Before Northam, Democrats Didn’t Just Dress Up as Klansmen

[Right_in_Virginia]

Before Northam, Democrats Didn’t Just Dress Up as Klansmen
American Spectator, Feb 3, 2019, Daniel J. Flynn

<snip>

In 1924, the Democratic National Convention rejected, by a single vote, a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan. The nation’s most prominent Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, used his considerable rhetorical gifts to shamefully aid the nos. “My friends,” the three-time presidential nominee told the convention, “it requires more courage to fight the Republican Party than it does to fight the Ku Klux Klan.”

In 1937, before Supreme Court nominees received the Brett Kavanaugh treatment, President Franklin Roosevelt placed Hugo Black, a former Klansman, on the high court. A proto-Patrick Howley revealed Black’s resignation letter from the Ku Klux Klan, which he signed under an “I.T.S.U.B.” (In the Sacred, Unfailing Bond) complimentary close — a common, cryptic acronym favored by the secret society — after the Alabaman had secured his spot. Why did not Roosevelt use the Justice Department to investigate Black? The president reasoned that “a man’s private life is supposed to be his private life.” On the court, Black’s private views became public policy. Black authored the Korematsu decision. Klansmen have consequences.

As late as 1989, Democrats called a former KKK Exalted Cyclops their leader in the United States Senate. Robert Byrd acknowledged, and regretted, his youthful involvement in the murderous hate group. But his “fleeting association,” as Bill Clinton put it, with the KKK appeared not so much as a moment of insensitivity, as some might construe Northam dressing up in the mid-1980s, as a prolonged period of bigotry at its ugliest. “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again,” he wrote Senator Theodore Bilbo, another Democrat associated with the KKK, “than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

Less than a decade ago, a more forgiving Left came together to eulogize Byrd as a great man. “Robert Byrd Showed That People Can Change,” a headline of an article in the Progressive read. Byrd did change.


Read more:  https://spectator.org/before-northam-democrats-didnt-just-dress-up-as-klansmen/

[Restored]

Rumor is that the Va Lt Gov is about to get down in flames. #MeToo

[Emjay]

Rumor is that the Va Lt Gov is about to get down in flames. #MeToo

Yep.  Lt Gov did a no no since the dems ran on 'believe the woman.'

[Emjay]

People can change, but Robert Byrd didn't.  In fact, he was too doddery to realize that he ever did anything wrong.

And, maybe he didn't.  His generation was entrenched in racism and it was a popular stance among most democrats of his era.

It's only recently, that we've started searching kindergarten yearbooks for politically incorrect stuff.

[mountaineer]

I'm seeing all sorts of excuse-making for ol' Bobby Byrd today. "Oh, he apologized and saw the error of his ways, isn't that enough?!?" the lefties plead. Well, no, because he and his fellow Dems were bigots and anti-civil rights through the 1960s, and Bobby still was using the "n-word" just a few years before his death. He wasn't sorry about being in the Klan. He was sorry only that it became something of which people disapproved.