Contrary to the bigots promoting the 1619 Project, Senator John C. Calhoun was a Democrat. Ignored by the authors of this fantasy is the fact that President Woodrow Wilson a Democrat PRAISED the KKK and segregated the Federal work force and the military. Also, ignored is the 1952 Democrat candidate for Vice President, Alabama Senator John Sparkman, an avowed segregationist.
As said before, the Democrat Party defending slavery—like Democrat President Martin Van Buren, created Jim Crow laws, revitalized the KKK and stopped blacks from voting. Racism? That is the Democrat Party—ignored by the Democrats who created the fantasy 1619 Project as a smear towards those opposed to slavery and racism—the Republican Party.
“The Democratic southern states, such as Georgia, specifically criticized the anti-slavery policies of President Lincoln’s Republican Party in their declarations of succession in the Civil War. Even after the war, Cost notes, the Democratic Party’s “central purpose in the second half of the 19th century was specifically to prevent civil rights legislation from being implemented.”
In response to black Republicans being elected in Southern states during Reconstruction, it was Democrats who enacted poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the black vote. A Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, resegregated the federal work force in Washington and hosted a White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s egregiously racist, white supremacist “Birth of a Nation.” As late as 1952, the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, John Sparkman, was an open segregationist. A significantly higher percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than did congressional Democrats, and segregationists such as George Wallace were major figures in the Democratic Party until the 1970s.
Even during President Obama’s tenure, Robert Byrd, a former Exalted Cyclops of his local KKK chapter, was one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate.”
1619 Project, Touted as Racial Reckoning, Ignores Democratic Party Racism
By Mark Hemingway, RealClear Investigations , 8/4/21
Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white-supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.
At a time when governments, sports teams, schools and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution” — and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.
“I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the history of the Democrat Party when we’re literally changing the names of birds because they’re named after racists,” said Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” referring to a new racism-cleansing push in, yes, ornithology.
Democrats’ circumspection in the face of this trend is especially noteworthy because it comes at a time when they are criticizing Republican legislation to block the teaching of critical race theory on the ground that the GOP wants to whitewash American history. But one of the most noteworthy efforts to reframe American history in terms of race, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, virtually ignores the Democrat Party’s role in advancing and sustaining racism in the United States.
Named after the year slaves from Africa were first brought to North America, the curated collection of essays on race in America presents even the most complex modern issues – from obesity and traffic jams to capitalism itself – as being primarily a consequence of America’s history of slavery and racial injustice. The 1619 Project has been widely adopted as an historical framework on the left despite criticism from eminent historians, being repudiated by the 1619 Project’s own fact-checkers, and mangling basic facts.
Yet, in the essay texts, the Democratic Party is named only three times, in passing. The Republican Party, the political entity formed to fight slavery, also receives little mention. But when the GOP is mentioned, it is excoriated as the 21st century heir to 19th century racist ideology.
For critics of the 1619 Project, the virtual omission of any discussion of the Democratic Party is not only galling but revealing. In their view, the goal of the 1619 Project is neither historical nor educational – it’s thoroughly political. “[1619 Project editor] Nikole Hannah-Jones has been explicit about saying that the point of her essay and the point of the 1619 Project more broadly is to get a reparations bill passed. So that’s a partisan objective,” says Lucas Morel, a professor at Washington and Lee University who has authored books on Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Ellison.
Hannah-Jones did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Sunday magazine, where the essays originally appeared.
Peter Wood, head of the National Association of Scholars and author of “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project,” agrees that politics is a likely explanation for the 1619 Project’s significant analytical failing.
“If you’re going to be leveraging this project in order to persuade Congress to pass legislation that would entail spending many billions of dollars giving money to the descendants of former slaves, then you need to court favor with the political party that is most likely to advance that agenda,” he says. “At least from Nikole Hannah-Jones’ perspective, I would think that the careful avoidance of casting shade on the Democratic Party fits with her longer-term agenda of extracting wealth from the American people and transferring it to a subset of American people who can prove they are descendants from slaves.”
Historians also note that applying the 1619 Project’s standards for evaluating historical racism could prove especially awkward for Democrats. “I think the history of the Democratic Party is even more problematic than anyone suggests, and the time period of its ‘criminality’ is very long indeed,” says historian Jay Cost, author of several books including “Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic” and a forthcoming biography of James Madison.
It would be difficult to overstate the Democratic Party’s enduring and baleful role in slavery and racism. Its origins in the 1820s are closely aligned with Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s second vice president and later president himself. Van Buren was a New York power broker whose efforts supporting slavery, partly in the name of preserving the union, earned him the moniker “a northern man with southern principles.”
The white supremacist blockbuster that got a private screening in the Wilson White House — unmentioned in the 1619 Project.
Chronicle of the Cinema/Wikimedia
The Democratic southern states, such as Georgia, specifically criticized the anti-slavery policies of President Lincoln’s Republican Party in their declarations of succession in the Civil War. Even after the war, Cost notes, the Democratic Party’s “central purpose in the second half of the 19th century was specifically to prevent civil rights legislation from being implemented.”
In response to black Republicans being elected in Southern states during Reconstruction, it was Democrats who enacted poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the black vote. A Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, resegregated the federal work force in Washington and hosted a White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s egregiously racist, white supremacist “Birth of a Nation.” As late as 1952, the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, John Sparkman, was an open segregationist. A significantly higher percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than did congressional Democrats, and segregationists such as George Wallace were major figures in the Democratic Party until the 1970s.
Even during President Obama’s tenure, Robert Byrd, a former Exalted Cyclops of his local KKK chapter, was one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate. The absence of Democratic Party critiques is all the more conspicuous when you consider that the 1619 Project doesn’t shy away from critiquing the GOP. New York Times columnist Jamelle
