David Herbert Donald Quotes

Incredible as it seems today, no Black person had ever dined in the White House as a guest of the President. African American servants were common. And Abraham Lincoln had received many Black visitors as had Presidents after him. But no president had ever had a Black person to dine as a social equal. The photo, reproduced here, illustrates the parity. But that was the worst thing a President could do so far as Tillman and his fellow racists were concerned. They had, since the end of the Civil war, used violence and terrorism to murder, maim and/or intimidate the Negro population to remain in an economic and socially inferior position. In Tillman’s state over these decades they had more lynchings than legal executions and there were plenty of them. Newspapers over the South riled up the whites and there was a wave of terror to be sure that the President’s importune action would not be taken as an endorsement of the Negro’s right to any equality or even dignity. This dinner essentially wedded all the Blacks to the Republican Party and all the Southern Whites to the Democratic Party. This would remain the political situation for over 60 years until the Democrats passed the LBJ Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Republicans decided to solicit the Southern White racists who accepted the invitation and within a few years, there was a complete reversal of party loyalty of most Blacks and most Southern White Racists.

This was art of the Nixon "Southern Strategy" to alienate the white supremacists and racists from the Democratic Party with Civil Rights legislation and rhetoric, and get most of them to become Republicans. But as Phillips observed, when Negroes began voting in significant numbers in the South the party switching really accelerated.

The Boers were lower class, uneducated, farmers from Holland who came to South Africa before the English did. They were at the bottom of the Dutch socioeconomic ladder. Unlike the English who were interest in establishing a trading colony, the Boers just wanted to own and farm the land and use blacks as slave or cheap labor. The Dutch Government and Trading companies lost interest in South Africa as there were much more profitable parts of the world, and they felt no obligation to the Boers whom they were glad to be rid of. So the Boers found themselves having to follow the British laws and rules of the British Colonial Office. Slavery was outlawed, and Blacks could be educated and become citizens under British law. They could own land, and contest the right of the Boers who had settled in some uninhabited land and some that was owned by Black tribes. The Blacks outnumbered the whites in general and the Boers, and there were educated Blacks who “outclassed” the still relatively uneducated Boers. So the Boers, fighting for their “way of life” set up their own area in Southern Africa and claimed independence. But Blacks claimed that it was their land and looked to the British to exercise English law. The Boer war ensued. Although the Boers lost the war, the bred at a much faster rate than the English, many of whom did not even have their families in South Africa. By the end of WWII, the Boer white majority controlled the government and kept the majority Blacks from voting and having full citizenship rights. They dominated Apartheid South Africa until the Black Revolutionists obtained control and although Black and white relations are better in South Africa than most countries, the extemeist Boers and most militant Blacks are in political, but not violent, conflict. Churchill and the British have always perceived themselves as being caught in the middle between the Boers and the Blacks.

The president was commenting on a Donald Trump campaign statement that African American were in the worst shape in history when the reality was just the opposite

Eight years and a Civil War later, he had changed his mind and was the sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1866—the first Federal civil rights law in America. See {587711}.

Hoover and the FBI were supposed to be enforcing Federal law. However, they could not find any criminal activity on the part of Martin Luther King Jr. They regarded the Civil Rights Movement as a revolutionary threat to the nation. See {620621} and {74219} . So the FBI in an incredible abuse of power, had a meeting of its top officials to plan a strategy for destroying King as a Negro leader in America. We look back on this era where officials who were never elected by anyone, and having no authority from an elected official, took it upon themselves to decide who leaders in America would be.

Johnson was then Vice President.

Freedom Rides were interracial groups of Civil Rights advocates who boarded public interstate busses in Washington and rode South through some of the most segregated communities in the country. As the bus stopped at the segregated rest stops, the Black Freedom Riders would use the “white” waiting rooms, toilets, and other facilities which was against the local custom and law. Racist segregationists often brutalized and assaulted the Freedom riders whose leaders demanded Federal Protection. The Attorney General and others were trying to get the local politicians and law enforcement officials to protect the Freedom Riders, but often these were the worst of the racist segregationists. Kennedy thought if he could have a “cooling off period” for a few days, he could persuade the locals to protect the Freedom Riders from the mobs with the threat of sending Federal Marshalls or troops for the protection. So he asked Farmer and other Freedom Ride organizers to stop the Freedom Rides for a few days. This was Farmer’s famous response. The Freedom Rides continued and forced the Federal Government to respond on a timetable they did not prefer.