I have heard people say that most blacks are Democrats. However, if you watch CNN or MSNBC you will see the same three black men express their pride in being black republicans. But my question is: “How can a black man justify being a republican?” It appears to me that any black person that is a republican now would have been what Malcolm X referred to as “a house Negro” during slavery. Can it be that by separating themselves from the masses they think they have nothing in common with the masses? Any black person who thinks they have been accepted by and welcomed into the Republican Party needs to take a few days to sober up. There are black people who say this is America and they have the right to choose which party they want to belong too and that’s true; but it amazes me that a black person would want to be in the same party as Jessie Helms, David Duke, Strom Thurman, Dick Cheney, Trent Lott and Ronald Reagan.

Trent Lott is one of the leaders of the Republican Party and these black republicans don’t have a problem with that. In 2002, Trent Lott’s contemporaries and fellow Rebublicans said they were shocked that he had uttered racial statements to support segregation. For some reason they didn’t notice that he had made these kinds of statements before. Nor had they noticed his voting record which clearly shows he voted against Affirmative Action, the Voting Rights Act, the extension of the Voting Rights Act, School busing and desegregation, the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday and all other legislation directed towards equality. Since Trent Lott’s support for Strom Thurman’s failed bid to be president was not his first show of support, why didn’t the people that had a problem with it in 2002 have a problem with it then?

All of a sudden people were shocked by his words but what about his actions? Not only did he vote against the legislation I’ve mentioned, he also spearheaded an effort to restore United States citizenship to Confederate President Jeff Davis, who was a trader to this country. He also filed a friend of the court brief arguing that Bob Jones University deserved tax breaks, declared the spirit of Jeff Davis lives on in the 1984 Republican Platform, called the Civil War “the war of northern aggression, said the Council of Conservative Citizens stand for the right principals and not once but twice said “we wouldn’t have all these problems” if Storm Thurman had become president in 1948.

All this went unnoticed and there are black people who are part of a party that has once again made him one of their party’s leaders. These same three “black republicans” have referred to Ronald Reagan as if he was and/or is some kind of Republican Saint. This reminds me of Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” speech when he said, “that during slavery there were two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negro lived in the house with his master and he loved his master more than he loved himself and when the master’s house caught on fire, he fought harder to put the fire out than the master did.” To support this statement all one has to do is look at what Reagan did and didn’t do.

Reagan’s first stop, in his general election campaign, was Neshoba County, Mississippi which is the place where civil rights activist were shot to death by whites who were outraged by the idea of people working towards securing the rights of blacks and at the time, this case was still news. And when Reagan used the term “State’s Rights” he was simply using the same old race card that other racists had used. He was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and tried to lessen it impact in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was against a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. and when it came to private schools that practiced racial discrimination, he tried to eliminate the federal ban on tax exemptions for those schools. In 1988 he vetoed a bill to expand federal civil rights legislation and he also vetoed the bill assessing sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Both of those vetoes were over rode by Congress. Throughout his political career, he joined the racists position regarding civil rights and other issues important to black people.

How a black person can justify following these guys lead truly amazes me. Malcolm was right.

Email Kenneth:
brown6207@bellsouth.net