Remove Every Symbol of America’s Racist History

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

Democrats have responded to the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, by obsessively criticizing President Donald Trump’s statements about them, while refusing to acknowledge that far-left provocateurs actually precipitated much of the violence. Now, Democrats are demanding the removal of Confederate monuments.

It began two years ago when, immediately following the horrifying Charleston church shootings, demands arose to remove a vestigial symbol of the old slave-holding South — the Confederate flag.

It’s unclear how purging artifacts of American history will repair the senseless acts of homicidal lunatics, but, if it’s logically defensible to ban those, then that instinct should be applied consistently to all surviving symbols of slavery and racial animus.

The Democratic Party, which historically supported slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, remains an enduring symbol of bigotry. Democrats have an ugly history of institutional racism.

Democrats’ annual Jefferson-Jackson Day honorees owned slaves, and Jackson dispatched native-Americans on a “trail of tears and death.”

Every Democratic platform from 1840 through 1860 contained planks explicitly defending slavery. Prior to secession, their 1860 platform implicitly supported the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision which legal scholars believe was designed to write slavery into the Constitution.

Northern Democrats opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and, as the Civil War ended, resisted passage of the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery.

The Confederate battle flag was surrendered forever in 1865, but Democrats continued to fight equality by opposing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments which guaranteed rights and protections for American citizens, including former slaves. Democrats then devised new oppressions such as poll taxes and Jim Crow laws.

In the 20th Century, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, an avowed racist, segregated the Army and federal government. Both were integrated by Republicans before Wilson and re-integrated by Republicans after FDR.
Founded by Democrats, the Ku Klux Klan, described by historians as a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party, ran the “Klanbake,” Democrats’ 1924 New York convention.

President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black, a lifetime Klan member, to the Supreme Court, and KKK Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops, Democrat Robert Byrd, was president pro tem of the Senate, third in line to the presidency, from 1989 to 2010.

A 1956 “Southern Manifesto” expressed opposition to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling which directed the integration of public schools. Ninety-nine of the 101 congressional signees were Democrats. There remain, extant, official portraits of, monuments and memorials to dozens of the signers and their racist Democratic antecedents. If all symbols of a failed 150-year old insurrection must go, those should vanish, too.

In the current climate of politically-correct hysteria, there is no modern “context” to excuse Jackson, Wilson, Byrd and other racist progenitors and members of the modern Democratic Party.

It’s peak hypocrisy for Democrats to accuse political opponents of sins of which, for two centuries, their own party has been guilty.

If the standards set by today’s Democrats are consistently applied, the Democratic Party must be abolished, its monuments demolished and its name removed from history books.