MLK STRUGGLE AGAINST DEMOCRATS

Martin Luther King's struggle was against Democrats



The police chief of Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights era was a Democrat. A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Eugene "Bull" Connor had been a Democrat state legislator and a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention.

In 1963, police under Connor's command attacked several thousand African-American schoolchildren who were demonstrating peacefully for their civil rights. At the time, it should be noted, he was the Democratic National Committeeman for Alabama. Connor's men used high-pressure hoses, clubs and dogs in their assault, and then jailed nearly a thousand children. A year after attacking the children, Connor was elected, as a Democrat, to statewide office.

How did it come to be that African-Americans in Alabama were so oppressed?

In 1901, the Alabama Democratic Party called for a convention to write a new state constitution that would prohibit African-Americans from voting. Despite vocal opposition from Booker T. Washington and other Republican civil rights activists, the Democrat scam succeeded.

Democrats dominated Alabama's 1901 constitutional convention, and its chairman was a Democrat. In his opening address, he said:

"If we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law -- not by force or fraud... The negro is descended from a race lowest in intelligence and moral precepts of all the races of men."

Alabama's African-American citizens would not vote in appreciable numbers again until the 1950s. It was a Republican federal judge, Frank Johnson, who in 1956 ruled in favor of Rosa Parks and who in 1965 ordered the Democrat governor, George Wallace, to permit Martin Luther King's voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Condoleezza Rice said:

"The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."

And, as Republicans celebrate Martin Luther King Day, they should remember that his struggle was against Democrats.

Here is the permalink to the article on my blog.

Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the country. He is the author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party. Each day, his Grand Old Partisan blog celebrates 155 years of Republican heroes and heroics. See www.RepublicanBasics.com for more information.


Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the country. He has made presentations in 28 states so far. His book, Back to Basics for the Republican Party, is the acclaimed history of the GOP cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision.