Sunday, January 18, 2009

Martin Luther King Jr.


was a Republican. Yet not a single person you meet will know this, not a single newspaper will mention this. Even though:

◼ The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

◼ The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) is the only living member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

◼ The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restricted on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

◼ The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

◼ In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. Yet - the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

◼ It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

◼ Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats.( Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision....

◼ Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.

◼ h/t, and credit to: Wolfhowling: Standing At The Crossroads - Identity Politics, Multiculturalism & The Melting Pot (Updated & Bumped)
◼ article in WSJ

DR. ALVEDA C. KING founded King for America, Inc. "to assist people in enriching their lives spiritually, personally, mentally and economically." She is the daughter of the late slain civil rights activist Rev. A. D. King and his wife Naomi Barber King. Alveda is the grateful mother of six children and she is a doting grandmother. She says, among other things: (...) My grandfather, Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., or “Daddy King”, was a Republican and father of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was a Republican. (...)

36 comments:

  1. Sad to see Bush leave office Rose?

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  2. My father was a republican now is independent. My grandparents were republicans and were racists.

    I hope the republican party can get back to its roots, rather than continuing sowing seeds of fear.

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  3. "Seeds of fear"? Please elaborate.

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  4. Carol,
    Your own post sows the seeds of ignorance regarding the Republican party.

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  5. Party affiliation doesn't mean much anymore when discussing Reps and Dems.The most tyrannical of our presidents on the whole have probably been Dems though.I put Clinton right up with Reagan,for reasons I won't get into now.And my favorite Pres.,Taft,was a repub.,heavily smeared and tarnished by Dems for daring to buck the banking system.After this was complete,Wilson was elected,promising no entry into WWI.He then of course caved to the bankers and brought them into their badly needed war.

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  6. The important point is that Dr. King would not be a republican today.

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  7. The Republican party has changes a whole hell of a lot in the past 50 years.

    For the worse.

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  8. No matter what a republican does today they will get smeared. Bush appointed Condi, and they both got nothing but grief.

    Today, Kennedy would be a republican.

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  9. You dream.

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  10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3l5EavRbQ4

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  11. Nick, is that a true story?

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  12. welcome to the new World Order dude. You can go along way towards helping yourself by not saying sacreligious things like calling yourself Michelle Obama's lover, they'll jail you for dissing the new Lord Our God.

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  13. The greatest president of all is the one term Democrat James K. Polk. We can thank him for adding the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada to the Union.

    The worst pres was Woodrow Wilson (D) who gave us the income tax, Federal Reserve Bank, illegal drugs and World War act I. He is closely followed by Jimmy (the peanut farmer) Carter (D) who gave away the Panama Canal and embarrassed us with 20% inflation as well as the Iran hostage fiasco. Let's see how the Marxist Messiah works out.

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  14. The Country of Panama was created when Teddy Roosevelt used military force to carve that piece of land from Columbia. This was pure racist American imperialism. Jimmy Carter appropriately put the canal under control of the Panamanian Government and left our military bases there to protect it. When the popular leader of that country, Omar Torrijos entered talks with Japanese engineering firms to build a new canal that would accommodate larger more modern container ships, effectively cutting American firms out of lucrative contracts, he was assassinated by people allied to Washington and who had been trained by the School of the Americas.

    President James K. Polk sent an army deep into Mexico. Future Presidents Tyler and U.S. Grant marched and fought Mexicans and took by force the future states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada. U.S. Grant took a dim view of our aggression against foreign countries for the purpose of expansion. Polk and Tyler cemented their popularity by this aggression - with Tyler riding a wave of popularity to the Presidency.

    Carter's popularity suffered when OPEC cut oil production to punish us for meddling in the Middle East and backing Israeli policies and gas became scarce and prices rose. He created CAFE standards that would have saved us from the pain we've endured from high energy costs. No doubt you have reserved high praise for Reagan. Weren't George Bush and his neo-conservative policies awesome.

    Please remind me how bad Bill Clinton was. Marxism must be a good thing if you think it is so bad.

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  15. 6:55 PM: "Marxism must be a good thing if you think it is so bad."

    Simply brilliant!
    Why rely on Leonidas in order to judge Marxism? Just read :The Communist Manifesto:
    1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
    2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
    3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
    5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. [ie The Fed]
    etc.

    We're already over halfway there dred/theo in case you hadn't noticed.

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  16. What was number four? Number one is a stretch, but you may be hysterical. Two and five have existed since my grand parents were children and have funded the greatest leap in technological advance in the history of the world and has afforded us the lifestyle you and Leonidas are so fond of. How could we afford all the law enforcement we have to protect the haves from the have nots if we didn't have a 'heavy' graduated income tax? What are you guys - some sort of regressive types?

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  17. A Republican? Well, he was also very much a socialist. Prior to 1920, many socialists were Republican, as was the man considered to be the father of modern liberalism, Robert LaFollette. The reallignment came in 1932, when black voters permanently abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats. HL Mencken wrote about the election as late as the summer of 1932 assuming that black voters would continue to vote Republican. They left en masse and never looked back.

    The Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act have mostly since switched over to the Republican Party. When Johnson signed the act he wrote "we (the Democrats) have lost the south for a hundred years." Whether it was deserved, Kevin Phillips "southern strategy" of 1968 was premised on blaming liberals for the Civil Rights Act, as it was in fact written by liberals. The exodus began in 1968 and until Obama was elected the only Democrats who have even come close to the presidency were white southerners.

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  18. Note - the article doesn't claim King was a conservative. Nor does it claim that the southern democrats opposing the civil rights act were liberal. That would be a much harder wagon to pull.

    Eric

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  19. Eric. Not all Republicans are conservatives. And not all Democrats are liberals. Nor are they all "progressives."

    If you asked 100 people they would tell you King was a democrat because all Republicans are filthy racists.

    The point here is actually quite stunning. In instance after instance after instance... quite the opposite is true.

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  20. Nice job Rose, but you forgot the final chapter to your Republican party run-down: George W. Bush!
    He changed his party's laissez-faire strategy into a big-government evangelical behometh.

    The Republican party is in a VERY different part of the national political spectrum now compared to the days when MLK and Abe Lincoln were kicking it old-school GOP.

    Back then the party was progressive, now it's clings, zombie like, to the tattered shards of our grandparent's worldviews.

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  21. That's your opinion. I'm not sure what those tattered shards are. What would that be? personal responsibility? A work ethic? A belief that taxes out to be limited, remember what our country was founded upon? A belief that judges should not legislate from the bench, again going back to that Constitutional thing...

    Maybe those are tattered shards. If so, we are all in trouble.

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  22. Our Country was founded upon the belief that judges should not legislate from the bench? This was the rhetoric of George W. Bush who believed he could legislate from the Presidency. Taxes are not the problem. A government that does not wisely spend those taxes in a way beneficial to the welfare of its citizens does not live up to its responsibility. The Constitution did not serve black people for much of this Nation's history. Individual freedom is sharply curtailed by individual poverty. The small government argument is dead. You cannot substitute market forces for good government.

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  23. Rose - my point is about the vast hypocrisy of those who hated him with a passion when he was alive, not just because of his desegregationism, but because of his left wing politics and what he represented. Republicans and Democrats outside of the south knew the writing was on the wall or the majority of them would have been happy to sit on their asses. What brought the act to the floor was the activism of tens of thousands of citizens, the vast majority of them leftists, many of them to what we would regard today as "the far left." For conservatives to take any large measure of credit for it, or to somehow belief that he would have anything to do with them today at anything other than arms length, particularly after the demonization of the Reagan years (which probably would not have happened had he been alive), is a pretty twisted joke, especially since four years later they would be inviting the segregationists to join them - in a big way.

    The Republicans were once the liberal party. They gave that role up after Teddy Roosevelt and pretty much came to be the party representing the excesses and irresponsibility of the 1920s. That's why black voters left the party. The modern party has nothing to do with the party of Lincoln.

    The other problem with the article is that it completely ignores King's actual political philosophy. Completely.

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  24. "If you asked 100 people they would tell you King was a democrat because all Republicans are filthy racists."

    Put a lid on your hysteria, Rose.

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  25. Lastly, Karl Marx endorsed the election of Lincoln. Does that make him a Republican, had he been an American?

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  26. the government will take good care of you. You be sure'n do what it tells you to do,'k. Obey. Bow. Accept what is dictated. Because government knows what is best for you.

    It's a brave new world. I'm happy for you.

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  27. The Government knows what is good for you when it represents your interests. Where has that been. We have seen what happens when government serves itself and the narrow interests of Wall Street.

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  28. Yes Rose, it was a true story. She was totally into master/slave bondage play.

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  29. Today was a rough day for Rose. Please give her a break.

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  30. I heard Joel Meilke is also into bondage, he likes it when he's out in carson park and homeless women tie him to trees.

    Makes him feel all smexy!

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  31. I don't believe that for a minute, 3:26.

    We all know Joel hangs with the boys up at Azalea Park.

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  32. Very funny, ha ha, and that's enough. Knock it off, guys, Joel is a friend, and none of that is true.

    I don't agree with him on MUCH of anything, maybe not on anything at all, but he's ok.

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  33. Oh look, rose and joel are sweet on each other. Maybe she can convince him to move out of his moms basement.

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  34. Wow, tough days for the Republicans. All that's left is insults directed at the Carson Park Ranger.

    Time to pray guys. That will help.

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