Yesterday, I linked to an article from the Washington Post that detailed concerns some people have with what they see as "coded racism" coming from the Clinton campaign. As several people in comments have pointed out, this only comes as a surprise to Democrats who have been silent when some truly reprehensible, blatantly racist things have been done or said by Democrats against Republicans who happen to be black. That is absolutely true. It is also absolutely true that the Democrats themselves have a long, long history of be the party of institutional racism in America. Bruce Bartlett has taken the trouble to round up a long list of quotes from some very famous people from American Democratic party history. The quotes are damning.
In his new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes a strong case for his belief that the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s. A key piece of evidence for Mr. Krugman is that Ronald Reagan gave his first speech after accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In the course of this speech, Reagan said he supported "states' rights." Mr. Krugman says this was code declaring his secret sympathy for Southern racism.
Others, including Mr. Krugman's Times colleague David Brooks and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, have come to Reagan's defense, denying that he was a racist or had any racist intent in his 1980 speech. That's fine but unlikely to change the minds of those like Mr. Krugman who are determined to smear the Republican Party with the charge of racism, and who are adept at finding racist code words like "law and order" by Republicans that are completely convincing to liberals and Democrats in support of this accusation, even though they are invisible to those with no political ax to grind.
However, if a single mention of states' rights 27 years ago is sufficient to damn the Republican Party for racism ever afterwards, what about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and "Jim Crow" laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.
Following are some quotes from prominent Democrats largely drawn from my new book, "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past." Even with the exclusion of all quotes that contain the N-word, it is clear that many of the Democratic Party's most important historical figures have long made statements that reduce Reagan's alleged transgression to a drop in the ocean. If we are going to hold him and his party accountable for a single mention of states' rights, then the party of those listed below is far more culpable in promoting and defending racism.
It is a very long list of people and some of them will surprise people who have not been paying attention. Of course, many of the people who made the statements Bartlett quotes have been dead for many years and policies and people's opinions do change. But the Democrats don't want people to remember that their party is the one that filibustered to try to stop Federal action on racial equality. They should not be able to smear others for supposed "coded racism" when they themselves have such a shameful past of blatant, open racism.





Can you prove that racism is a significant problem in America? I doubt it. Using quotes and incidents to prove the extent of racism in America is like using nothing but shark attack stories to determine the dominant causes of death in the world. After a while, you come to the conclusion that we’re all going to be eaten by sharks.
I would suggest that the initial reaction to the Michael Vick dog fighting incidents provides plenty of evidence that racism is not as common as many would like us to believe.
My wife is a black African (born and raised in Africa). I am white, and our biological son is one of the few people who can accurately claim to be “African-American”.
I mention this not to play the Absolute Moral Authority card (a gambit designed to try to silence opposing points of view), but to point out that when it comes to race relations there is no theoretical component for us. We are living these issues in our everyday lives.
That is why I find the tactics of Paul Krugman and the MSM to be nothing short of evil. Krugman cares nothing for rooting out racism in politics and society (if he did, he would find a target-rich environment in the modern Democrat Party of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jimmy Carter, etc.). He cares only for keeping the black community is a permanent state of rage and fear – and voting the straight Democrat ticket. Krugman and the MSM take no responsible whatsoever for the extensive collateral damage they cause by the lies they routinely tell in the pursuit of power.
As far as the MSM is concerned, facts must always be made subordinate to the Narrative when political power is at stake. This is the reason I believe that the MSM pushes phony racism stories like the Jena 6, the Willie Horton ads, the fake Duke rape case, the “macaca” incident in the Senate campaign in Virginia last year, and the Reagan-as-KKK-sympathizer.