Editor’s note: Mr. Blackwell is a member of the Advisory Board of the American Civil Rights Union.
You know you’ve hit a nerve when the left starts screaming.
MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow’s producer, Steve Benen, just trashed the American Civil Rights Union’s recent pamphlet, “The Truth About Jim Crow” (TTAJC), which National Review on the Internet writer John Fund, who he wrote about in a recent column.
Benen cites criticism from Atlanta Journal Constitution blogger Jay Bookman: “Jay Bookman takes a closer look at the brochure promoted by the Fund, highlighting some of the more glaring errors of fact and judgment.”
And what would those errors of fact be, Steve? Bookman did not point out a single factual error. Instead, referring to TTAJC’s three main points that Jim Crow is “dehumanizing, deadly and democratic,” he painfully admitted that the article was exact: “it’s true about everything.” Apparently Benen believes that if you can’t find a factual error yourself, you can falsely claim that someone else did it.
Benen also suggests that Fund is a hypocrite for daring to write about civil rights for the NRO. You see, in 1957 William F. Buckley z National Review wrote an article supporting segregation. But Buckley was not alone in 1957. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson was busy gutting GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act, and John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, voted against it. If the Fund is responsible for Buckley, aren’t Barack Obama and Harry Reid also responsible for Kennedy and Johnson?
If Benen and Bookman can’t find any factual errors in TTAJC, what are they complaining about? Eating their sacred ox. Benen and Bookman devote their columns to confirming the left’s standard dogma about Jim Crow, which TTAJC denies. Such heresy cannot be tolerated.
According to Bookman:
I have read the entire brochure and there is one word that is not in the document issued by such a highly conservative organization. This word is “conservative” and there is a very good reason for its absence:
Conservatives – conservatives in the Democratic Party and conservatives in the Republican Party – fought against civil rights. They fought tough, fiercely and ultimately lost. The very magazine in which the Fund’s article appeared, National Review, is a conservative magazine that strongly defends segregation.
Liberals and moderates – again, liberals and moderates from both parties, both Republicans and Democrats – fought FOR civil rights.
This is the basic, unvarnished and indisputable truth. It was never a fight between Democrats and Republicans, it was a fight between liberals and conservatives. The fund knows this. The authors of the ACRU brochure know this. And the whole point of the pamphlet and similar efforts to rewrite history is to make that truth disappear.”
Benen adds that Democrats “sent racists to the GOP” and “segregationists established themselves in the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century.”
This is the left’s narrative about Jim Crow, and it is completely wrong in both facts and analysis. Here’s the crux of the problem: the left has hijacked the real history of Jim Crow. The dividing line between Jim Crow was never between liberals and conservatives; it’s much more exact to call it Democrats vs. Republicans. Not only in the 19th century, when the KKK served as the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, but also in the 1950s and 1960s. Bookman’s claim that “conservatives in the Republican Party… fought against civil rights” is completely false. As historian Dr. John Fonte noted at NRO in 2003, staunchly conservative Republicans led the fight for civil rights in the Senate, including Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, Ohio Senator Robert Taft and California Senator Bill Knowland. In contrast, liberal Democrats remained divided, and liberal senators such as William Fulbright and Al Gore Sr. continued to fight for Jim Crow and white supremacy until the bitter end. One of these undeniably liberal Democrats who fought fiercely for civil rights was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who switched sides only because he believed that supporting civil rights for blacks would strengthen black support for the Democratic Party. And how many people reading this column knew that the greatest icon of the Democratic Party, liberal John F. Kennedy, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957?
Further contradicting the left’s narrative, there was no sudden shift of segregationists from Democrats to Republicans after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The truth is that white Southerners continued to vote en masse for the Democratic Party until the arrival of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Democrats never “sent out” segregationists from their party, as Benen claims. It is more exact to say that the segregationist Southern Democrats are dead than that they have changed parties. In any case, no Southerner switched from the Democrats to the GOP because the GOP offered refuge to racism. Republicans have never adopted racist policies like Democrats have for over a century; they actually opposed questionable progressive concepts like racial quotas as affirmative action. Democrats to this day accuse Republicans of racism for opposing racial preferences, even though, as Fonte notes, liberals including Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, and Adam Clayton Powell all spoke out against racial preferences during congressional debate on the bill Civil Rights Act of 1964. Now we are dealing with real hypocrisy.
Certainly the most furious segregationist politicians remained in the Democratic Party. Only one Southern Democratic senator who defeated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 defected to the GOP, which was ironic considering that a larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the bill. The rest of the segregationists remained in the Democratic Party, which in 1977 elected former Ku Klux Klan official Robert Byrd as Senate majority leader.
Finally, the left’s civil rights narrative ignores the fact that race is not the only issue in America. There are many reasons why Southern voters rejected the Democratic Party, which moved sharply to the left in 1968 and never returned. Here are some examples: her blame-first foreign policy, her hostility to business, her promotion of welfare dependency, her hostility to God and religion, her sexual radicalism and, last but not least, her constant identity politics and fanning the flames of racial division .
Bookman complains: “I’m not sure that ‘Jim Crow was a Democrat’ is actually one of the three most important things we need to know about that era.”
Actually it is. There is a reason why Jim Crow, which ended fifty years ago, still evokes such mighty emotions, and it is all about partisan politics.
In the 1950s and 1960s, political ideology crossed party lines to a much greater extent than it does today. Both parties included liberals and conservatives. Today’s Democrats range from liberal to the far left, while Republicans range from moderate to conservative. The left benefits from rewriting the history of Jim Crow as a struggle between liberals and conservatives, so they can smear the current, moderately conservative GOP as racist, at least in the eyes of black Democrats.
Jim Crow is also a useful tool for characterizing conservative efforts to root out voter fraud as “racist.” Both Benen and Bookman focus on photo ID measures, with Benen calling them “discriminatory.” What exactly is discriminatory about requiring every American to provide photo ID before voting? As a long-time observer of international elections, I can say that virtually every country in the industrialized world requires a photo ID when voting. Also, the argument that photo IDs deprive people of the right to vote has long been debunked. In fact, both the United Nations and the Department of State recommend the employ of photo IDs to prevent voting fraud in both developed and Third World countries. The Left’s claims that voter ID laws are racist are nothing more than an effort to obfuscate the real problem, voter fraud, while inciting racial divisions and motivating their base.
It all comes down to identity politics, which Democrats have been practicing since the end of the Civil War, especially when they created Jim Crow. Everything ourselves.
