The man who freed the slaves by Elsie May Johnson

The linchpin moment of this realignment was the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which scrambled party allegiances and led Lyndon B. It’s Republicans trying to undo that now. It was Democratic presidents in the ’60s who enacted civil rights legislation. It was Republicans like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and now Trump who mainlined the fears of white working-class voters Wallace embodied. It was George Wallace, a former Democrat and a segregationist, who won five Southern states in the 1968 presidential election. That’s true! But he missed the second part, about the fight over civil rights in the ’60s and the dramatic party realignment that’s happened since then. It was the Republican Party that passed the 15th Amendment, giving Black men the right to vote. It was the Republican Party that passed the 14th Amendment, giving Black men citizenship. It was the Republican Party that passed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. If that sounds strange, you don’t know your history. So it was factually true and sounded good in real time when Clarence Henderson, a Black man who marched for civil rights in the 1960s and now supports Trump, said this Wednesday night during the convention: Today, it’s a Republican President, Donald Trump, who has changed his allegiance to a Southern state, Florida, and is appealing to nostalgia for the Confederacy and stoking racial divisions, not trying to end them or get past them. The problem is that the Republicans and the politics of 1860 bear almost zero resemblance to the Republicans of today.īack then, Republicans were, generally, a party of Northerners and Democrats were, generally, the party of the South.īack then, a Republican President, Lincoln, tried to hold the union together after Southern states, led by Democrats, seceded. Republicans tried to claim their political ancestors at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, casting back to Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, to argue they deserve more credit from Black voters.

The man who freed the slaves by Elsie May Johnson