The GOP, in an effort to, do something, has a new website up. On it, they list a bunch of Republican "Heroes," and a sizeable chunk of them are African-American. A quick glance, however, shows that all but one of them were born before the Civil War, and the most recent is Jackie Robinson. I don't know if anyone remembers, but an awful lot of African-Americans were Republican for a very long time, for some reason.
Oh, I know, it's because Abe Lincoln was a Republican.
Then came the civil rights movement, and the southern strategy, and Goldwater and Nixon and then the whole modern GOP, which basically told everyone who wasn't white to go screw themselves.
Methinks it will be a while before any more non-white faces join the list.
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Well, apparently the RNC didn't do much research on Jackie Robinson because this is what he wrote of the GOP in his autobiography:
"Every chance I got, while I was campaigning (for Rockefeller), I said plainly what I thought of the right-wing Republicans and the harm they were doing. I felt the GOP was a minority party in term of numbers of registered voters and could not win unless they updated their social philosophy and sponsored candidates and principles to attract the young, the black, and the independent voter. I said this often from public, and frequently Republican, platforms. By and large Republicans had ignored blacks and sometimes handpicked a few servile leaders in the black community to be their token "niggers." How would I sound trying to go all out to sell Republicans to black people? They're not buying. They know better."
"I wasn't altogether caught of guard by the victory of the reactionary forces in the Republican party, but I was appalled by the tactics they used to stifle their liberal opposition," Robinson wrote of that 1964 convention. "I was a special delegate to the convention through an arrangement made by the Rockefeller office. That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude toward black people."
That's one ringing endorsement for today's Republican Party.
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