“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”
Lyndon Johnson
The Democratic Party's Two-Facedness of Race Relations | Huffington Post
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III, By Robert A. Caro, p662
To the people of color who visit this site, just a conspiracy theory about Martin Luther King Jr. who quoted "judge not a man by the color of his skin, but of the content of his character". Before John F. Kennedy had wire tapped Mr. King's phone lines and the 1957 civil rights act was shot down by L.B. Johnson and Kleagel Robert Byrd(Senator from WV), Mr. King was a staunch Republican, but switched to Democrat because of what LBJ offered in his RAW DEAL, to blacks. After it was found out that LB was still a racist bastard(for his attitude towards blacks on Air Force One) Mr. King was going to go back to the Republican Party and bring his constituents along with him. LB decided that at that point Mr. King needed to be removed and so it happened. JMO, but seems likely because people who cross the Democrat Party soon end up dead or missing.
Oh fucking bullshit. MLK was never a Republican. That's revisionist mythology Bubble-o-sphere crapola.
Why Martin Luther King Was Republican | Human Events
However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.
Must really piss you off, knowing that you life has been a lie. But you can still change, and get off the fucking plantation.
Sigh. Fucking history revisionists keep coming back for more spankings....
>> I have few regrets in my life. At the top of the list is the demise of two children in my womb, and one miscarriage. Next to that,
I regret having said to a group of peers that my Uncle M. L. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) was a Republican. My Grandfather, Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. was a registered Republican. Uncle M. L. was an independent. I
assumed that since Granddaddy was a Republican, Uncle M. L. was too. After all, before the election of President John F. Kennedy, the majority of African American voters were Republicans*. Granddaddy convinced a large block of Blacks to vote for President John Kennedy after he helped to get my uncle out of jail during those turbulent days. Uncle M. L. tended to vote Democrat, but remained independent because he found weaknesses in both parties. The truth of the matter is that God isn't a Republican or a Democrat or a Tea Party voter. God doesn't vote. The squabbling and division among the parties is tragic. << --
Alveda King: 'Put the Political Strife Out to Pasture'
Which aligns with what
King himself said:
>> I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses.
And I’m not inextricably bound to either party. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this, that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely2.”
(2. During a sermon in Atlanta one month earlier, King revealed that he had been offered money by both political parties to rally black voters for the 1956 election: They told me they had $75,000 to spend towards obtaining the Negro vote. A large part of this money would have been set aside for my own advantage. I studied their offers long and prayed over it again and again. Then I told them I couldn’t do it. I knew it would have given me anopportunity to educate my children and would have given me my first possessions in the world, but I could not sacrifice my soul in the structure of partisan politics” (“King Warns Leaders Of PartisanPolitics,” Montgomery Advertiser, 14 January 1958). << --
Interview transcript here
--- and of course that letter to a supporter that said:
>> Thanks for your very kind letter of September 17, making inquiry concerning the way the Negro will vote in the coming election. I am of the impression that the Negro voter will go largely for the Democratic Party.
I haven’t fully decided which candidate I will vote for. In the past I have always voted the Democratic ticket. At this point I am still in a state of indecision. Stevenson seems to be more forthright on the race question than Eisenhower, but the Democratic Party is so inexplicably bound to the South that it does leave doubt in the minds of those interested in civil rights. Let us all hope that the candidate most concerned with the welfare for all people of America will win the election.
Sincerely yours,
M. L. King, Jr.,
President
(letter to Viva Sloan, 2 October 1956) << --
The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers
This is where you get taken when you depend on Googly Images and YouTube for your history -- instead of actual history. Sorry, history is history.... you don't get to rewrite it.
* - actually Alveda King is wrong here too; African Americans started voting toward the Democratic Party early in FDR's administration. They did spike in 1964 but the pattern was already established for three decades. We've done this before too. Part of the evolution/devolution of the two parties since the 19th century.
Oopsie.
Oh Jeeves --- serve our guest please.
Bon appetit, mythologist.