Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Who helps African-Americans?

Democrats
with handouts (Welfare, Food Stamps, etc.) that lead to dependency on the government.
who preach, blame others for your misfortune.

or

Republicans
whose party was formed to end slavery.

Republicans also have supported legislation favorable to blacks, often against intense Democratic headwinds:


In
1865, Congressional Republicans unanimously backed the 13th Amendment,
which made slavery unconstitutional. Among Democrats, 63 percent of
senators and 78 percent of House members voted: "No."

In 1866,
94 percent of GOP senators and 96 percent of GOP House members approved
the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans equal protection of the
law. Every congressional Democrat voted: "No."

February 28, 1871: The GOP Congress passed the Enforcement Act, giving black voters federal protection.


February 8, 1894: Democratic President Grover Cleveland and a
Democratic Congress repealed the GOP's Enforcement Act, denying black
voters federal protection.

January 26, 1922: The U.S. House
adopted Rep. Leonidas Dyer's (R., Mo.) bill making lynching a federal
crime. Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure.

May
17, 1954: As chief justice, former three-term governor Earl Warren (R.,
Calif.) led the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation of government
schools via the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. GOP
President Dwight Eisenhower's Justice Department argued for Topeka,
Kansas's black school children. Democrat John W. Davis, who lost a
presidential bid to incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924,
defended "separate but equal" classrooms.

September 24, 1957:
Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little
Rock's government schools over the strenuous resistance of Governor
Orval Faubus (D., Ark.).

May 6, 1960: Eisenhower signs the
GOP's 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour
filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

July 2, 1964: Democratic
President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former
Klansman Robert Byrd's 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other
Senate Democrats (including Tennessee's Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle
the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP
senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill's
passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National
Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of
Democrats.

True, Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) opposed
this bill the very year he became the GOP's presidential
standard-bearer. However, Goldwater supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil
Rights Acts and called for integrating Arizona's National Guard two
years before Truman desegregated the military. Goldwater feared the
1964 Act would limit freedom of association in the private sector, a
controversial but principled libertarian objection rooted in the First
Amendment rather than racial hatred.

June 29, 1982: President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Republican party also is the home of numerous "firsts." Among them:


Until 1935, every black federal legislator was Republican. America's
first black U.S. Representative, South Carolina's Joseph Rainey, and
our first black senator, Mississippi's Hiram Revels, both reached
Capitol Hill in 1870. On December 9, 1872, Louisiana Republican
Pinckney Benton Stewart "P.B.S." Pinchback became America's first black
governor.

August 8, 1878: GOP supply-siders may hate to admit
it, but America's first black Collector of Internal Revenue was former
U.S. Rep. James Rapier (R., Ala.).

October 16, 1901: GOP
President Theodore Roosevelt invited to the White House as its first
black dinner guest Republican educator Booker T. Washington. The
pro-Democrat Richmond Times newspaper warned that consequently, "White
women may receive attentions from Negro men." As Toni Marshall wrote in
the November 9, 1995, Washington Times, when Roosevelt sought
reelection in 1904, Democrats produced a button that showed their
presidential nominee, Alton Parker, beside a white couple while
Roosevelt posed with a white bride and black groom. The button read:
"The Choice Is Yours."

GOP presidents Gerald Ford in 1975 and
Ronald Reagan in 1982 promoted Daniel James and Roscoe Robinson to
become, respectively, the Air Force's and Army's first black four-star
generals.

November 2, 1983: President Reagan established Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday, the first such
honor for a black American.

President Reagan named Colin Powell
America's first black national-security adviser while GOP President
George W. Bush appointed him our first black secretary of state.


President G.W. Bush named Condoleezza Rice America's first black female
NSC chief, then our second (consecutive) black secretary of State. Just
last month, one-time Klansman Robert Byrd and other Senate Democrats
stalled Rice's confirmation for a week. Amid unanimous GOP support, 12
Democrats and Vermont Independent James Jeffords opposed Rice — the
most "No" votes for a State designee since 14 senators frowned on Henry
Clay in 1825.

"The first Republican I knew was my father, and he
is still the Republican I most admire," Rice has said. "He joined our
party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not
register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never
forgotten that day, and neither have I."


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