Why Martin Luther King Was Republican
by Frances Rice
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16500#continueA

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a
Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans.
Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today,
the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for
blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is
as it always has been, the party of the four S's: slavery, secession,
segregation and now socialism.

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed
the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats
started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats
fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with
the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil
rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the
Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning
fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican
President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of
1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President
Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S.
Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President
Harry Truman's issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the
military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who
actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil
rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while
he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became
President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr.
King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black
Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert
Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on
suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King's leaving Memphis,
Tenn., after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat
Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called
Dr. King a "trouble-maker" who starts trouble, but runs like a coward
after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to
Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King
was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks
from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom
(13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote
(15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the
1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction
Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in
the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks.
Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with
Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted
by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation's fist goals and
timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the
Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by
Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President
Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal
government jobs.

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the
Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact
that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the
passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not
mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting
Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill.
Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968
which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson
could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without
the support of Republicans.

Critics of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President
against Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to
force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws
and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights
legislation.

Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater also ignore the fact that
Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on Jan. 4,
1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only 35 words
were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting
rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King's protest
against the Vietnam War, Johnson referred to Dr. King as "that Nigger
preacher."

Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist "Dixiecrats"
did not all migrate to the Republican Party. "Dixiecrats" declared
that they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than vote for a
Republican because the Republican Party was know as the party for
blacks. Today, some of those "Dixiecrats" continue their political
careers as Democrats, including Robert Byrd, who is well known for
having been a "Keagle" in the Ku Klux Klan.

Another former "Dixiecrat" is former Democrat Sen. Ernest Hollings,
who put up the Confederate flag over the state Capitol when he was the
governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat
Sen. Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been "a
great senator for any moment," including the Civil War. Yet Democrats
denounced then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott for his remarks about Sen.
Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.). Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and
defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes
imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Byrd and Thurmond were alive during
the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party
began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy,"
which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the
South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and
were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened
to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern
states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting
to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how
egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.

After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase
was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and
killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29.
The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many
years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black
Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004, blocked passage of a
bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by
Republicans and vetoed twice by President Clinton before he finally
signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002,
Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30,
2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity
scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools
and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000
in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites
(72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40
years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More
than $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since
Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on
poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame
Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then
incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

In order to break the Democrats' stranglehold on the black vote and
free black Americans from the Democrat Party's economic plantation, we
must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate
that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on
government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican
Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good
education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the
pathway to prosperity.