Alcibiades DeBlanc. Members pledged to support “the supremacy of the white race” and restore white control of the government. Their tactics (harassment, floggings, and murder) “produced a reign of terror among the state's black population during the summer and fall of 1868” (James Dauphine, “The Knights of the White Camelia,” Louisiana History, Spring, 1989, pp. 173-1900). The White Camelia consisted mainly of upper class southerners.
The federal efforts to stop the Klan were criticized and slandered by the Democratic press. They “harped on the supposed unfairness and cruelty of incarcerating Klan ‘political prisoners.’ The New York World depicted the convicts as victims of ‘hordes of detectives’ sent to the South to fabricate charges against them. Parallels were goofily drawn between the Bastille, or Siberia, and the Albany Penitentiary in New York’s capital, where the federal government housed Klan convicts from the South. The New York Sun said Klansmen had been ‘sentenced to rot to death,’ and implicitly likened their journey north from South Carolina, ‘stowed away between decks’ of a federally chartered ship to slave ship voyages from Africa to the United States” (Lane, p. 179). It was a pack of lies. Democratic congressmen like James Beck of Kentucky did everything possible to oppose investigation of the KKK.
Democrats committed massive election fraud in the South that stole elections from Republicans. Freemen who voted were threatened, whipped, and many were murdered. “Despite the presence of federal troops, white southerners deployed violence in a sustained campaign to topple the new Republican majorities, oust black officeholders, and disfranchise black voters. At times the violence resembled warfare” (David Krugler, 1919, the Year of Racial Violence, p. 9).
Consider a tiny example of the brazen type of fraud that was committed widely. In 1900, the town of Scotland Neck, North Carolina, had a registered white vote of 395, mostly Democrats, and a registered black vote of 534, all Republicans. In the election for the congressional seat that year, the tally was 831 Democrats and 75 Republicans. In Halifax, North Carolina, there were 345 registered Republicans and 194 registered Democrats, a total of 539 voters. The vote tally was 990 Democrats to 41 Republicans (George H. White’s Farewell Address to Congress, 1901).
In 1876, the Democrat’s fraud and intimidation in the southern states brought the national presidential election itself into confusion. The states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina submitted two sets of election returns with different results. South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton was a former Confederate general who used violence to silence the Republican majority. An estimated 150 blacks were murdered in that state by white supremacist Red Shirts, who were 100% Democrat (Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, p. 174). Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden and Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes each had 184 electoral votes, not counting the three disputed states. Rightly accusing the Democrats of fraud and intimidation, the Republicans contested the electoral ballots from the three Southern states. The nation had no duly elected president from November 1876 to late February 1877. With the country in a constitutional crisis, Congress set up a commission to settle the matter. It consisted of five U.S. representatives, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices, a total of 15 so there could be no tie vote. With eight of the 15 being Republican, the Democrats sought a private compromise. The Democrats would not filibuster the commission’s vote if the Republicans would agree to withdraw all federal troops from the South and the federal government would no longer interfere with Southern elections. This is called the Compromise of 1877. In spite of the agreement, there was talk of forming armed groups to march on Washington to forcibly install Tilden in office, but sitting president Ulysses Grant tightened military security to thwart any such attempt. Hayes was hated by Democrats throughout his term and derided as “His Fraudulency.” As part of the compromise, Southern Democrats had pledged that they would “recognize the civil and political equality of blacks.” This promise was not kept, to say the least.
In 1877, all federal troops were removed from the southern states and the era of reconstruction ended.
By 1878, all of the southern states were captured by Democrats. They were called “Redeemer” governments.
In 1901, the last black congressman from the south, George White, Republican from North Carolina, gave his farewell address. It was called the “Phoenix Speech,” because he predicted that African Americans would return to Congress.
The Jim Crow Era (1877-1964)
“The Democratic party came to be more than a political party in the South--it came to be a defender of a way of life. And that way of life was the restoration as much as possible of white supremacy. ... The Confederate statues you see all around were primarily erected by Democrats” (David Goldfield, The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good).
Democratic-controlled southern governments enacted segregation policies, called “Jim Crow Laws,” which effectively disenfranchised blacks and segregated all aspects of society. (Jim Crow was a black face comedy routine that denigrated blacks.)
“The region then became the Solid South, giving overwhelming majorities of its electoral votes and congressional seats to the Democrats through 1964” (“History of the United States Republican Party,” Wikipedia).
The Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915 and thrived through the 1940s. The founder was William Simmons. The founding ceremony was held on Thanksgiving night, 1915, on top of Stone Mountain near Atlanta. “With a flag fluttering in the wind beside them, a Bible open to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross to light the night sky above, Simmons and his disciples proclaimed the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” (Nancy MacLean. Behind the Mask of Chivalry, p. 5).
At its height in the mid-1920s, the revived KKK had as many as five million members in 4,000 local chapters (Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan). On August 8, 1925, 40,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. From midafternoon to dusk, they marched 16 to 20 abreast. At the head was a masked horse and rider, followed by the Imperial Wizard, Hiram Evans, “wearing a flowing royal-purple robe, trimmed in gold, and surrounded by the rich-colored garments of his Dragons, Klokards, and Kleagles.”
In its heyday, the Klan had considerable political power, all Democrat. In Georgia, Klansmen included the governor, the chief justice of the state supreme court, state attorney general, the mayor of Atlanta, district attorney of Fulton County, and a Fulton superior court judge. A city attorney said, “Everybody in the courthouse belonged to the Klan, virtually every judge, the prosecuting officers ... all the police and the mayor and the councilmen” (MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry). In 1923, at least 75 members of the House of Representatives “were said to owe their seats to the Klan” (MacLean). Anti-Klan governors were defeated in many states, including Oregon and Kansas.
The following case from in the late 1940s illustrates the terrible abuse that blacks in some parts of the South were still enduring in the mid-20th century at the hands of Democrat white supremacists.
In 1949, in Lake County, Florida, a 17-year-old white married girl, Norma Padgett, claimed that she was raped by four black men. In that time and place, any such claim was a death sentence for the black men concerned. The Democrat, KKK-associated Sheriff Willis McCall went on the warpath even though the evidence consisted only of the girl’s testimony, and her reputation was less than sterling. The four men identified were Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. Thomas escaped capture but was chased down in a swamp by a sheriff’s posse and riddled with bullets. Greenlee, Shepherd, and Irvin were arrested. A KKK mob burned homes and businesses in the black community in the Groveland area. After a series of severe beatings and threats against their lives, Greenlee and Shepherd confessed to the rape. At the trial, Padgett pointed her finger at each of them and testified that they are the ones who had raped her, though previously she had told multiple people that she couldn’t recognize the men because it was dark. The all-white jury convicted them of rape and sentenced Shepherd and Irvin to the electric chair and Greenlee to life in prison on a chain gang. Greenlee had an irrefutable alibi that placed him far from the scene of the alleged rape. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled for a new trial in 1951. In November, Sheriff McCall and his brutal racist deputy, Yates, picked up the two men from the Raiford State Prison to transport them to Tavares for the second trial. On the way, he drove down a dark country road, stopped and shot the men who were handcuffed together. He claimed that they tried to escape. When other men arrived to view the bodies, it was found that Irvin was still alive, so Yates shot him again in the neck. In spite of three bullet wounds, he survived to stand trial. Though the sheriff claimed that he shot both men when they were standing and attacking him, the bullet that was fired by Yates into Irvin’s neck was found by the FBI in the ground where he had been lying. On Christmas night 1951, unknown men dynamited the home of Harry T. Moore, executive director of the Florida NAACP, killing Moore and his wife, both of whom were school teachers. Previously they had been fired from their teaching jobs because of Harry’s activism for equal pay for black public school teachers in Brevard County. Moore had been campaigning for justice for the Groveland boys. Local florists refused to deliver flowers to “a Negro funeral.” A lengthy investigation concluded that the likely perpetrators were four Ku Klux Klan members. In the second trial for Irvin, he was again sentenced to death by an all-white jury. He had been offered a deal to plead guilty to rape for a life sentence, but he refused, saying he would not lie about the matter. In 1955, his sentence was commuted to life by Gov. LeRoy Collins. In 1968, he was paroled, but he died the next year. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and lived with his family until he died in 2012. In 2019, the Florida Board of Executive Clemency recommended pardon for the Groveland Four, and Gov. Ron DeSantis followed through on this, and the Florida House of Representatives voted 117-0 to apologize to the families.
Republicans attempted to pass antilynching bills in the U.S. Congress, but they were resisted by Democrats. The first attempt was in 1918. “The bill never made it out of committee, however; the southern Democrats who still controlled Congress in 1918 had no intention of scheduling an antilynching bill for a vote” (David Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence, p. 276).
Segregation laws relegated blacks to second class citizenship.
“Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows. Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped. It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there” (“Jim Crow Laws,” History.com).
The Negro Motorist Green Book, published under sponsorship of Esso and Ford Motor Company, “listed by city and state the names and addresses of hotels, restaurants, taxi services, and gas stations that would accommodate blacks.”
Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) enacted segregation in the federal civil service. “Discrimination in the military was rampant. The marine corps refused to enlist blacks; the navy limited blacks to menial service occupations; and the army, which segregated its units, channeled most of its black conscripts and recruits into labor battalions” (Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence, p. 16).
The Democrats of the U.S. Congress filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which was promoted by President Dwight Eisenhower.
The Democrats of the U.S. Congress filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
In 1963, Alabama Democrat Gov. George Wallace flew the Confederate flag over the statehouse to protest integration. At his inauguration that year, he said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
The Democrats of the U.S. Senate filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The filibuster was led by Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Cyclops. The act was passed with 82% Republican support and 63% of Democrat support.
One thing we have not been able to find out is when the Democratic Party publicly repented of its white supremacy and the degradation of the black man and when reparations for its crimes. We haven’t found this in a Democratic Party history, in the Democratic Party’s platform, or on its web site or Facebook page.
And we have not been able to discover when the Democratic Party stopped using black people for its own advantage.
WHAT THE DEMOCRATS ARE DOING TODAY
The Democratic Party is trying to tear the nation apart again. Their totalitarianism is no longer directed largely against blacks as in previous centuries. Today it is directed against anyone who disagrees with them. All opposition is to be cancelled, which is an open assault on the Bill of Rights.
They have refused to accept a lawfully elected president. Instead of the party of opposition, they are the party of anarchy. They have viciously slandered the man and his supporters. They have called for the assassination of the president.
https://www.wnd.com/2020/08/put-bullet-donald-trump-watch-2-minutes-dem-threats-violence-president/
They are openly supporting a Marxist anarchist movement called Black Lives Matter (BLM). We don’t know of one prominent Democrat who has condemned BLM’s wanton destruction of America’s cities. In fact, all of the cities being destroyed are ruled by Democrats (e.g., Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago).
They are calling for the defunding of the nation’s police forces.
They are calling for the disarming of law-abiding citizens.
They are slandering federal law enforcement agencies.
They are calling for the abolishment of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
They support open borders to allow the inundation of the nation with illegal aliens, and they support the granting of economic benefits and voting rights to those aliens.
They use dastardly, illegal tactics to oppose the lawful appointment of highly qualified judges.
They have called for violence in the streets in an election year.
They are pushing for election by mail, which is a program rife with potential for voter fraud.
They are dishonoring the national flag by refusing to stand for the nation’s anthem.
They are slandering the nation’s founding fathers.
They are destroying the nation’s historic monuments.
They are rewriting the nation’s history to magnify the bad and ignore the good.
They are using the judiciary to legislate.
They are trying to bankrupt the nation by endless deficit spending.
They are advising that the Democratic presidential nominee for 2020 “not concede under any circumstances” (“Hilly Clinton: Joe Biden Should not Concede,” Daily Wire, Aug. 26, 2020).
These are just a few of the things that add up to another willful attempt to destroy America.
Preaching the gospel and building New Testament churches are far more important endeavors than political activity. These address a nation’s spiritual and moral fundamentals and have eternal consequences. This present world system is passing away and will soon be gone. What good is it to win an election and lose your soul?
But politics do have a major effect in this present world, and it is important for God’s people to know what is happening.
THE FIRST TIME THE DEMOCRATS TRIED TO DESTROY THE NATION
The first time the Democrats tried to destroy America was in the 19th century.
It was the Democratic Party that split the country by its white supremacy.
It was the Democratic Party that advertised itself in a political poster in 1856 as “for the White man” and mocked the Republican Party as “for the Negro.”
It was seven Democrat Supreme Court judges who ruled in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that a descendent from an African slave, whether slave or free, cannot be a U.S. citizen.
Every state that seceded from the Union in 1860-61 was a Democrat-ruled state.
The Confederate officers were Democrats, including commanding general Robert E. Lee.
For all practical purposes, the Confederate flag was a Democrat flag. (Not to be confused with the official flag of the Confederate States which was called the “Stars and Bars,” the flag popularly known as the Confederate flag features a blue diagonal cross emblazoned with 13 white stars on a field of red.) Called “the Southern Cross” and “the Stainless Banner,” it was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Savannah Morning News editor William T. Thompson, said, “As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism” (Savannah Morning News, May 4, 1863). (The Confederate flag was promoted the the Democrat politicians who passed the Jim Crow segregation laws. They also erected hundreds of Confederate monuments. In 1948, Democrat Strom Thurmond used the Confederate flag as a symbol of his presidential candidacy and of the Dixiecrats’ rejection of civil rights for blacks. In 1956, Democrat lawmakers of the state of Georgia incorporated the Confederate flag into its state flag “as a symbol of resistance to integration.” In 1963, Alabama Democrat Gov. George Wallace flew the Confederate flag over the statehouse to protest integration. At his inauguration that year, he said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In 1987, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton signed Act 116 that described the state flag: “The blue star above the word ‘ARKANSAS’ is to commemorate the Confederate States of America.” When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 and 1996 and Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, some of their campaign buttons and other paraphernalia featured Confederate flags.)
Reconstruction (1865-1877)
After the Union was restored in 1865, it was Democrats who fought against black civil rights every step of the way.
At the end of the war, Republicans in Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery (the Senate in April 1864 and the House in January 1865). The overall vote was 100% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats. This shows that a large number of white people cared for the rights of black people and wanted to help them. A great many whites gave their lives for this cause, both before, during, and after the war.
In 1866, Republicans in Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment granting citizenship to former slaves and equal protection under the law. 94% of Republicans voted for the amendment and 100% of Democrats voted against it. When it was submitted to the states for ratification, it was rejected by the southern Democrat governments. “These new governments accepted the emancipation of the Negro but accorded him only varying degrees of limited citizenship, always excluding the ballot” (Chalmers, Hooded Americanism). The amendment was finally ratified in 1868.
Under President Ulysses Grant (1868-1876), Republicans, backed by federal troops, sought to “Reconstruct” the South by enforcing federal laws granting liberties to blacks. “To entrench the Civil Rights Act’s statutory equalization of citizenship in the nation’s basic law, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1866, then submitted it to the states for ratification. Republicans campaigned on this program in the 1866 midterm elections. Voters rewarded them with veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress. In 1867, Congress passed three Reconstruction Acts ... The laws grouped ten of the eleven formerly seceded Southern states into five military districts, with each district governed by an Army general and patrolled by several thousand troops. (Tennessee had already returned to the Union through a separate process.) The ten states would be excluded from congressional representation pending the rewriting of their constitutions by state conventions. The conventions, in turn, would be elected by black and white male voters, except for former Confederate leaders, who would be ineligible based on their past role in the rebellion. Then voters would go to the polls again in April 1868, to ratify the constitutions in statewide elections. Only after its voters ratified a new constitution, and its legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, could any of these ten former Confederate states be restored to the Union and send representatives to Congress. By early 1868, it seemed Congress might indeed accomplish what had come to be called ‘radical’ Reconstruction. Originally an exclusively Northern antislavery movement, the Republican Party would achieve national viability, based on black votes in the Southern states. That, in turn, would help sustain the great legislative achievements of the postwar Republican Congresses--equal rights, regardless of race or caste, for every man in every state. What had been an agglomeration of fractious states would at last be a true nation-state, steered by a federal government responsible for security and the economy, and, above all rededicated to the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth, ‘that all men are created equal’” (Charles Lane, Freedom’s Detective: The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan and the Man Who Masterminded America’s First War on Terror, p. 19).
Republicans gained majorities in the new southern state governments. They were called “Radicals” by the Democrats. Nearly 800 black men served in the legislatures. In Georgia, a Republican congress and governor were elected in 1868, with the 188,000 votes evenly divided between whites and blacks (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 30), thus demonstrating that large numbers of whites in the South supported equal rights for blacks.
In 1869, Republicans in Congress passed the 15th Amendment granting the right to vote to all men regardless of race. 100% of Republicans voted for it and 100% of Democrats voted against it. It was ratified by the states in 1870 under Republican majorities.
In 1872, the first seven black members of the United States Congress were seated. All were Republicans. Between then and 1900, nearly 40 blacks would serve in Congress, all Republicans.
A Republican-controlled Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, including inns, theaters, public conveyances on land or water, and other places of public amusement. The act was approved by 100% of Republicans and opposed by 100% of Democrats.
Blacks made great progress in the decades after the Civil War, in spite of starting out from the depraved condition created by 200 years of slavery. The following is from Congressman George H. White’s farewell speech of 1901:
“Since that time we have reduced the illiteracy of the race at least 45 percent. We have written and published nearly 500 books. We have nearly 800 newspapers, three of which are dailies. We have now in practice over 2,000 lawyers, and a corresponding number of doctors. We have accumulated over $12,000,000 worth of school property and about $40,000,000 worth of church property. We have about 140,000 farms and homes, valued in the neighborhood of $750,000,000, and personal property valued about $170,000,000. We have raised about $11,000,000 for educational purposes, and the property per-capita for every colored man, woman and child in the United States is estimated at $75. We are operating successfully several banks, commercial enterprises among our people in the South land, including one silk mill and one cotton factory. We have 32,000 teachers in the schools of the country; we have built, with the aid of our friends, about 20,000 churches, and support 7 colleges, 17 academies, 50 high schools, 5 law schools, 5 medical schools and 25 theological seminaries. We have over 600,000 acres of land in the South alone. The cotton produced, mainly by black labor, has increased from 4,669,770 bales in 1860 to 11,235,000 in 1899. All this was done under the most adverse circumstances. We have done it in the face of lynching, burning at the stake, with the humiliation of ‘Jim Crow’ laws, the disfranchisement of our male citizens, slander and degradation of our women, with the factories closed against us, no Negro permitted to be conductor on the railway cars…no Negro permitted to run as engineer on a locomotive, most of the mines closed against us. Labor unions–carpenters, painters, brick masons, machinists, hackmen and those supplying nearly every conceivable avocation for livelihood–have banded themselves together to better their condition, but, with few exceptions, the black face has been left out. The Negroes are seldom employed in our mercantile stores. With all these odds against us, we are forging our way ahead, slowly, perhaps, but surely.”
White concluded that speech with the plea that his people simply be given the same opportunity as other Americans.
“Mr. Chairman, before concluding my remarks I want to submit a brief recipe for the solution of the so-called ‘American Negro problem.’ He asks no special favors, but simply demands that he be given the same chance for existence, for earning a livelihood, for raising himself in the scales of manhood and womanhood, that are accorded to kindred nationalities. Treat him as a man; open the doors of industry to him. Help him to overcome his weaknesses, punish the crime-committing class by the courts of the land, measure the standard of the race by its best material, cease to mold prejudicial and unjust public sentiment against him, and he will learn to support and join in with that political party, that institution, whether secular or religious, in every community where he lives, which is destined to do the greatest good for the greatest number. Obliterate race hatred, party prejudice, and help us to achieve nobler ends, greater results and become satisfactory citizens to our brother in white.”
The Dismantling of Reconstruction
Southern Democrats hated reconstruction. Ryland Randolph, editor of the Independent Monitor of Alabama, wrote of the “galling despotism that broods like a nightmare over these southern states ... a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources, and all powers, to degrade the white man by the establishment of Negro supremacy.”
Democrats formed terrorist organizations to destroy reconstruction.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed in 1865, but it didn’t prosper until 1867 when it came under the leadership of Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest, former Confederate cavalry commander. “In April of 1867, representatives met in Nashville, at the Maxwell House, and turned out a flavor more to their liking. With much talk of unity of purpose, concert of action, proper limits, and authority to the prudent, a Constitution or prescript was drawn up. ... Nathan Bedford Forrest, lately of the armies of the Confederacy was elected Grand Wizard, and his Empire divided into realms, dominions, provinces, and dens, headed by Grand Dragons, titans, Giants, and Cyclopes, and composed of Ghouls” (David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan).
In 1868, Forrest was a delegate to the Democratic Convention in New York City. Horatio Seymour was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, and Frank Blair, Jr., a friend of Forrest, was nominated vice presidential candidate. Their campaign slogan was, “Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.” The Democratic Party called for termination of the Freedman’s Bureau and “any government policy designed to aid blacks in the South” (Charles Calhoun, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant).
“Their goal would be to disrupt radical Reconstruction through intimidation of Republican voters and politicians, starting with the 1868 elections. The new Klan leaders formalized the hierarchy of the ‘Invisible Empire,’ as it would come to be known, with a ‘Grand Wizard.’ Forrest, at the top, commanding rank-and-file ‘ghouls’ initiated in secret grips, passwords, and rituals. [Forrest was a] slave trader before the Civil War, and a commander of forces notorious for massacring surrendered black Union soldiers during the conflict ... New Klansmen swore to support ‘a white man’s government,’ and to maintain absolute secrecy about Klan activities, upon pain of death” (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 23). “Henceforth it was to be war between the Klan and Radical rule” (Chalmers, Hooded Americanism).
“The Ku Klux Klan--numbering tens of thousands of sworn members across the southeastern United States, and enjoying the informal support of many times that number in the white population--constituted the Democratic party’s terrorist wing” (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 134).
The violence began under Forrest’s leadership. “In the spring of 1867, Forrest and his dragoons launched a campaign of midnight parades; 'ghost' masquerades; and 'whipping' and even 'killing Negro voters and white Republicans, to scare blacks off voting and running for office’” (Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre, p. 386).
During the election campaign of 1868, there were 336 murders or attempted murders of blacks in Georgia alone to suppress Republican voting (Jonathan Bryant, “Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era,” georgiaencyclopedia.org).
Hundreds more were killed that year in Louisiana (not only by the KKK, but also by other white terrorist groups such as the Knights of the White Camellia). In one rampage that occurred in September in the town of Opelousas in the St. Landry parish, more than 200 blacks were killed. The violence began with the vicious beating of 18-year-old Emerson Bentley, a white school teacher from Ohio who also worked at the Republican paper The St. Landry Progress. Beaten in front of his young students by three Democrats, including James Dickson who later became a judge, Bentley escaped with his life, but that episode began an open season on black Republicans. “The bloodshed continued for two weeks, with African-American families killed in their homes, shot in public, and chased down by vigilante groups. C.E. Durand, the other editor of the St. Landry Progress, was murdered in the early days of the massacre and his body displayed outside the Opelousas drug store. By the end of the two weeks, estimates of the number killed were around 250 people, the vast majority of them African-American. ... The groups managed to achieve their ultimate purpose, as was borne out by the results of the November presidential elections. Even though Republican nominee Ulysses Grant won, not a single Republican vote was counted in St. Landry Parish. Those who oversaw the election felt “fully convinced that no man on that day could have voted any other than the democratic ticket and not been killed inside of 24 hours thereafter” (“The Deadliest Massacre in Reconstruction-Era Louisiana,” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 28, 2018).
The first KKK political assassination was that of George Ashburn, a leading white Republican in Georgia who assisted in writing Georgia’s new reconstructionist constitution. He was among the white minority in the South who opposed succession. Before the Civil War, he came to see slavery as evil and quit his job as a plantation overseer. He fought on the side of the Union and returned home to Georgia after the war with the following dream: “I only hope to live to see Georgia reconstructed and to lay my bones in soil consecrated to liberty, within her borders” (Lane, Freedom’s Detective, p. 17). Ashburn was appointed a judge by the military governor George Meade and called to order the Georgia Constitutional Convention of 1867 to remove restrictions on the civil rights of African Americans. Ashburn was shot to death on the evening of March 30, 1868, in his boarding room by four KKK shooters. All were Democrats. One was the chairman of the local Democratic Party; another was the Democratic clerk of the Muscogee County court. They were captured and brought to trial in a federal court. One of the defense lawyers was Alexander Stephen, former vice president of the Confederate States. In his “Cornerstone Speech” in favor of secession in March 1861, he said the Confederacy is “founded upon ... the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” The federal government made a deal with the Georgia Democrats to stop the trial in exchange for Georgia’s ratification of the 14th Amendment. No one was ever punished for the assassination.
The Ku Klux Klan was one of several paramilitary groups that were founded to overturn the black civil rights that were guaranteed by federal law. “They used organization, intimidation and force to achieve political purposes of restoring the Democrats to power, overturning Republicans, and repressing civil and voting rights of freedmen” (Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, p. 76). These groups were “the military arm of the Democratic Party” (George Rable, But There Was No Peace, 1984, p. 132). The White League (also called the White Man’s League) was founded in 1874 in Louisiana. Its purpose was to defend a “hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization.” In 1874, League members murdered 17-year-old Julia Hayden, a black schoolteacher in Hartsville, Tennessee. That same year, the League murdered six white Republican officeholders and between five and twenty black witnesses. “Through violence and intimidation, its members reduced Republican voting and contributed to the Democrats' taking over control of the Louisiana Legislature in 1876" (Americanhistoryusa.com.). The Red Shirts was another white supremacist movement formed to destroy Reconstruction. They originated in Mississippi in 1875. They also operated in the Carolinas. The founders were “southern brigadiers of the Democratic Party.” Freedmen who voted were driven from their homes, whipped, and some were murdered. During elections, they rode around the black-majority precincts on horses, brandishing rifles and shotguns and threatening black voters. After helping Democrats win in North Carolina in 1898, Red Shirt leader Josephus Daniels cheered “white supremacy and rescuing the state from Negro-rule.” The Knights of the White Camelia were formed in 1867 in Louisiana by Democrat-Confederate Colonel Alcibiades DeBlanc. Members pledged to support “the supremacy of the white race” and restore white control of the government. Their tactics (harassment, floggings, and murder) “produced a reign of terror among the state's black population during the summer and fall of 1868” (James Dauphine, “The Knights of the White Camelia,” Louisiana History, Spring, 1989, pp. 173-1900). The White Camelia consisted mainly of upper class southerners.
The federal efforts to stop the Klan were criticized and slandered by the Democratic press. They “harped on the supposed unfairness and cruelty of incarcerating Klan ‘political prisoners.’ The New York World depicted the convicts as victims of ‘hordes of detectives’ sent to the South to fabricate charges against them. Parallels were goofily drawn between the Bastille, or Siberia, and the Albany Penitentiary in New York’s capital, where the federal government housed Klan convicts from the South. The New York Sun said Klansmen had been ‘sentenced to rot to death,’ and implicitly likened their journey north from South Carolina, ‘stowed away between decks’ of a federally chartered ship to slave ship voyages from Africa to the United States” (Lane, p. 179). It was a pack of lies. Democratic congressmen like James Beck of Kentucky did everything possible to oppose investigation of the KKK.
Democrats committed massive election fraud in the South that stole elections from Republicans. Freemen who voted were threatened, whipped, and many were murdered. “Despite the presence of federal troops, white southerners deployed violence in a sustained campaign to topple the new Republican majorities, oust black officeholders, and disfranchise black voters. At times the violence resembled warfare” (David Krugler, 1919, the Year of Racial Violence, p. 9).
Consider a tiny example of the brazen type of fraud that was committed widely. In 1900, the town of Scotland Neck, North Carolina, had a registered white vote of 395, mostly Democrats, and a registered black vote of 534, all Republicans. In the election for the congressional seat that year, the tally was 831 Democrats and 75 Republicans. In Halifax, North Carolina, there were 345 registered Republicans and 194 registered Democrats, a total of 539 voters. The vote tally was 990 Democrats to 41 Republicans (George H. White’s Farewell Address to Congress, 1901).
In 1876, the Democrat’s fraud and intimidation in the southern states brought the national presidential election itself into confusion. The states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina submitted two sets of election returns with different results. South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton was a former Confederate general who used violence to silence the Republican majority. An estimated 150 blacks were murdered in that state by white supremacist Red Shirts, who were 100% Democrat (Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, p. 174). Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden and Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes each had 184 electoral votes, not counting the three disputed states. Rightly accusing the Democrats of fraud and intimidation, the Republicans contested the electoral ballots from the three Southern states. The nation had no duly elected president from November 1876 to late February 1877. With the country in a constitutional crisis, Congress set up a commission to settle the matter. It consisted of five U.S. representatives, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices, a total of 15 so there could be no tie vote. With eight of the 15 being Republican, the Democrats sought a private compromise. The Democrats would not filibuster the commission’s vote if the Republicans would agree to withdraw all federal troops from the South and the federal government would no longer interfere with Southern elections. This is called the Compromise of 1877. In spite of the agreement, there was talk of forming armed groups to march on Washington to forcibly install Tilden in office, but sitting president Ulysses Grant tightened military security to thwart any such attempt. Hayes was hated by Democrats throughout his term and derided as “His Fraudulency.” As part of the compromise, Southern Democrats had pledged that they would “recognize the civil and political equality of blacks.” This promise was not kept, to say the least.
In 1877, all federal troops were removed from the southern states and the era of reconstruction ended.
By 1878, all of the southern states were captured by Democrats. They were called “Redeemer” governments.
In 1901, the last black congressman from the south, George White, Republican from North Carolina, gave his farewell address. It was called the “Phoenix Speech,” because he predicted that African Americans would return to Congress.
The Jim Crow Era (1877-1964)
“The Democratic party came to be more than a political party in the South--it came to be a defender of a way of life. And that way of life was the restoration as much as possible of white supremacy. ... The Confederate statues you see all around were primarily erected by Democrats” (David Goldfield, The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good).
Democratic-controlled southern governments enacted segregation policies, called “Jim Crow Laws,” which effectively disenfranchised blacks and segregated all aspects of society. (Jim Crow was a black face comedy routine that denigrated blacks.)
“The region then became the Solid South, giving overwhelming majorities of its electoral votes and congressional seats to the Democrats through 1964” (“History of the United States Republican Party,” Wikipedia).
The Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915 and thrived through the 1940s. The founder was William Simmons. The founding ceremony was held on Thanksgiving night, 1915, on top of Stone Mountain near Atlanta. “With a flag fluttering in the wind beside them, a Bible open to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross to light the night sky above, Simmons and his disciples proclaimed the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” (Nancy MacLean. Behind the Mask of Chivalry, p. 5).
At its height in the mid-1920s, the revived KKK had as many as five million members in 4,000 local chapters (Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan). On August 8, 1925, 40,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. From midafternoon to dusk, they marched 16 to 20 abreast. At the head was a masked horse and rider, followed by the Imperial Wizard, Hiram Evans, “wearing a flowing royal-purple robe, trimmed in gold, and surrounded by the rich-colored garments of his Dragons, Klokards, and Kleagles.”
In its heyday, the Klan had considerable political power, all Democrat. In Georgia, Klansmen included the governor, the chief justice of the state supreme court, state attorney general, the mayor of Atlanta, district attorney of Fulton County, and a Fulton superior court judge. A city attorney said, “Everybody in the courthouse belonged to the Klan, virtually every judge, the prosecuting officers ... all the police and the mayor and the councilmen” (MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry). In 1923, at least 75 members of the House of Representatives “were said to owe their seats to the Klan” (MacLean). Anti-Klan governors were defeated in many states, including Oregon and Kansas.
The following case from in the late 1940s illustrates the terrible abuse that blacks in some parts of the South were still enduring in the mid-20th century at the hands of Democrat white supremacists.
In 1949, in Lake County, Florida, a 17-year-old white married girl, Norma Padgett, claimed that she was raped by four black men. In that time and place, any such claim was a death sentence for the black men concerned. The Democrat, KKK-associated Sheriff Willis McCall went on the warpath even though the evidence consisted only of the girl’s testimony, and her reputation was less than sterling. The four men identified were Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. Thomas escaped capture but was chased down in a swamp by a sheriff’s posse and riddled with bullets. Greenlee, Shepherd, and Irvin were arrested. A KKK mob burned homes and businesses in the black community in the Groveland area. After a series of severe beatings and threats against their lives, Greenlee and Shepherd confessed to the rape. At the trial, Padgett pointed her finger at each of them and testified that they are the ones who had raped her, though previously she had told multiple people that she couldn’t recognize the men because it was dark. The all-white jury convicted them of rape and sentenced Shepherd and Irvin to the electric chair and Greenlee to life in prison on a chain gang. Greenlee had an irrefutable alibi that placed him far from the scene of the alleged rape. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled for a new trial in 1951. In November, Sheriff McCall and his brutal racist deputy, Yates, picked up the two men from the Raiford State Prison to transport them to Tavares for the second trial. On the way, he drove down a dark country road, stopped and shot the men who were handcuffed together. He claimed that they tried to escape. When other men arrived to view the bodies, it was found that Irvin was still alive, so Yates shot him again in the neck. In spite of three bullet wounds, he survived to stand trial. Though the sheriff claimed that he shot both men when they were standing and attacking him, the bullet that was fired by Yates into Irvin’s neck was found by the FBI in the ground where he had been lying. On Christmas night 1951, unknown men dynamited the home of Harry T. Moore, executive director of the Florida NAACP, killing Moore and his wife, both of whom were school teachers. Previously they had been fired from their teaching jobs because of Harry’s activism for equal pay for black public school teachers in Brevard County. Moore had been campaigning for justice for the Groveland boys. Local florists refused to deliver flowers to “a Negro funeral.” A lengthy investigation concluded that the likely perpetrators were four Ku Klux Klan members. In the second trial for Irvin, he was again sentenced to death by an all-white jury. He had been offered a deal to plead guilty to rape for a life sentence, but he refused, saying he would not lie about the matter. In 1955, his sentence was commuted to life by Gov. LeRoy Collins. In 1968, he was paroled, but he died the next year. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and lived with his family until he died in 2012. In 2019, the Florida Board of Executive Clemency recommended pardon for the Groveland Four, and Gov. Ron DeSantis followed through on this, and the Florida House of Representatives voted 117-0 to apologize to the families.
Republicans attempted to pass antilynching bills in the U.S. Congress, but they were resisted by Democrats. The first attempt was in 1918. “The bill never made it out of committee, however; the southern Democrats who still controlled Congress in 1918 had no intention of scheduling an antilynching bill for a vote” (David Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence, p. 276).
Segregation laws relegated blacks to second class citizenship.
“Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows. Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped. It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there” (“Jim Crow Laws,” History.com).
The Negro Motorist Green Book, published under sponsorship of Esso and Ford Motor Company, “listed by city and state the names and addresses of hotels, restaurants, taxi services, and gas stations that would accommodate blacks.”
Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) enacted segregation in the federal civil service. “Discrimination in the military was rampant. The marine corps refused to enlist blacks; the navy limited blacks to menial service occupations; and the army, which segregated its units, channeled most of its black conscripts and recruits into labor battalions” (Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence, p. 16).
The Democrats of the U.S. Congress filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which was promoted by President Dwight Eisenhower.
The Democrats of the U.S. Congress filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
In 1963, Alabama Democrat Gov. George Wallace flew the Confederate flag over the statehouse to protest integration. At his inauguration that year, he said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
The Democrats of the U.S. Senate filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The filibuster was led by Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Cyclops. The act was passed with 82% Republican support and 63% of Democrat support.
One thing we have not been able to find out is when the Democratic Party publicly repented of its white supremacy and the degradation of the black man and when reparations for its crimes. We haven’t found this in a Democratic Party history, in the Democratic Party’s platform, or on its web site or Facebook page.
And we have not been able to discover when the Democratic Party stopped using black people for its own advantage.
WHAT THE DEMOCRATS ARE DOING TODAY
The Democratic Party is trying to tear the nation apart again. Their totalitarianism is no longer directed largely against blacks as in previous centuries. Today it is directed against anyone who disagrees with them. All opposition is to be cancelled, which is an open assault on the Bill of Rights.
They have refused to accept a lawfully elected president. Instead of the party of opposition, they are the party of anarchy. They have viciously slandered the man and his supporters. They have called for the assassination of the president.
https://www.wnd.com/2020/08/put-bullet-donald-trump-watch-2-minutes-dem-threats-violence-president/
They are openly supporting a Marxist anarchist movement called Black Lives Matter (BLM). We don’t know of one prominent Democrat who has condemned BLM’s wanton destruction of America’s cities. In fact, all of the cities being destroyed are ruled by Democrats (e.g., Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago).
They are calling for the defunding of the nation’s police forces.
They are calling for the disarming of law-abiding citizens.
They are slandering federal law enforcement agencies.
They are calling for the abolishment of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
They support open borders to allow the inundation of the nation with illegal aliens, and they support the granting of economic benefits and voting rights to those aliens.
They use dastardly, illegal tactics to oppose the lawful appointment of highly qualified judges.
They have called for violence in the streets in an election year.
They are pushing for election by mail, which is a program rife with potential for voter fraud.
They are dishonoring the national flag by refusing to stand for the nation’s anthem.
They are slandering the nation’s founding fathers.
They are destroying the nation’s historic monuments.
They are rewriting the nation’s history to magnify the bad and ignore the good.
They are using the judiciary to legislate.
They are trying to bankrupt the nation by endless deficit spending.
They are advising that the Democratic presidential nominee for 2020 “not concede under any circumstances” (“Hilly Clinton: Joe Biden Should not Concede,” Daily Wire, Aug. 26, 2020).
These are just a few of the things that add up to another willful attempt to destroy America.
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