The author's name is Michael Bryant, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Toledo. He holds a Ph.D in history from Ohio State University.
As a former professor os history, I feel a duty to the readers of The Blade to correct Jack Kelly's surrealistic love letter to the Republican Party, "GOP off defensive on racism" (Jan. 18). Far from being proponents of "equal justice under the law," Republicans have never looked with favor on the full integration of black Americans.
As early as 1858, Lincoln declared "that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races," assuring his audience that in a society of white and black the whites should always enjoy "the superior position." In an 1862 letter, Lincoln affirmed that his "paramount object in this struggle [i.e. the Civil War] is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy Slavery."
When he decreed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, it "freed" only slaves in those states that were in open rebellion against the Union, mentioning nothing about the status of slaves on Union-controlled territory. In short, the Proclamation was intended less to free the slaves than to induce loyalty to the Union.
The short-lived integration of black Americans into the body politic immediately after the Civil War ended abruptly through an act of Republican chicanery. The occasion was the 1877 presidential election, in which the Democrat Samuel Tilden enjoyed a 250,000-vote edge over the Republican competitor, Rutherford b. Hayes, with three states yet to be counted. These three states would be decisive. whoever captured their electoral votes would win the presidency. At this point, a deal was struck between the republicans and Southern Democrats.
In exchange for the government's withdrawal of Union troops from the South, Southern Democrats agreed to swing the remaining electoral votes to Hayes. With the withdrawl of Union troops, the sole barrier against the civil disemancipation of southern blacks was removed, and the Jim crow system of institutionalized racism was born. So much for "historic Republican principal of equal justice under the law, as Mr. Kelly absurdly describes it.
Nor did Dwight Eisenhower believe in equal rights for black Americans, despite Mr. Kelly's assertion t the contrary. Eisenhower famously deplored Early Warren's majority opinion in Brown vs. Board (1954), prophesying that it would undermine race relations in the United States. Consistent with this view, when he sent federal troops into Little Rock to ensure orderly desegregation of its public schools, he reassured the nation that his purpose was not to "enforce integration, but to prevent opposition by violence to orders of a [federal] court."
Far from being a "malicious distortion," as Mr. Kelly alleges, the Republican 'Southern strategy" was a conscious plan to win votes by appealing to Southerner's fears of black integration in the late 1960s. Since that time, conjuring fears of the black "bogeyman" has become one of the favorite ruses in the Republican's bag of tricks.
George Bush pere exploited white fears of blacks in the 1988 presidential campaign by accusing Michael Dukakis of supporting a prison furlough program that released a black convict, Willie Horton, who then raped a white woman. Jesse Helms used a similar tactic in his senatorial re-election campaign when he ran a series of ads showing a pair of white hands holding an employment rejection letter. The voice over intoned: "You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but it had to go to a minority because of a racial quota." Recently, the republicans showed their true stripes again the the Michigan gubernatorial race, in which Republicans sought to discredit the Democratic candidate, Jennifer Granholm, as a supporter of reparations for centuries of slavery.
The Republicans neither are nor ever were defenders of the idea that blacks should be given political, legal, and social equality with whites.
The reality is that Republicans have manipulated white American racism to achieve successes at the ballot box. Blacks are mere props in their bid for power, routinely sacrificed for political gain. Trent Lott's remarks during Strom Thurmond's birthday celebration were thus no misstatements, but an honest expression of Republican views--held covertly--about black civil rights. If a student of mine had handed in a paper fraught with the historical errors in Mr. Kelly's column, it would have received an "F".
