Off the Rails Again

        Poor Walter Williams. He says things which he wants his readers to believe and it's obvious that there are one of two scenarios at play. Either he doesn't know what he doesn't know, or chooses to ignore facts and generate his own reality.

          The most recent example is a June 8th column entitled, "Democrats' Hoodwinking Of Blacks" of which minority Walter Williams is a member. I would have said proud member, but his screed casts serious doubt on that assertion.

          To begin with, Williams points to the 1820 founding of the Democratic Party and correctly asserts that as a group, Democrats supported states' rights and the institution of slavery. Apparently he would like the reader to believe that nothing has changed over the ensuing 200 years. This is akin to going to Rome and asking, "What time will the Christians be sacrificed to the lions."

          There is no question that the South was solidly Democratic before and after the Civil War, in reaction to having the first Republican President (Lincoln) and several successors force Reconstruction upon a prostrate and still vilely racist South. As long as reconstruction continued with a military presence in the former Confederacy, Blacks were enabled to participate in the political process, to the tune of Black state legislators, and 22 members of Congress, all of which Williams points out.

          He omits, however, that in 1877, it all crashed when Rutherford B. Hayes was "elected" by a deal with the Devil. In exchange for the  electoral votes in the contested states of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, the Republicans won  the White House and the US military got out of the South, abandoning Black Americans and ending reconstruction. Why is this important? It matters because all that militarily enforced "hale good fellow well met"  in the South was replaced by the Klan, lynchings and massive Black disenfranchisement. Black Republicans were then ignored by a succession of republican administrationsas they lost civil rights and were subject to discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting. At the turn of the 20th century, most black people were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every southern state, despite being a majority in some. Following the Republican abandonment of Reconstruction and Southern Blacks, neither party really was successful in obtaining representation for Blacks.

          Meanwhile, and this is where Williams goes off the rails, the Democratic party had become the party of two faces. While racism in America still limited opportunities for minorities, and women of all races, for that matter, the South had White citizen's councils which institutionalized it. Meanwhile in the north, as a result of the Great Migration of the 1910-1940 period, Blacks began making strides and the party began to split along sectional lines.

          This abyss among Democrats became even wider  in 1948, when Democrat Harry Truman, from Missouri, a pre-Civil War slave state, desegregated the US military and also insisted on a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform. Reaction to this in the South was immediate and reflexive. Southern Democrats as they now called themselves were, like Southern Baptists, a breed apart from the mainstream of the party. Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina bigot and Senator, formed the "Dixiecrat" party and ran for President in 1948, proving as he did that a third party usually fragments the party from which it splits. Thurmond and to much greater surprise, Republican Thomas E. Dewey both lost to Truman. In the South, this resulted in many southern racists abandoning  the Democratic party and becoming Republicans. By the end of Truman's term in 1952, there were still some hard line Southerners who clung to the "Democrat" label as much out of tradition as anything else,  but they were identified by their constituencies as the same old racists they'd always been.

          Williams believes he "calls out" the modern Democratic party by naming Orval Faubus, Bull Conners, and other redneck trash as representative of the  Democratic Party as it is today and apparently thinks we'll believe him.  He lauds Republican Dwight Eisenhower for sending troops to Little Rock in support of Brown V Board's desegregation initiative. He knows little and assumes a lot. First, by today's standards, Eisenhower would be a Liberal and almost assuredly a Democrat. He once  said, "I'm Conservative with money and Liberal when it comes to people." As for Williams' allusion to Ike's racial liberalism, we must consider that Eisenhower, a military man, took his oath seriously, unlike the current mess in the White House, and believed it was his duty to enforce the law, not necessarily to agree with it. A far better index of how Eisenhower really felt can be found in the quote immediately after hearing that Earl Warren had pushed the USSC to a unanimous reversal of Plessy v Ferguson, the case which had "legitimized" US apartheid for the previous 58 years. When told of the decision in Brown V. Board, and its implications, he said (of Warren) "If I had known he was going to do that, I'd never have appointed him." Walter Williams either doesn't know that or hopes you, the reader, don't.   

          He simply omits any reference to either Kennedy, especially Bobby's role as Attorney General in opposing violence aimed at Civil rights activists  in the Deep South. The  Kennedys, obviously representative of the Modern Democratic Party, were gone too soon, but JFK's Democratic successor, who Williams hasn't even the class to mention by name,  actually defined the party as it is today. Williams is quick to point out that there was Democratic opposition to Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964. He fails to mention that the opposition was by Southern Democrats or that the Bill was forced down those Southern Democrats' throats by a Democratic President. Lyndon B. Johnson would go on to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (missing in Walter's  World) as well as creation of Medicare and Medicaid which, like them or hate them, are monuments to equal treatment under the law and are color blind.

          Williams then takes on Labor Unions as the enemy of people of color. Who does he cite as authorities? Who else but Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and WEB DuBoise, all dead, all accurate in their evaluations of Labor Unions ...(wait for it) when they were alive and all well before  the 1960s. It's about 50 years later, things are different and he Democratic Party is different, but Walter Williams hopes you don't know that. It is unnecessary to point out the partisan affiliation of the race baiters and haters in America at present. Walter Williams should be ashamed of himself, and in a deeply Freudian sense, I think he might be.