The Centennial of the NAACP - A Good Idea Turned Bad
by Bruce Walker (2/17/09)
The NAACP celebrates its 100th anniversary this month. During the last forty years this once great civil rights organization has evolved into a hapless flack for the Democrat Party. Once the NAACP was closely aligned with the Republican Party and once the NAACP stood for absolute legal and social equality. Once strong and good black leaders understood which party represented the true principles of unprejudiced and fair legal and political systems. That party was the Republican Party.
The Republican Party has always been champion of equal rights for blacks in American politics. Lincoln is often cited as evidence of Republican cynicism. He was more concerned with preserving the Union than with ending slavery, but Lincoln was also hostile to slavery, which is why the Southern states seceded. Three Democrats ran against Lincoln in the 1860 election. All three supported slavery. Lincoln was softer on slavery than the rest of his party (which is why he was nominated: Lincoln could carry counties in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio that a pure abolitionist could not.)
But the Republican Party, before Lincoln, viewed slavery with horror. Thaddeus Stevens, invariably described in history books as a “Radical Republican,” in 1838 refused to sign the revised Pennsylvania Constitution which disenfranchised blacks- - 22 years before the election of Lincoln. When Stevens died, at his own request, he was buried in a segregated black cemetery with the epithet: “I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, Equality of Man before his Creator.”
Republican Party platforms from 1856 onward refer explicitly to the language of the Declaration of Independence “…that all men are created equal” when discussing race, slavery, or civil rights. The platform of 1872 speaks of “complete liberty and exact equality” when discussing race. The political history of the Democrat and Republican parties after the Civil War was a stark contrast on the issue of race: Republican leaders invariably stood for equal rights for blacks, despite the fact that this not only cost Republicans one third of America (the whole Solid South) but large numbers of bigoted Northern white voters as well.
When the NAACP was formed in 1909, Fred Miholland, a staunch Republican, contributed $25,000 of his own money to help found it. Black leaders who helped make the NAACP a serious force, like James Weldon Johnson, were active Republicans. Republicans would routinely join the NAACP while Democrats spurned the organization. (Barry Goldwater, in the 1950s, joined the NAACP, also joined the Urban League, and contributed money to test the legality of Phoenix segregation ordinances.) Republican nominated blacks to serve in Congress, selected blacks as delegates and speakers at Republican National Conventions, and appointed blacks to the federal bench.
What about Democrat leaders? Grover Cleveland appointed Edward White, who had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, to the Supreme Court. Woodrow Wilson, an avowed racist, re-segregated the federal civil service when he took office. His son-in-law, William McAdoo, was almost nominated by the Democrats after Wilson left office; McAdoo was the favored candidate of the Ku Klux Klan, who held rallies to support him. In 1928 the Democrats held their convention in Houston, where a black had just been lynched. When Al Smith, the Democrat nominee, was asked to speak out against the outrage he refused to say a single word of condemnation.
Franklin Roosevelt is supposed to have won blacks over to the Democrat Party when he became president. One must ask: Why? In 1932, FDR won the Democrat nomination on the fourth ballot by sweeping the racist Democrat South delegations against the other Democrat candidates for the nomination. President Roosevelt appointed a Klansman, Tom Clark, as Attorney General; he appointed another Klansman, Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court. This so-called “friend of the black man” refused to meet with Jesse Owens in 1936.
The New Deal exempted jobs performed by blacks from minimum wage laws (promptly the Urban League to state that the New Deal has betrayed blacks.) When the NAACP asked FDR to help tenant farmers in the South and to support anti-lynching laws, Roosevelt refused. In 1944 FDR selected as Vice President Harry Truman, who had signed up to join the Ku Klux Klan (he stopped when he found out it was anti-Catholic.) Almost all Democrat leaders, right through LBJ, had been racists (LBJ in 1947 opposed civil rights legislation, opposed anti-lynching laws, opposed laws banning discrimination in employment, and favored the poll tax.)
What caused black leaders to embrace men who embraced the vilest enemies of black people? Organizations like the NAACP, over time, changed from movements favoring individual liberty - - the ideals of men like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington - - into dull organs of the Left. The NAACP simply became a power bureaucracy. Does this mean the NAACP would align with a party built on Ku Klux Klan terrorism? Yes.
The Left has never had a problem with organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Klan has never had problems with the Left. When the Klan was formed, its avowed purpose was to do “justice to the afflicted and oppressed.” The Klan was a strong advocate of public schools and favored laws to ban religious schools. The Klan, like all organs of the Left, was all about crushing the individual and using coercive power to make us all members of herds, bossed by other Leftists.
Tom Watson is a good example of racists as Leftists. Watson was a radical opponent of private business and industry. When in the Senate, Watson took pride in being the first member to ask the United States to recognize the Soviet Union. Tom Watson was also a strong supporter of the Ku Klux Klan and an anti-Semite. Watson was a “progressive,” like Wilson, and an idol to the Left of his time. Watson and Wilson were followed decades later by Truman, a “liberal” who disliked Jews and blacks.
The common theme of racism and other forms of Leftism is viewing people not as individuals but as members of a race, a gender, a religion, a political party. The Left is simply a lust for power. Once civil rights became safe and secure, it morphed into an auxiliary of the Left. It ceased really standing for anything except the perpetuation of grievances upon which its power was based. The NAACP, when it fought for true equality alongside Republicans, stood for something very good. One hundred years later, the NAACP has simply become another good idea soured by the unquenchable appetite for of the Left for power.
Bruce Walker
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