Disclaimer: If you are offended by the mention of racial slurs you may not want to read this. The use of such slurs are used only in actual quotes from Democrats and are in no way the actual thoughts or feelings of the TrueStorey blog or its contributors.
Last time in
Part II I covered the role Roosevelt and Truman played in Civil Rights. I’m going to move on to Eisenhower (1953-1961), the first Republican president after twenty years of Democrat control. Where we finally start to see some movement in the right direction.
While President Truman had begun the process of desegregating the Armed Forces in 1948, actual implementation had been slow. Eisenhower made clear his stance in his first State of the Union message in February 1953, saying “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.” When Robert B. Anderson, Eisenhower’s first Secretary of the Navy, argued that the Navy must recognize the “customs and usages prevailing in certain geographic areas of our country which the Navy had no part in creating”, Eisenhower overruled him: “We have not taken and we shall not take a single backward step. There must be no second class citizens in this country.”
After the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education Eisenhower told District of Columbia officials to make Washington a model for the rest of the country in integrating black and white public school children. In 1956, Eisenhower was faced with “Massive Resistance”, a policy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. (D-VA) to unite other white politicians and leaders in Virginia in a campaign of new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, as well as violence in other states.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Gov. Orval Faubus (D) refused to integrate public schools. Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to protect nine children while integrating a public school, the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops were sent to the South. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote to Eisenhower to thank him for his actions, writing “The overwhelming majority of southerners, Negro and white, stand firmly behind your resolute action to restore law and order in Little Rock”. There had been continued physical assaults against suspected activists and bombings of schools and churches in the South by Democrats. The administration of Eisenhower proposed legislation to protect the right to vote by African Americans.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957, effectively a voting rights bill, was the first Civil Rights legislation enacted in the United States since Reconstruction. The bill passed the House with a vote of 285 to 126 (Republicans 167-19 for, Democrats 118-107 for) and the Senate 72 to 18 (Republicans 43-0 for, Democrats 29-18 for). President Eisenhower signed it on September 9, 1957. By the time the Bill was passed it was watered down significantly from what Eisenhower’s Attorney-General, Herbert Brownwell, originally intended when producing the bill. Lyndon Baines Johnson was the Senate Majority leader at the time and did his best to slow the progress of civil rights. Johnson sent the bill to a Senate judiciary committee which would examine it for flaws, controversial and unconstitutional points etc. This committee was led by Senator James Eastland (D-MS). Committee heads have the ability to greatly alter and change bills, which is exactly what Eastland did. The result was a watered down bill that didn’t do much to help matters, but did open the door for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act down the road. The loopholes left in the 1957 bill led Eisenhower to sign the 1960 Civil Rights Act, which tried to close up some of the loose ends.
Following Eisenhower, there was another decade (1960s) of Democrat rule, and the subsequent filibustering that slowed, but could not stop, the civil rights movement.
When it comes to President Kennedy (D) it is widely an excepted truth that he was a major player in the advancement of the civil rights cause. It has been said that from the 70’s on that most black houses had a wall that held pictures of three men, Lincoln, MLK, & Kennedy. He is given so much credit even though when you look at history you see that Kennedy never accomplished anything worth noting on the issue. Granted, he didn’t have much of an opportunity since he didn’t even serve a full term. His predecessor did have a chance though.
Fast forward to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This bill was a huge victory for minorities and the Republicans who fought for civil rights. It ended all major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic, national and religious minorities, and women. It put an end to unequal voter registration requirements and segregation in schools, workplaces, and public services such as restaurants. Passage of this bill wasn’t so easy though.
The bill was brought to a vote in the House on February 10, 1964, and passed by a vote of 290 to 130,(with support from 80% of Republicans and a whopping 40% disapproval from Dems) and sent to the Senate. Since it was passed in the House first it went directly to the Senate calendar, bypassing the normal committee review. This rule is rarely used, but supporters of the bill wanted to avoid the probable delay of the bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee. This left the bill’s opposers with only the filibuster to try and stop a vote. Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) launched a filibuster to prevent its passage. Russell was quoted saying, “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”
For the next three months Democrats filibustered. The only way to end the filibuster was with cloture which requires 2/3s of the senate to vote in favor of bringing the bill to a vote. The minority leader, Everett Dirksen, R-IL, played a pivotal role for the civil rights bill. On June 10, 1964, his substantial efforts in support of the bill culminated in an impassioned appeal to the Senate to support cloture and hold the vote. On this extraordinary occasion, the Senate voted for cloture, 71-29 — 44 Democrats and 27 Republicans voted in favor. Opposed were 23 Democrats and 6 Republicans. In the eventual vote the Senate passed the bill with only 31% of Dems and 16% of Republicans voting no.
When Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, took the throne, he realized that the fight for segregation was a losing one and decided to flip the switch. LBJ was quoted as saying, “I’ll have those ******s voting Democrat for 200 years.”
Going back to the 50’s for a moment, let me give a little back story on LBJ. As I said earlier, he was the Democrat Senate Majority Leader when Eisenhower sponsored the civil rights act from 1957, and the 1960 voting rights act. It was Johnson who lead the fight against these bills and was a big part of why they were so watered down. Back to the 60’s, when Johnson took over, after JFK’s assassination, he had a chance to jump on the upcoming Civil Rights act of 1964 and claim it as his own. So he took advantage, in his own words, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
Johnson did sign the bill but it is evident to anyone who looks close enough that he did not do it for any reason other than political gain. As with his appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. He explained his decision to a staff member by saying, “Son, when I appoint a ****** to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a ******.”
By this time the civil rights movement was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and the Democrat party was finally realizing they could no longer leave their racism on their sleeves. They began slowly rewriting history and devising new ways to keep the black people in poverty and voting Democrat. They went from publicly displaying a belief that blacks and whites should be separate and that blacks shouldn’t vote, to backing legislation to keep blacks on the government teat and in the slums, and to make sure if blacks did get to vote, they would always vote Democrat.
Even though the racism of The Democrat Party is no longer in the spotlight, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. They just have the media to help them keep it quiet now, not to mention the NAACP.
For example, Senator Robert Byrd, (D-WV) is a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and, until his death in 2010, was the only national elected official with a history in the Klan at the time. Byrd was extremely active in the Klan and rose to the rank of “Kleagle,” an official Klan membership recruiter. Byrd once stated that he joined the Klan because it was effective in “promoting traditional American values”
In March of 2001 Byrd had an outburst of racist bigoted slurs, more specifically the “n-word,” on national television. Amazingly, this incident of blatant racism on national television drew barely a peep from the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Mary Frances Berry, or any of the other clowns who purport themselves to be the leaders of the civil rights movement. In contrast, the main source of well deserved criticism for Byrd’s racist outburst came not from any of the so called leaders of the civil rights movement but from Republican Majority Leader dikk Armey. The race hustlers turned a blind eye towards this act of racism by one of their own party. But where they turn a blind eye and spew their lies, it is up to conservatives to set the record straight with the truth.
Not like we had a choice, Unfortunately.
