Reparations? Let Democrats Pay for Their Anti-Black Abuses
Democratic presidential candidates Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren recently pushed their party even farther left with their latest radical scheme: slavery reparations. This is beyond ironic, of course, since Democrats have tortured blacks for centuries and hammer us even today.
As Black History Month draws to a close, it is vital to remember that slavery spread agony across the South under the watchful eyes of Democrats, such as President Andrew Jackson, from the party’s 1828 launch. It was not until 1860’s election of Republican Abraham Lincoln that the final, decisive push toward abolition began. The GOP-led Union Army crushed the Democrat-led Confederacy in 1865. That’s when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation came into full force, as Republicans freed the slaves.
The Republicans’ Radical Reconstruction empowered newly liberated blacks. Overriding the presidential vetoes of Democrat Andrew Johnson, congressional Republicans pressured southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing blacks equal protection under law.
“Blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period,” History.com recalls. Alas, by 1877, the Democrat-launched “Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority.”
Tightening Democratic control of state legislatures and Congress rubbed out Reconstruction and swept in Jim Crow segregation. Democrats adopted and enforced these statutes across Dixie and even in Washington.
Democratic president Woodrow Wilson resegregated the previously integrated bathrooms in the State, War, and Navy Department Building, which was adjacent to the White House. (It now is called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.) The order to create separate toilets for “women, white men, and Colored” was signed on August 7, 1916, by none other than Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
FDR became, arguably, the most influential Democratic president ever. His actions included the 1937 nomination of former Klansman Hugo Black to the U.S. Supreme Court. Before admirably defeating Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, FDR forced some 112,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry into World War II internment camps.
Democratic president Harry Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948. This was about the first good thing a Democrat ever did for black Americans.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled separate-but-equal government education unconstitutional in 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren, previously California’s three-term Republican governor, delivered the Court’s unanimous, pro-integration opinion. Warren rejected the oral arguments of John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, who defended separate-but-equal classrooms.
U.S. senators Robert Byrd of West Virginia (a former Exalted Cyclops in the KKK who recruited some 150 new Klansmen), Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, and other Democrats filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 60 legislative days. Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois finally broke the filibuster and clinched the measure’s passage.
Democratic president Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the bill, which was a beautiful thing. He also approved the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each reauthorized for 25 years in 1982 and 2006. Reagan also signed into law the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday, as well as legislation that offered an apology and a tax-free $20,000 check to each survivor of FDR’s Japanese internment camps.
Today, teachers’-union-funded Democrats tirelessly battle school choice, thus stranding black children in classrooms where, too often, little learning occurs. Obama struggled mightily to kill the Washington, D.C., school-voucher program, which George W. Bush had signed. Then–House speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and former senator Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) secured the funds to keep this sliver of hope alive.
Republican president Donald Trump has championed school choice, not least by signing Senator Ted Cruz’s (R., Texas) language to let “529” savings accounts accept tax-free deposits for K–12 studies, not just university tuition. Trump also approved a new criminal-justice-reform law that will reduce mass incarceration, largely benefiting black prisoners.
Democrats cheer abortion, which disproportionally kills black babies. Blacks equal 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, the Census Bureau reports, but 40.1 percent of aborted Americans, the Centers for Disease Control discovered in 2015, based on the ethnicities of mothers in 37 states. The corresponding white figures were 76.6 percent of population and 48.6 percent of abortions.
So, if Democrats want reparations to atone for their nearly 200 years of anti-black sins, they should finance them. From Barbra Streisand to George Clooney to Tom Steyer to George Soros, the Democratic 1 percenters should shove their billions into a huge pile and then show us the money!
