The Democratic Party and Racism

John C. Rankin

 

Let’s consider the following timeline:

  1. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision denied the legal  personhood of Black Americans. The Democratic Party supported this decision.
  2. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln published the Emancipation Declaration, setting all Black Americans free. The Democratic Party opposed this decision.
  3. In 1865, 1868 and 1870, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution 1) ended the legal slavery of Black Americans, 2) affirmed the legal personhood of Black Americans, and 3) affirmed the citizenship rights for Black Americans. The Democratic Party opposed each of these Amendments.
  4. The Reconstruction efforts of 1865-1877, even as handicapped by the assignation of Abraham Lincoln, nonetheless produced great gains for Black Americans, now legally free to build their own economic lives. The word “economic” is rooted on the Greek term oikonomos meaning “household.” A comprehensive reality. They succeeded greatly. But it came to a grinding halt as the Democratic Party organized itself in the following years through 1) unionization to give unfair advantage to White Americans, taking direct aim against a free market economy where Black Americans – despite four centuries of chattel slavery – were fully able to compete, 2) the founding of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and its lawless violence and lynching of Black Americans, and 3) Jim Crow and Segregation laws.
  5. Under four centuries of chattel slavery the marriages and parenthood of Black Americans were relentlessly assaulted and broken up. Yet, and in face of the institutionalized racism of the Democratic Party and its influence on the American culture, Black Americans had a lower illigitimacy rate than White Americans.
  6. The 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States Congress was opposed by enough members of the Democratic Party, so that it could not have passed except by enough Republican votes.
  7. Included in this Act was the inclusion of Black Women in the Aids to Family with Dependent Children (AFDC) Act instituted with the creation of the Social Security Act of 1935. But what happened is that the illigitimacy rate rose sharply in Black America and now well over 70 percent of Black Children grow up without a a father who is married to their mother and living in the household. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously quipped how such a situation would help ensure the “Black vote” for the Democratic Party for “the next 100 years,” as they would be dependent on the Democratic Party and its Welfare State. This is where Black Americans are not view as free people but as reified vote tallies.
  8. After Lincoln’s assassination, where has the Republican Party been, “the Party of Lincoln”? With only a few exceptions, they have been silent. Whereas Democrats go to the inner cities and Southern rural Black enclaves and troll for Black votes with promised handouts, the Republicans are nowhere to be seen. The Republican Establishment has passively (at a minimum) acquiesced to Democrat Institutional Racism, even as it buys off strategic Black leaders in the maintenance of the fiction of caring for Black Americans and other disposed peoples.

And to complement this timeline, click on Race in America by Phil Vischer.

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