I’m thrilled to be able to vote for Harris and the vibe has been super positive the last two nights. It is time to organize to push her once she wings to change the party even more to protect basic civil rights. There has never been a chance like this before. But the change wasn’t gradual but all at once. There was some movement in the two decades before the Great Abandonment of the summer of 1964. The first two Civil Rights Bills passed in 1957 and 1960. Throughout that time the Southern Democrats in particular grew angrier and angrier because of those Civil Rights Bills and started the Massive Resistance Movement across the 15 states of the Jim Crow South. They were the only party remaining after the disenfranchised black Republican voters from 1890 to 2010 on a state by state basis by passing new state constitutions. There simply was NO real opposition left because they gotten the Republican Party to win elections. 98 percent in Alabama (19022), 90 in South Carolina (1895), 97 percent in Louisiana (1895). It was political disenfranchisement, throwing out more than half the voters in the Republican Party because of race and rigged it so they would win every election.
If white people had written history, you would see that the Democratic Party WAS the racist party of Trump starting in 1828, when it was founded in large part to preserve slavery. Stop believing the labels and start looking at the actions and beliefs. The racist white male Southern Democrats has white male allies in the North of course. After the Civil War the freed Blacks organized with white “fusionists” in the Republican Party, working together to learn to vote and organize politically. Black Republican Americans in the Southern states, even after more than 95 percent were disenfranchised of voting, were important up until 1912 as they were still allowed to caucus with the Party and in the national convention could vote and did to help get Teddy Roosevelt nominated and thus into office. As a result, he continued to desegregate the federal workforce, assigning black postmaster and even a black postal female to Southern states, and opened a federal USDOJ investigation into slavery in Alabama followed by Georgia, that lasted for years, convicting whites of slavery, which they called “peonage” on paper to avoid the truth. Roosevelt acted pro-black. He was followed by Wilson, a nasty racist Democrat who segregated the federal workforce. Strum Thurmond was a Democrat who quit the party and took his America First buddies with him into the Republican Party, which in the South was gutted decades ago. The Solid South was Blue from 1910-1964, because it was all white men who were racists and disenfranchised the black voters who their opponents. Just stop believing the labels and look at the actions. Only after 1964 when black Americans were RE-enfranchised could they vote.
The fact is only now have black Americans finally gained political traction to make a change. It happens now to be in the Democratic Party. But if they don’t push their own candidate after she wins to fight for her, and just expect her to do it, then it will just be status quo. The racist Dixiecrats took over the Republican Party in 1964 then fought and fought and fought—like they always did—to change the party and erase its past. Andrew Jackson was a thorough pro-slave who massacred native indigenous, while Lincoln’s key allies were Fredrick Douglas and Radical Republican Abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner. I’ve read their speeches and they were all long and all pro-abolition I found out. They were master orators. For the last few decades, crafty nasty GOP think tanks have cherry picked phrases out of Lincoln’s speeches and molded him into some sort of mild modern day Republican to fit their narrative that “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery” and “Lincoln only wanted to preserve the union.” They’ve repeated it so much that now everyone repeats these cherry picked phrases. It’s like now when I’ve heard the black Conservative congressmen like Byron say that MLK said blacks “should be judged by the content of their character.” They’ve got the black GOP congressman, voted in in safe majority white GOP districts and not by blacks, repeating these phrases like they are pro-MLK or something. If you repeat the words long enough, for decades and decades, then the labels become more important than the actions and deeds.