Was Dr Martin Luther King a republican? In this hyper charged media age where any meaningless utterance can circle the globe a million times in a manner of minutes, isn’t it odd how politicians attempt to rewrite history? Let’s look at the case of Black Republicans. Many in the Republican Party would have us believe they led the charge for civil rights. The GOP would also have us believe that, as the party of Abraham Lincoln, they were founded on the principle that rejected slavery as an institution, and that some of the most influential Blacks in history were republicans.
Was MLK a Republican
Undoubtedly Dr King would have been raised a republican as most Blacks during the 1940’s and 50’s were. Democrats had a virtual strangle hold on politics in the post antebellum South. They were the face of American apartheid and a thorn in the side of their counterparts who saw the issue of civil rights as a means of diffusing the monolithic Black Republican voting blocks in northern US cities.
How did Democrats Win Black Votes
The migration of Black Americans to the Democratic Party began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that served many of the economic issues affecting African Americans in the urban landscape. Democrats continued to woo Black voters by adopting civil rights into their party platform during their 1948 Convention; this prompted a walk out by Southern Democrats. Republicans included some civil rights language in their platform for the 1952 campaign but gummed their way through eight years until finally producing the 1960 Civil Rights Act.
During the Presidential Campaign in 1960, John F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. had a one hour breakfast meeting. King stressed the need for strong executive leadership and was impressed with JFK’s forthright manner and willingness to learn more on the issue of civil rights. The elections of 1960 marked the single greatest migration of black voters to the Democratic Party.
How Republicans Honored Kings Legacy
Kings’ endorsement of JFK, and Lyndon B. Johnson was based in part on promises they made and subsequently kept concerning voting rights, civil rights, and poverty. When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act he supposedly sighed “There goes the South for at least a generation” and that is exactly what happened. Former Southern Democrats like Trent Lott and Strom Thurman found themselves new homes in the Republican Party while former liberal Northern Republicans found themselves exiled to the island of misfit toys. The party of Lincoln now dominates South Carolina, the first state to succeed from the union.
There is no room for doubt as to the history of the Black Republican. It began with forward thinking abolitionist pioneers like Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and A. Phillip Randolph. All these brave men and women saw the Republican Party as a means to right the wrong imposed by slavery. Through the bottom half of the twentieth century, the GOP served as a bulwark between southern “Dixiecrats”, and the more populace industrial north. The question today is not why did African Americans flee the GOP, but rather is today’s Republican Party something Lincoln would recognize?
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