A Column By Larry Wiwi
We are now in full election campaign season and if you are thinking of voting Democrat because you believe Democrats are better for women and minorities, think again as both recent performance and historical view shows otherwise. In the three years prior to the COVID induced downturn, the Trump / Republican economy set absolute historical records for low unemployment for all minorities and women – far better than Democrats under Obama/Biden managed in eight years. The long historical record similarly shows dramatically better performance by Republicans as detailed below:
- The original inclusion of slavery in the Constitution was necessary to get the cooperation of the southern states, who’s Democrat progeny expanded slavery and later defended it in the Civil War opposing Republican Abraham Lincoln
- The modern Republican Party was founded by Lincoln as the anti-slavery party
- A group of northern Democrats, known as Copperheads tried to persuade Lincoln to negotiate peace with the Confederate south which would have perpetuated slavery on this continent
- After losing the Civil War, radical southern Democrats formed the KKK, terrorizing and sometimes lynching former slaves, though happy to substitute a white Republican on occasion
- The Democrats controlled the state legislatures of the “solid south” for decades and produced the very “Jim Crow” laws they now brag about bringing down in the civil rights era
- Democrat Woodrow Wilson instituted segregation policies in the federal government and hailed the showing of The Birth of a Nation – a film about the KKK in the White House
- Democrat Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment and property confiscation of American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII
- Republican Earl Warren led the Supreme Court to end segregation in public schools with the Brown vs Board of Education decision
- Speaker Lyndon Johnson watered down Eisenhower’s 1957 civil rights bills because he knew he would be unable to get his fellow southern Democrats to approve the original bill
- In 1957 Republican Dwight Eisenhower, forced Democrat governor Orval Faubus to allow black students to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, after Faubus blocked their entry
- Republican Congressmen voted for the 1964 and 1965 civil and voting rights acts in much larger numbers than their Democrat counterparts
- Bull Connor, the iconic, oppressive Birmingham Police Chief, was a Democrat
- Democrat Robert Byrd, who spent over 50 years in the Senate until his death in 2010, was a ranking member of the KKK
- Republican Ronald Reagan signed a bill to compensate the American families of Japanese descent that suffered under Roosevelt’s internment actions during WWII
- Though not as unassailable factual as the points above, an argument can be made that Democrat policies have helped keep blacks poor and more likely to be victims of crime – you need only look at Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore as examples of what 50 years of Democrat rule will bring.
- Similarly, an argument can be made that the Democrats unflinching support of abortion and Planned Parenthood is a form of continued oppression as the majority of Planned Parenthood operations are in or near minority neighborhoods, where in some areas, nearly 50 percent of black babies are aborted.
Against this horrific record, the Democrats have only four bright spots:
- Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1947
- John and Robert Kennedy’s support was critical in the civil rights era of destroying Jim Crow
- Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 and 1965 civil and voting rights acts
- Lyndon Johnson nominated the first African American, Thurgood Marshall, to the Supreme Court in 1967
So I must ask my fellow citizen Democrats: Why do you continue to support a party with this history that falsely claims credit as the party of minorities?
Larry Wiwi, Franklin County