Since its founding in the late 1820s, the Democratic Party has defended slavery, started the Civil War and opposed Reconstruction. The Democratic Party imposed segregation. Its members engaged in the lynchings of blacks and opposed the civil rights acts of the 1950s and '60s. During Reconstruction, hundreds of black men were elected to Southern state legislatures as Republicans, and 22 black Republicans served in the U.S. Congress by 1900. The Democratic Party did not elect a black man to Congress until 1935.
President Woodrow Wilson was a Progressive Democrat and an avowed racist who shared many views with the Ku Klux Klan. He resegregated the federal civil service. He screened the racist film "The Birth of a Nation," originally titled "The Clansman," at the White House; it was the very first movie ever played at the White House.
What was the party of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who blocked the desegregation of Little Rock schools and defied the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision? What was the party of Theophilus Eugene Connor, known as Bull Connor, who, as city commissioner, set vicious dogs, fire hoses and billy clubs on black civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama? Connor said: "You can never whip these birds if you don't keep you and them separate. I found that out in Birmingham. You've got to keep your white and black separate." If you answered that Faubus and Connor were Democrats, go to the head of the class. By the way, it was Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower who sent troops to ensure that black students could attend Little Rock's Central High School.
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