ANOTHER TEA PARTY MYTH DEBUNKED

I was surprised to hear a North Carolina Tea Party spokeswoman, Diane Rufino, plaintively at a loss to explain why blacks are for the Democrats and against Republicans. In an interview she claimed in all sincerity that “It’s the White Republicans, the conservatives who fought so hard for the end of slavery, for [Blacks’] civil rights, to integrate the schools . . . Everything [the Blacks] have was from Republican senators, congressmen.”

There’s an interesting mixture of fact and fiction in her statement — just enough fact to indulge the Tea Party fiction that they are on the side of the Blacks, but not enough to demonstrate why they are not.

It’s true that the Republican Party fought to free the slaves. Lincoln was a Republican from Illinois, and he waged war, ultimately to free the slaves, and he issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in the states then “in rebellion.” Republicans also passed the 14th Amendment in 1866 granting full rights of citizenship to Blacks. According to the Republican National Committee’s web site: “The principal author of the 14th Amendment was U.S. Rep. John Bingham (R-OH). In Congress, all votes in favor of the 14th Amendment were from Republicans, and all votes against it were from Democrats.” Well, no, five negative Republican votes were congressmen from the border states of Kentucky, Maryland, and West Virginia.

However, the Republican party of the 1860s weren’t “conservatives.” Democrats, particularly in the South were the conservatives of their day, seeking to preserve the privileges of the slave-owning, landed aristocracy, obviously at great cost to Blacks. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of the moribund Whig Party, the Republican Party emerged from Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854, together with Free-Soil Democrats, to oppose the extension of slavery. Far from being conservative, early Republicans were the leftist radicals of their day, not only proposing to end constitutionally protected slavery, but also to promote suffrage for women, free love and redistribution of property favoring workers. If transported to the present, Republicans of the 1860s would have felt right at home with the Freedom Riders, Women’s Libbers, Democrats and Hippies of the 1960s. It was White Republicans alright who fought to free the slaves, but they were hardly conservatives, as Rufino alleges. More significantly, Republicans in the 1860s were almost exclusively Northerners, the Party having made no effort to expand into the South.

Fast forward a century to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 where again Republicans contributed to an outcome favorable to Blacks. To be clear, the majority of votes cast in favor of the Act were by Democrats, then solidly in control of Congress, and the Act was signed into law by President Johnson, also a Democrat. Nevertheless, bipartisan Republican support proved to be critical to the passage of the Act, inasmuch as Southern Democrats voted almost unanimously against the act in both houses, along with all Southern Republicans. The Act so incensed the South as to prompt its massive conversion from reliably Democrat, before and after the Civil War, to solidly Republican after the Act’s passage.

So as was the case with all these efforts in support of Blacks — the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — gains were made at the insistence of the liberal North and against resistance from the conservative South. In modern times, party affiliations in both regions have flip-flopped to reflect alignment with the fundamental liberal/conservative divide, with the once-Republican liberal North becoming predominantly Democratic and the formerly Democratic conservative South becoming overwhelmingly Republican.

Consequently, it is naively misleading, at best, or disingenuous, for Tea Party members like Diane Rufino, to cloak today’s “conservative” Republicans with the mantle of champions for Black civil rights. (See: “Why Have African-Americans Abandoned the Republican Party When It Never Abandoned Them?”) The Black civil rights issue has always been, and remains a struggle between the more liberal urban North and the conservative South, rather than between the changeable Republican and Democratic Parties. It was the White liberal North (former Republicans who are now Democrats) who fought so hard for the end of slavery and for Blacks’ civil rights, against the resistance of White conservative South (former Democrats who are now Republicans). Blacks see the issue clearly in those terms, and, therefore, are not deceived by a superficial historical narrative into believing Republicans are on their side.