This column appeared first in the January 30, 2011 print edition of the St. Louis Metro Evening Whirl. For this weeks column Click Here for a location near you!

  THEIR VIEW   

By the Honorable Governor Peter Kinder 

Democrats Can’t Rewrite Our History of Championing for Civil Rights

Last month I wrote in this space about the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Specifically, I described how the Democratic Party has employed revisionist history to co-opt civil rights issues and silence conservatives, many of whom don’t know the Republican Party’s proud tradition of championing civil rights for all.

As we begin Black History Month, I’d like to provide some additional, little-known facts about the Republican Party’s role in blacks’ struggle for civil rights.

Did you know that:

After the Civil War, 23 blacks—including 13 ex-slaves—were elected to Congress, all as Republicans?

In 1854 Democrats passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that overturned the Missouri Compromise and allowed for the importation of slaves into the territories?

Democrats opposed Senate Bill 60 in 1866 to give blacks “40 acres and a mule?” Democratic President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill passed by Republicans.

 
Democrats opposed the 1866 Civil Rights Act?

In 1865, when Congress approved the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, 100 percent of Republicans voted for emancipation, but only 23 percent of Democrats did?

 
When Congress passed the 14th Amendment, giving newly emancipated blacks full civil rights and superseding state laws, every voting Republican voted for the amendment and no Democrats voted for it? Similarly, every Republican voted for the 15th Amendment giving blacks the right to vote in 1870. Every Democrat voted against it.

From 1870-1875, the Republican Congress passed many pro-black civil rights laws, but in 1876, Democrats took control of the House. No further civil rights-based laws were passed until 1957.

In 1892, when the Democrats gained control of the House, Senate and the White House, all the Republican-backed civil rights laws were repealed. It was southern Democrats who passed Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and literacy tests to disenfranchise black voters in their individual states.

Too often Black History Month is used only to point out black grievances against the “sins of white people.” As black economist and author Thomas Sowell has pointed out, black achievements that did not involve battling the sins of white people get little attention during Black History Month.

You don’t hear a lot about highly successful black conservatives such as Sowell, or Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, or former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, author Shelby Steele, Mildred Fay Jefferson (the first black graduate of Harvard Medical School), or P.B.S. Pinchback (the first black to serve as a governor of a U.S. state).

Justice Thomas has discussed the pressure for blacks to conform to an exalted liberal black stereotype. He urges free-thinking Americans to reject such demands.

“I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black,” Thomas says.

It’s time to give the Clarence Thomases and Thomas Sowells of America their rightful place in the American history we all celebrate during Black History Month.