The Great Democratic Party Massacres (of Blacks)
When Exactly Did the Democrats Become Sooooo Racist?
[WARNING: This article discusses planned American political massacres that killed blacks in order to win elections and were actual events; you may be triggered]
If you can’t find a stain on the Democratic Party, then you haven’t been looking. And don’t worry, neither have I. It wasn’t in my non-CRT textbook back in the 1980s. The long-lasting legacy of one dominant white supremacist Senator from the Democratic Party helped ‘save’ the democrats from the brink of black integration proposed by another party leader. This key strategic change brought about the most repressive and violent strategy any political party took on from the post-Civil War days until today. Its deliberate racism was best seen in two violent white supremacist massacres of blacks used to not only win an American election but to reorder politics in the most profound, anti-democratic strategy taken on.
It was by the Democratic Party, which is why you won’t read about it and last for 90 years. It was never consciously repudiated by them. They used its brutal tactics and strategy to gain the White House. This narrative here just scratches the surface.
A couple strategic massacres of blacks by political operative white supremacists rescued the Democratic Party from integration. Because of the strategic ingenuity of the clever use of slaughter and voter intimidation of blacks by one great Democrat, the Democratic Party would claim victory and secure it for their ilk for one of the longest reigns of political dominance in American history, 90 years. Afterwards, it would then be forgotten about, and the reverse would be believed.
The most brilliant strategist of the Democratic Party, maybe ever in U.S. history, had devised a method to gain control and keep it: massacre blacks. He started some good slaughters in key non-swing districts and repressed almost all the black votes, 60 percent, by directly threatening blacks, while literally standing over the polls. Ballots were not secret. He told people outright who showed up: I am watching you vote; I see who you vote for, and I know where to find you afterward. Literally threatened them with violence while they were thinking of voting. They probably had in mind the black local politician who was fairly elected but executed while kneeling in prayer with a bullet to the back of the head. This guy knew how to poll watch.
His direct, personal intimidation at the polls, after devising and leading in two massacres of blacks personally, led to opposition getting only 2 votes. 2 Votes, not two percent. A complete reversal. The murders, the threats, the guns were all successful, and he sprang to national prominence for his efforts at saving the Democratic Party from the brink of integration with blacks. His success saw the Democratic Party remain completely white and male until the Great Shift caused by Great Betrayal.
Now, if you are thinking that I deserve to be straightened up, corrected, and aim to get all angry on me, please, do so. I welcome your comments and insights. I’m admitting right away that I am perplexed and baffled myself. This reality and these facts have only just freshly slapped me in the face and completely reordered my view of modern America, from the Civil War until today.
In fact, I’m at the start of my research into this problem of the Democratic Party, and might be quitting the Democratic Party by the end of my research, which could mean only a few more days. I’ve been so deceived, betrayed.
I’ve been researching, writing and participating though for the last few years, since George Floyd’s murder, into black history as a white man. I just finished my second year of black history month by reading articles about history and watching speeches and interviews by black figures and white abolitionists siding with blacks from the 1650s.
But nothing hit me like this. I can see now a definite kind of white unity of silence and white unforgiveness casting a dark shadow over American politics. I had thought the Democratic Party had a deep history of civil rights and flight for blacks. Not true. It was the party of racist white supremacy and the main proponent of segregating blacks until JFK died. Why have I been so fooled?
Since Floyd’s murder, I like to vote along ethnic lines, that means I vote for diversity and against white supremacy as my main issue. I was recently upset at Biden for not yet voting for the anti-voter suppression bill and the social justice bill (“social justice” is code white’s use to mean black and brown issues from any readers who may be white like me and forced to interpret white speak).
I am now a seeker of true democratic equality that eliminates perceptual differences between races. Not an easy journey, a twisted path. Thus, I won’t be switching to the Republican Party for sure. I’ve been watching their GOP conventions since Reagan ran in 1980 and have seen part of their convention every four years to witness a sea of white faces, with not even a liberal sprinkling of blacks and browns.
Back to history, facts, and truth.
The period I’ve been talking about is 1874–1964. The Democratic strategist is the ‘great’ senator from South Carolina, Benjamin Tillman, aka “Pitchfork Ben”. (Great in historical terms, but yes he is a bigot, and that was his actual nickname). Yes, this was the Democrat that engineered two literal political massacres, the Hamburg Massacre and the Allentown Massacre, leading up to the 1876 election. About 100 black men were killed between these two massacres that he engineered and took part in. That included a democratically elected black politician who knelt down and was shot in the back of his head while in prayer. (I just must repeat that — murdering a black opponent on purpose to win an election.) This man as a result got to be senator for a long reign, from 1895 until his death on the senate floor in 1918 (not literally on the floor, I don’t know where he died in reality and don’t care).
This is also the same senator who proclaimed, on the Senate floor in 1900 in the Capitol building in DC, bragging: “We do our best to keep every negro in our state from voting.” And he did, until 1964. The Democratic Party maintained its white supremacist ironclad grip on this state, and all southern states, during that long time period. He served for 24 years as a Democratic Senator in Congress. Tillman’s biographer, Stephen Kantrowitz, described the massacres as “unrest”, apparently a genteel way for biographers to mark political murder (or assassination), and said that the “unrest” of 1876 “marked a turning point in Ben Tillman’s life, establishing him as a member of the political and military leadership.” That’s one way to look at it.
If you do the electoral college math, that means all these overtly white supremacists in South Carolina were voting who had been solidified by into a white racist platform with their fellow white Supremacists throughout the South were voting FOR John F. Kennedy, or JFK, not against him. He knew electoral math. He grew up in the Party. He one by .1 percent, so he needed every vote. Getting to the White House by White Supremacists votes cobbled together with the Catholic vote, a secret “Blue Bomb” campaign to get blacks to switch sides, helped him edge out his opponent. If only I would have known about JFK sooner, I wouldn’t have revered him. I probably would have denounced him.
In fact, it wasn’t until 1964, when LBJ, the Democrat from Texas, had voted for the Civil Rights Bill, when everything changed. The South Carolina senator who had occupied Ben the Pitchfork Tillman’s seat at the time was Senator Strum Thurman. Strum, along with many southern white racist democrats, felt so utterly betrayed by LBJ signing the Civil Rights Bill in favor of blacks, they quit. They all switched to the Republican Party, under whose umbrella all the blacks were voting.
The blacks, perhaps so disgusted by seeing the Republican seats fill up with racist supremacists who had slaughtered and lynched them and completely repressed their vote, left. There are some indignities you just can’t take. Perhaps this was not the type of integration they had in mind after the Brown v Board of Education Decision. So, the blacks then became Democrats. The Democratic Party was now palatable to them I suppose since the white racists all left and since LBJ had broken in half under the pressure of Martin Luther King Jr. LBJ went with his moral heart instead of party pressure and signed three (3) civil rights bills in a row that helped the blacks out of an ugly era of long repression under evil federally accepted laws.
When you think about, what else could Strum do but quit? Here was the man in his own party, the traitor LBJ, who single-handedly killed Jim Crow. (Yes, there was a third-party attempt.) Jim Crow was the ‘brilliant’ policy and laws at the heart of the man who made the strategy that cemented his Democratic Party’s victory for 90 years, Senator Tillman. The laws were his intent of the massacring the blacks to win the election.
No one best represented the true spirit of Jim Crow than Tillman. Nor had any Democrat worked so hard to achieve that segregation that occurred because of his ballot box strategy. Not to quit thus would be an aberration and betrayal against that “great” man Tillman’s legacy whose seat Strum occupied (full disclosure, “great” means great to Strum and his southern Democratic colleagues, though it means a massacring manic to me (and maybe some blacks)). Yeah, they were not the party of Lincoln. Quite the opposite. Until 1964, they were the party that won because of acceptance of the Tillman white segregationist strategy or voter repression.
Was JFK really some sort of hero of diversity?
No. Quite the opposite. His cynical strategy to pursue black votes outside the south by not upsetting the southern ‘alliance’ of his southern racist democrats, was done secretly and anonymously through “the blue bomb.” This was an October surprise over 2 million pamphlets sent to black churches with no party name, and promised to support civil rights, a complete ‘flip’ on his party issues.
But he kept his fingerprints off it so as not to disrupt the Southern Democrats who were supremacists in large part and decidedly anti-civil rights, having successfully beat down the black vote. In other words, he made false promises to blacks never made before by Democrats to blacks, just so he could squeak out a victory. He did not fulfil those promises after winning. Doing so would have destroyed his chances of re-election.
Make the Democrats apologize for the two political massacres one of their leaders committed and the rest endorsed to push them to power and maintain it until 1964. Then we can talk getting my vote.
