Recent Articles Israel’s October Surprise? Just Because He’s Black Loose Lips The Spider & The Fly When Liberals Care Click here for more articles by Paul R. Hollrah About Paul R. Hollrah Paul R. Hollrah is a freelance writer. He is a member of the Civil Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni at the University of Missouri - Columbia and a Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute. He currently resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Click here to email Paul L. Hollrah

Paul R. Hollrah

Just Because He’s Black
October 14, 2008

In 1938, after receiving a majority vote in the House of Representatives, a bill to outlaw lynching was filibustered by Senate Democrats. One Democrat, Senator Claude Pepper, of Florida, said in the course of a six-hour filibuster, “Mr. President, the crime of lynching...is not of sufficient importance to justify this legislation.”

In a 1946 letter to the Grand Wizard of the West Virginia Ku Klux Klan, Democrat Robert C. Byrd, the current President Pro Tem of the United States Senate, wrote, “I am a former Kleagle (recruiter) of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County...The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union.” Byrd was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1959 and is currently serving his ninth consecutive term.

In a 1961 speech, Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) said, “I have never seen very many white people who felt they were being imposed upon or being subjected to any second-class citizenship if they were directed to a waiting room or to any other public facility to wait or to eat with other white people. Only the Negroes, of all the races which are in this land, publicly proclaim they are being mistreated, imposed upon, and declared second-class citizens because they must go to public facilities with members of their own race.” The Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, the oldest of three senate office buildings, is named after Russell.

Following a poor showing in the 1983 Iowa presidential straw poll, Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) said, “Everybody likes to go to Geneva. I used to do it for the Law of the Sea conferences and you’d find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.” Hollings served as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee from 1987-95 and from 2001-03.

In a 2007 speech, vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden (D-DE) said in referring to Senator Barack Obama, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy.” Implying what? That previous black candidates...Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Senator Carol Moseley Braun...were all radical, inarticulate, ignorant, unclean, and ugly?

And finally, it is only fair that African Americans should know where the New York Times, the principal mouthpiece of the Democrat Party, stood on racial issues a century ago.

In a May 10, 1900 editorial titled "The Political Future of the South," the Times editors wrote that southern Democrats had implemented a “deliberate policy of suppressing the Negro vote,” and that they had been “forced to choose between a policy of manifest injustice toward the blacks and the horrors of Negro rule.” The Times concluded that, to disfranchise the black vote was “manifestly the lesser of two evils.”

Since the Times is not known for its willingness to apologize for or to reverse its editorial positions, one must assume that the Times still believes in “the horrors of Negro rule.”

In 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin, a group of anti-slavery Democrats met to found a new political party dedicated to ending the national shame of slavery. That party was the Republican Party.

In the years that followed, Americans fought a bloody civil war over the issue of slavery. It was a war that pitted north against south, Republican against Democrat, family against family, and brother against brother. When the war ended, Republicans sponsored the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution, banning slavery and giving blacks citizenship and the right to vote. Democrats gave blacks Jim Crow laws and the Black Codes, which established for whom blacks could or could not work, the type of work they could do, evening curfews, and travel restrictions. Jim Crow and the Black Codes prevailed through the 1950s and ‘60s.

Republicans enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Enforcement Act of 1870, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. When Democrats had regained control of the Congress and the courts they repealed most of the Republican civil rights laws and had the Civil Rights Act of 1875 declared unconstitutional by a Democrat-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1866, Democrats created the Ku Klux Klan as a paramilitary force to achieve outside the law those things which they could no longer accomplish within the law. Republicans responded with the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, designed to put an end to the Klan’s terrorist activities against blacks and white Republicans. The Klan remained active throughout most of the 20^th century.

But now, in the same year that Democrats attempt to take credit for having ended slavery (It’s no joke. See 2008 Party Platform, Page 7, Line 1)...much as if Nazis had taken credit for liberating the concentration camps...the party’s radical left has been successful in nominating a black man, a man with little experience, a man of little or no real accomplishment, as the party’s nominee for President of the United States. But is he electable?

Not only is Barack Obama the most liberal candidate ever nominated by the Democratic Party, he carries the added burden of being a black man in a party with a long and sordid history of racial oppression. While the daily tracking polls reflect a better than even chance of victory for Obama, they fail to take into account the most significant poll of all...a recent poll showing that as many as 30% of white Democrats will not vote for a black candidate.

These are Democrats who regularly lie to pollsters about voting for Obama because, as good Democrats, they know what they’re expected to say. But what they do in the privacy of the voting booth is an entirely different matter. The racists in the party have not gone away and they have not been reformed. Other white Democrats, those of the far left, will vote for Obama, not because he’s black, but because he promises to transform America into the socialist paradise for which they have always yearned.

But what is most alarming and disturbing...given what the two major political parties have meant to black liberation and black civil rights over the past 154 years...is the percentage of blacks who will cast their votes for Obama, not on the basis of his background and experience or on his ability to serve as commander in chief, but...just because he’s black.

It cheapens the memory of every one of the more than 360,000 men who died in the war to end slavery, and it cheapens the sacrifice of thousands of blacks and white Republicans, martyrs all, who’ve died at the end of a Klan rope.