Black Americans at the Crossroads

Black Americans have arrived at a crossroads. It is one thing to take three steps forward, one step back, three steps forward, and one step back, as they have since Reconstruction, but to arrive at a point where they are sliding backward, losing two or three generations of progress in a few short years, represents a sociological catastrophe of major proportions. But that is precisely what the paternalism of white liberals, Democrats, and self-appointed black leaders has accomplished.

It has been a long, hard 220-year struggle for blacks as they attempt to gain parity with whites in education, economic opportunity, and civil rights. It is a struggle in which the first 160 years were characterized by indescribable racial brutality, while the last 60 years can only be described as an era of smothering paternalism… the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” to use the words of George W, Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson. Unfortunately, most blacks are not yet ready to admit to themselves that much of the progress they’ve seen in the past 220 years has been stolen from them by people who pose as their benefactors: white liberals and Democrats.

The black relationship with the Democrat Party dates back to 1792. When the U.S. Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia five years earlier, Democrats won a major concession when, for the sole purpose of increasing the number of pro-slavery Democrats in Congress, the convention agreed to give slave states the legal authority to count each slave as three-fifths of a person.

In 1820, as the State of Missouri was entering the Union, congressional Democrats won passage of the Missouri Compromise, insuring that, as new states entered the Union, there would always be an equal number of slave-states and free-states. But then, in 1854, Democrats replaced the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave each state the right to decide whether they would be a free state or a slave state. Later that year, in July 1854, anti-slavery Democrats decided they’d had enough. They met in Jackson, Michigan, for the purpose of forming a new anti-slavery party: the Republican Party.

On May 1, 1856, pro-slavery Democrats from Missouri invaded the town of Lawrence, Kansas, an abolitionist community which supported efforts to bring Kansas into the Union as a free state. Democrats attacked the town with cannon and small arms fire, killing a number of residents and burning several buildings to the ground. Contrary to popular belief, the first shots of the Civil War were not fired at Fort Sumpter, South Carolina, in April 1861; the 1856 attack on Lawrence, Kansas, represented the first shots of the War Between the States.

Three weeks after the attack, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) delivered a fiery speech on the floor of the senate, condemning slavery and the Kansas invasion. As he spoke, Congressman Preston Brooks (D-SC) crept up behind him and struck him over the head with a cane, knocking him unconscious and severely injuring him. Following Brooks’ arrest on assault charges, pro-slavery Democrats were quoted as saying, “It would not take much to have the throats of every abolitionist cut. If the northern men had stood up, the city would now float with blood…”

Meanwhile, the Republican Party was gaining in popularity among abolitionists and quickly attracted large numbers of supporters… so many, in fact, that the party was able to elect its first president, Abraham Lincoln, just four years after it was founded.

Following the Civil War, and in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Democrats were very creative in finding ways of oppressing blacks by enacting Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws. The Black Codes dictated where and for whom blacks could work, where they could live, where they could eat and sleep, which restrooms and drinking fountains they could use, where they were allowed to sit in movie theaters and on trains and busses, and what time they had to be off the streets or outside city limits each evening.

Then, in 1866, in order to enforce the Black Codes, Democrats established an auxiliary called the Ku Klux Klan. Its purpose was to keep the freed slaves in line and to intimidate them into voting for Democratic candidates. The history of the Klan is an ugly one, comparing well to Nazi atrocities during World War II. Although no official records of Klan atrocities are available for the years 1866 to 1882, Tuskegee Institute records indicate that, between the years 1882 and 1951, some 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites, nearly all Republicans, were lynched by the KKK.

Many Klan atrocities were of the most heinous kind imaginable. For example, in May 1918 there were a series of lynchings in the State of Georgia. When Mary Turner, a black woman who was nine months pregnant, announced that she would seek the prosecution of the white men who lynched her husband, Hayes Turner, a mob dragged her from her home, tortured her, and hanged her. While she was still alive, hanging from the rope, they cut open her womb, the child spilled out onto the ground and they crushed the baby’s skull under the heel of a boot.

A year later, in Elaine Arkansas, some 200 black sharecroppers and tenant farmers were murdered after meeting to discuss how they could stop their white landlords from cheating them out of their share of the cotton crops. Seventy-nine other blacks were arrested. Twelve were later sentenced to death and the remainder was sentenced to prison terms of up to 21 years.

Such was the relationship between blacks and the Democrat Party between 1792, when the party was founded, and 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision, outlawing the concept of “separate but equal” in public education. It was then that Democrats came to the cynical conclusion that, if they could no longer oppress blacks by force and violence, they would purchase their allegiance with funds from the public treasury.

The immediate result was the Kennedy-Johnson War on Poverty. And while young blacks had access to the stories of giants such as George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, white Democrats found that it was not in the best interest of their party for young blacks to see such men as role models. Instead, at the behest of self-appointed race hustlers such as Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Al Sharpton, blacks offered themselves as an all-but-unified voting bloc with their votes going to the highest bidder.

The relationship between blacks and liberals has not been a beneficial one for blacks. And while white liberals and Democrats have benefitted immensely from the captive black vote, blacks have received only crumbs from the Democratic table. One does not have to be a psychologist to understand that recent racial unrest in St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri; the number of black-on-black murders and drive-by shootings in black neighborhoods; as well as the increasing number of young blacks playing the “knockout game” in major cities across the country, is evidence that the level of frustration and hopelessness among blacks is fast approaching critical mass… especially among young black males.

Yes, Democrats have regularly carved out congressional districts that were certain to elect black candidates, but white Democrats are not prone to nominate and elect blacks to the U.S. Senate except under extraordinary circumstances. Forty-one black men and women were elected to the 113th Congress, all liberal Democrats and all heavily committed to the narcotic of the welfare state. In recent years, only two black Democrats have been elected to the U.S. Senate: Carol Moseley Braun and Barack Obama, both products of the corrupt Chicago political machine. Two others, Roland Burris (D-IL) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), were token blacks appointed by Democrat governors, leaders of corrupt political machines in Illinois and New Jersey.

In recent decades we’ve had the first black associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, who never saw an unconstitutional constitutional right he couldn’t embrace. Now we have the first black president Barack Obama, who is not only ineligible to serve, but is by far the most incompetent man ever to occupy the Oval Office. We have a black attorney general, Eric Holder, the most corrupt and lawless man ever to serve as our top law enforcement official. And we have a black national security advisor, Susan Rice, who is not only the most incompetent and inexperienced person ever to serve in that capacity, she is widely known as an accomplished liar. To think that a woman of her caliber would be advising our acting president on questions of national security is enough to scare the pants off every American.

Yes, many corrupt and incompetent whites have achieved high public office, but because blacks are under the public microscope far more intensely than their white counterparts, the failures of Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Susan Rice, and many black members of Congress are magnified. They cause a great many Americans, of all races, to question whether or not a black man is capable of running the country. They have set race relations back several generations, bringing blacks to the point where only black conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) and Dr. Ben Carson, former head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, can lead them back from the abyss… if only they will listen to reason.

Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett did not give blacks new cars or make their house payments, as many blacks expected; all they got was cheap cell phones. As they leaves the White House, they will leave behind nothing but an angry and highly agitated black community, a large blank space in American history, and a record of failure that will make it even more difficult for an African-American to ever again be elected to lead the country.

As syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer has described Obama’s $870 billion economic stimulus package,”It left not a trace behind. For God’s sake, at least FDR left the Hoover Dam. Obama leaves behind the ruins of that Solyndra factory; that’s it. That’s where the Obama library ought to be.”

Black Americans are at a crossroads and its time they took a long hard look at their political allegiances.