February 22, 2024

Although I was born into a typical Democrat New York City family, I registered as a Republican as soon as I was old enough to vote.

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Why? Just to be different but at heart, I was as enamored of John F. Kennedy as the nuns at my high school. My first vote was for Democrat Hubert Humphrey, and I worked for Robert F. Kennedy’s senatorial campaign. But I was never really a Republican at heart until Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976.   

Before that epiphany, I was as clueless as the rest of America, and when a German coworker asked me the difference between the two major parties, I told her, “the Democrats are for the poor and the Republicans are for the rich.”

Boy, was I wrong. Just a little research into the past, proves that the GOP is the party of civil rights and the Democrats, founders of  the KKK, Jim Crow and segregation policies. Amazingly, this fact has been totally reversed, cleverly, since the 1960s.

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It would help if low-information voters do a little research into the origin of the Republican Party that managed to give us one of the best civil rights presidents, Abraham Lincoln. What many Millennial voters may not know is that the first Republicans were considered radicals of the time. They were abolitionists, an enemy of slavery. While in office, they attempted to enact legislation that would benefit former slaves. Unfortunately, their opponents were racist Democrats who then founded the Ku Klux Klan.

After the Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, freed Confederate slaves were supposed to receive 40 acres and a mule to start their new lives of freedom. After Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, Democrat Andrew Johnson, reversed that ruling. At that time, members of both parties were allowed to serve as president and vice president. Bad idea, for, as soon as Johnson and the Democrat-led Congress were in power, they did all they could to reverse the true civil rights agenda of the rebels in the GOP.

Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which stated; “That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.”

Sounds good but by 1883, it was found unconstitutional by a liberal Supreme Court. Most civil rights legislation was unenforced when the Democrats took over the House. The Biden administration is doing the exact same thing now to Donald Trump’s successful presidency.

One of the most racist films ever made in Hollywood was screened and applauded at Woodrow Wilson’s White House. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was an eye opener for me when I first watched it 20 years ago because I had never been aware of the origin of the Ku Klux Klan or how racist the Democrat party was and still is. It was Democrat Wilson who authorized segregation in the federal government under the guise that it would benefit Black workers.

Today, Democrat politicians routinely toss out the race card against GOP rivals because so many voters are ignorant of that party’s racist past. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 had more Republicans vote for it than the hypocritical Dems. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) was a former member and organizer of the KKK and filibustered the passage of the Civil Rights Act, yet served in Congress for 51 years.