Confessions of a Black Republican

Excerpts from Testimonial of a Black Republican

HELP FROM A FRIEND

My dear conservative friend introduced me to some historical facts about the Democratic Party that helped push me to research for myself whether or not the claims he made were true. What I learned crushed my beliefs that the Republican Party was full of racists who were trying to hold the black man down. What I learned left me with no affinity for my inherited party; I was left, finally, with NO good reason to vote Democrat.

What I found out in my quest for political clarity was that the Republican party passed EVERY civil rights legislation in regard to black Americans, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was signed by a Democrat president but only passed because of a Republican congress’ overwhelming support. Most Democrats in congress opposed it. Republicans passed the 13th amendment, freeing black slaves; the 14th amendment, giving blacks their citizenship; the 15th amendment, granting blacks the right to vote. Even still, whenever Democrats would take back control of the white house and congress, they would prevent blacks from buying land, they denied them fair wages for their work, and they undid many of the civil rights advancements of the Republicans.

Republicans were largely responsible for promoting and defending the civil rights of blacks while Democrats fought to lynch us, enslave us, and keep us as second-class citizens. I discovered that even civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was Republican and so was abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Other abolitionists, both black and white, were Republican. In fact, I learned that the Republican Party (initially comprised of disgruntled Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soil party members) was established in 1854 as the anti-slavery party; they opposed the spreading of slavery into free states.

I had always been told that white people were the ones who upheld slavery and fought to keep black people down. I had never heard the political aspect of the civil rights controversy. White people who identified themselves as Republican (most also identified themselves as Protestant Christians or Evangelicals) fought to free black slaves. They clearly identified their enemy as Democrat, or Southern Democrat, the ones who wanted to maintain and spread slavery. John Mark Reynolds once said of the Republican Party, “When it came time to confront the original sin of the nation—slavery—the Republican Party was on the Lord’s side.” Once they were granted the right to vote, blacks voted Republican and worked alongside white Republicans to advance our freedom in this country.

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S SHAMEFUL PAST

To my great surprise, I found out that it was the Southern Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery. As Francis Rice has said, “They were the ones who passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. They started the Ku Klux Klan (the terrorist wing of the Democrat party) to lynch and terrorize blacks.” They fought against the passage of every single civil rights law from the 1800’s through the 1960’s.