"Of Course He Votes the Democratic Ticket" (1876)
A political cartoon printed during The Reconstruction Era in Harper's Weekly depicting the intimidation techniques that the Democratic Party used to suppress southern black votes in the election of 1876.
A terrible price had to be paid, in a tragic, calamitous civil war, before this new democracy could be rid of that most undemocratic institution. But for black Americans the end of slavery was just the beginning of our quest for democratic equality; another century would pass before the nation came fully to embrace that goal. Even now millions of Americans recognizably of African descent languish in societal backwaters. What does this say about our civic culture as we enter a new century?
In the Ghettos, the source of Democratic votes; crime, drug addiction, family breakdown, unemployment, poor school performance, welfare dependency, and general decay in these communities constitute a blight on our society. black ghetto dwellers are a people apart, susceptible to stereotyping, stigmatized for their cultural styles, isolated socially, experiencing an internalized sense of helplessness and despair, with limited access to communal networks of mutual assistance. Their purported criminality, sexual profligacy, and intellectual inadequacy are the frequent objects of public derision. In a word, they suffer a pariah status. It should not require enormous powers of perception to see how this degradation relates to the shameful history of black-white race relations in this country.
And from history, we see the Klu Klux Klan, a Democratic organization, and now Democratic run ghettos!
Lyndon Baines Johnson, a power hungry, war mongering, beer-swilling, blunt-speaking Democrat said,
These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.
This quote appears on page 155 of Goodwin’s LBJ biography. The utterance was made to Richard Russell, a fellow Democratic Senator from Georgia.
The Democrats are the racist and use racism to divide Americans against each other. What defines us of who we are is culture. The Democrats are experts of cultural engineering, such as keeping people poor, families fatherless, uneducated and dependent on the state. The Democrats use scare tactics saying the other party will take their livelihood and promise them the world if the poor vote for them.
Black ghettos are no accident – how state-sponsored racism shaped US cities
The majority African-American enclaves found in every major US city are no accident of history. And, although societal racism certainly played its part, de facto segregation isn’t the prime culprit for the urban divide. In this animation, adapted from his book The Color of Law (2017), the US historian Richard Rothstein explains with devastating precision how decades of brazenly intentional racist local, state and federal government housing policies led to the current status quo. While this history was once widely understood, the extent of these efforts – including their origins in Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal public housing initiatives – have been forgotten, even as their lasting effects are omnipresent. In reviving this history, Rothstein details the multitude of ways these policies are still affecting African-American communities, and offers a remedy for the generations of harm. He argues that state-sponsored segregation efforts were unconstitutional at their very inception, and must be reckoned with both in the courts and with new policy that acknowledges the pernicious legacy of housing discrimination in the US.