The Shame of Being Black and Republican

Black Republicans?

Blacks mostly voted Republican from after the Civil War and through the early part of the 20th century. That’s not surprising when one considers that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and the white, segregationist politicians who governed Southern states in those days were Democrats. The Democratic Party didn’t welcome blacks then, and it wasn’t until 1924 that blacks were even permitted to attend Democratic conventions in any official capacity. Most blacks lived in the South, where they were mostly prevented from voting at all.

Abraham Lincoln

The election of Roosevelt in 1932 marked the beginning of a change. He got 71 percent of the black vote for president in 1936 and did nearly that well in the next two elections, according to historical figures kept by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. But even then, the number of blacks identifying themselves as Republicans was about the same as the number who thought of themselves as Democrats.


It wasn’t until Harry Truman garnered 77 percent of the black vote in 1948 that a majority of blacks reported that they thought of themselves as Democrats. Earlier that year Truman had issued an order desegregating the armed services and an executive order setting up regulations against racial bias in federal employment.


Even after that, Republican nominees continued to get a large slice of the black vote for several elections. Dwight D. Eisenhower got 39 percent in 1956, and Richard Nixon got 32 percent in his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

But then President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing segregation in public places) and his eventual Republican opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater, opposed it. Johnson got 94 percent of the black vote that year, still a record for any presidential election.


The following year Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. No Republican presidential candidate has gotten more than 15 percent of the black vote since.


Footnote: Younger African American voters have been edging away from the Democratic Party in recent years. David Bositis of the Joint Center notes "a fairly long-term pattern of decreasing identification with the Democrats by younger African Americans." Of course, it remains to be seen what the 2008 campaign will bring.

-- Brooks Jackson


If you look back through American history and find a black American being enslaved, lynched, railroaded, or persecuted, 99 times out of a hundred, you'll find a Democrat behind it. The hated and feared KKK? Throughout most of its history, it was little more than a hooded, thuggish arm of the Democratic Party.

But in the 1960s, when the Democrats’ overt racism became untenable, they switched to a strategy they've used all the way until the present day. Instead of persecuting black Americans because they thought they were inferior, they decided to "help" black Americans because they thought they were inferior. Unfortunately for black Americans, the "help" they get from the Democratic Party is almost always perversely damaging.

All the First Blacks in Congress Were Republican

Democrats cooked up the great society, welfare, food stamps, and all other manner of government goodies because they said they wanted to "help" people. What was the result of that "help?" The Democrats did something that they hadn't managed to do when they enslaved black Americans, persecuted them with Jim Crow laws, or terrorized them with the Ku Klux Klan: they managed to nearly destroy the black family. According to Walter Williams,

 "In 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 19 percent, in 1960, 22 percent, and today, it's 70 percent. Some argue that the state of the black family is the result of the legacy of slavery, discrimination and poverty. That has to be nonsense. A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families, comprised of two parents and children. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households had two parents. In fact, according to Herbert Gutman in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925, "Five in six children under the age of 6 lived with both parents."

The story is no different when it comes to education. Many black children are stuck in disastrous, failing schools. That's why it's no surprise that a majority of black Americans support school vouchers, just like the Republican Party. But, the Democratic Party, at the behest of the teachers’ unions, has worked ceaselessly to keep black children trapped in mediocre schools by killing voucher programs.

Robert Byrd on his biggest mistake (1993):

“Well, it’s easy to state what has been my biggest mistake. The greatest mistake I ever made was joining the Ku Klux Klan. And I’ve said that many times. But one cannot erase what he has done. He can only change his ways and his thoughts. That was an albatross around my neck that I will always wear. You will read it in my obituary that I was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Strom Thurmond on running as a segregationist Dixiecrat (1998):

“I don’t have anything to apologize for, I don’t have any regrets. The Dixiecrats were right.”

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Cigar Guy's 15 Minutes of Fame are Over 10 Minutes Early

Cigar Guy Outed

The Original Pic of Tiger with Cigar Guy

If you've been under a rock, you might not know who "Cigar Guy" is.  The internet creates personalities over the most unsuspecting oddities at times.  Take a photo and single out a guy with a weird expression and overnight he's a megastar on the internet.  The phenom come to be known as Cigar Guy is just such a happening.  What organically grew from a great photo, interestingly enough turned into a vast array of fake, doctored, photoshopped photos. What started out as probably the best photo in sports ever taken captured by The Mail on Sunday's Mark Pain, it showed Tiger Woods fluffing a chip at the Ryder Cup – his ball heading straight towards the camera lens.  Congratulations to the photographer, but what he didn't realize is that standing behind Woods was a wide-eyed spectator smoking a fat cigar and wearing a Groucho Marx moustache and ginger wig. Nicknamed 'Cigar Guy' he became an overnight internet phenomenon after the picture appeared in The Mail on Sunday and Mail Online last week.

Cigar Guy Close Up, Notice Wig, Fake Mustache

Now begins the fame and fortune of poor Cigar Guy.  People took the image of him and photoshopped him into everything imaginable, and then some not so imaginable.  He was even made into a Simpsons character, Aqua Teen Hunger Force character and a Boris character.  He literally was photoshopped into both the first Lincoln photograph ever taken and the Martin Luther King Jr. "I have a dream" speech.  There is nowhere that Cigar Guy couldn't be seen.  Secret Service to President Bush, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and in place of Obama are all up for Cigar Guy to replace.  [ I wish he would replace them in real life, but that's a WHOLE nother blog, isn't it, am i right? ] 

However, this week, the meme phenomenon was done away with, when Cigar Guy was tracked down and interviewed.  He was outed by the very organization that originally captured him in a picture.  It was revealed his name is  Rupesh Shingadia, a 30-year-old investment analyst in the City.  He lives with his mom and dad in London.

While millions had fun with him and some even proposed marriage, once he was outed and his real story revealed, it killed the meme phenomenon of Cigar Guy.  His fame was short lived and his 15 minutes, cut short.

Rupesh Shingadia 'Cigar Guy' without Hair and Cigar

Well we had fun while it lasted.  And, for those not in the know of the internet and why I'm saying it was short lived, seeing as it went on for a whole week, you might not know that some meme's go on for years and grow and grow.  For those who can remember and are true computer geeks, remember that "All your base are belong to us" lasted for years, and people would prank church signs, McDonald's signs, motel signs to read "All your base are belong to us".  They then photoshopped pics to make road signs to look like that and went so far as to doctor the Budweiser girls to have their logo read "All your base are belong to us".  I grew until it just naturally died.  In fact it still goes on today to a small extent.  So a week of meme is nothing.  And, anyone that tells you that a meme doesn't go on for years, just doesn't know what they're talking about.

Oh and by the way, Rupesh Shingadia isn't a bad looking guy when he's not in fake wig, mustache and cigar hanging out his mouth.  So I guess the marriage proposals are warranted.  It's too bad Cigar Guy was killed.

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Donner Party Discovery, Lincoln Personal Letters

Donner Party, Scandals and Murder Oh My!

The Donner Party

In a statement released Monday, July 19th, 2010, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum said that Donner Party member James Reed and his family carried muster rolls with Lincoln's name on them among their treasured heirlooms.  Researchers had made the unexpected discovery among the effects of a member of the Donner Party kept in a carpetbag on the group's sojourn to California.  It turned out to be a military document with Abraham Lincoln's own handwriting on it.  It took a team of librarians, historians and handwriting experts to confirm that the handwriting was indeed of President Lincoln on the document.  The document lists Lincoln and volunteer soldiers who fought in the 1832 Black Hawk War.

"We often find documents that detail fascinating stories about Abraham Lincoln's life and times, but it is rare indeed for the document to have such an intriguing history after it was written," said Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. "That these documents detail part of Lincoln's military service and that they accompanied the Donner Party to California makes them doubly significant."

All four of the muster rolls include "Private Abraham Lincoln" among the list of soldiers. On one of them, experts say two-and-a-half lines are clearly written in Lincoln's hand. And the documents reveal that Lincoln had a horse worth $85 and equipment valued at $15, noting that Lincoln received one tent that was United States property to be returned at the end of his service.

The lines Lincoln wrote said: "Muster Roll of Captain Jacob M. Earleys Company of Mounted Volunteers Mustered out of the service of the United States By order of Brigadier General Atkinson of the United States army on White Water Rivers of Rock River on the 10th day of July 1832."

The documents are part of the James Frazier Reed Collection at the California State Library.  Reed's name appears just beneath Lincoln's on the list. He was one of the organizing members of the Donner Party, the group of pioneers known for resorting to cannibalism while enduring a harsh winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Lincoln Muster Roll

He likely inherited the papers from the military company's commander and took them with him when he left Springfield, Illinois, in April 1846 because they were part of his personal history, the Lincoln Presidential Library said.

While historians believe the papers accompanied the Donner Party for their entire journey, Reed did not. He was banished from the group after fighting with a teamster and stabbing him to death, Monday's library statement said.  He left the papers with his wife after being expelled from the party, and "she brought them safely in her bosom to California when helped by the first relief party which went to their assistance," daughter Martha Jane "Patty" Reed recalled.

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