Ad accuses Democrats of founding KKK

History is not stupid nor is it unimportant, and it most certainly has a bearing on today’s politics. Part of our political dilemma is due precisely because we have forgotten, ignored, or twisted the facts of our history. I will grant you that name-calling, finger-pointing, and back-stabbing have no place in politics (although historically, rancor has always been prevalent in US politics), but to say history is not important is to commit a grave error.

The Democrats WERE predominately Southern slave owners—The Solid South. The Northern Democrats realizing that their Southern brethren were willing to secede or else go to war over their “state’s rights” to slavery joined the newly formed Republican Party beginning in 1854. The Republican Party was formed in the North specifically to end slavery in the new territories, and to stop the Democratic majority House of Representatives from creating a federal law to bring slavery into the Northern states.

The Democratic Party WAS the political party of the Ku Klux Klan (formed in 1865 out of boredom but in one year grew in retaliation to the Northern Republicans winning the war) just as it had been the party of the slave-holders before the war. It wasn’t until The Freedom Riders of the 1960’s and the gerrymandering in the 80’s that the South went to the Republicans. For awhile during the 40’s the Dixiecrats were a temporary splinter group of the Jim Crow Southern Democrats.

The KKK, a prevalent negative force of the South, voted for segregationist Democrats / Dixiecrats like Gov. John Patterson, Gov. George Wallace, Sen. Jesse Helms, and Sen. Strom Thurmond; the latter two having a major impact on federal policy. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican and that fact will always beg to question Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s motivation at having the FBI tape his telephone conversations and put him under video surveillance.

Historical ignorance is a key reason why voters persist in the foolish notion that the Democratic Party is the party for the disenfranchised. Anyone who has followed politics these last few decades or who has studied the history of American politics knows exactly what the Democratic Party has always been—the party of the four S’s: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and since FDR, Socialism.