Always a great discussion and debate. Democrats contained up until June 1964 the worst white racists in American history. Jackson, who was the party’s first president, drop his slaves off in Mississippi then started warring against native Americans, killing and slaughtering. He signed the The Indian Removal Act, then ordered the army out to destroy the Creeks and other nations. The native survivors were forced out of their country they lived in for a thousand years. The were forced death marched to Oklahoma, used as basically a concentration camp that was surrounded by states until 1909 when it founded on.
Lincoln, after I read the speech of 1854 against Douglas, was a radical republican, like his ally from New York Seward. The confederates hated them and sent three assassins out one night to kill these two, the number one and number three most powerful leaders in April 1965. Some how the one assassin George Azterodt “lost his nerve” and didn’t kill Johnson.
Probably not a coincidence since Johnson was from a fallen state of the CSofA conquered and retaken by the USofA, Tennessee. During a state 1870 criminal trial involving 5 klansmen who hung the first black sheriff in the South in Alamance county and killed the elected fusionist country commissioner who assigned him after winning the election, they all admitted under oath that Johnson was the spiritual head of klan. As I read through that trial transcripts, I was surprised, once again, how backwards his is told, that is how labels are flip-flopped and major events and understanding erased from our collective narrative.
The time period from 1890 to 1910 was a period where over a million registered black American voters were kicked off the voting rolls. The Democrats in the South took over by violence and cheating for 30 years, and finally during this period changing their state constitutions and/or major voting laws to disenfranchise Black Republican men. 184,000 in Alabama alone in 1903 erased. Blacks had the vote and voted often, but they were protected by the federal government, deadlocked as always. But Black Southern Republican delegates still had power to give their electoral votes during the national Republican convention until 1912, and had given them to Teddy Roosevelt.
Between 1900 and 1960, many American lawyers and activists continue to vote and get their candidates nominated for positions of power, like congressmen and senators, state and local representatives. Most didn’t win, but it was the struggle to stay in the game that counted.
Finally after Brown v Board was decided in by SCOTUS in 1954, the Southern Democrats had enough and for the next decade vehemently fight against integration, voting, and democracy, flat out killing any black who tried to register, like George Lee in 1955 and many, many after. These Democrats conducted a reign of terror, beating and whipping and threatening black and white activists by the thousands (reading a Fannie Hamer biography now that goes into these explicit white spread details).
Finally, after Southern Democrats filibustered the heck out of the CRA in April 1964, the third one in 10 years after the first two passed, they quit the Democratic Party and into the weak and near empty Republican southern wing of that Party that they had decimated 50 to 60 years before. They were Beyond Anger, and livid, at the passing of the CRA passage. LBJ was a traitor.
Then this Livid American First Wing started attacking from within their new party, destroying and taking it over for the next 40 years.
