David Broder Quotes
What really sets Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country -- a title that one hopes will now be permanently retired.... What is unique about Helms -- and from my viewpoint, unforgivable -- is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.
David Broder, 1929–2011, Political Columnist, 2001, Quoted in The Maddow Blog, http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/09/12/20455782-we-need-a-hundred-more-like-jesse-helms-in-the-us-senate?lite
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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
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.
Slogan used to protest the injustice of segregation in the nation’s capital:
In 1911 the citizens of Honea Path, SC, led by Joshua W. Ashleigh, the State Legislator representing the district and his son, the editor of the local newspaper, dismembered and lynched a Black man, Willis Jackson. Some South Carolinians were distressed and asked the Governor to initiate and investigation. See his later statement on lynching in 1930.
In 1862 the president requested a $600,000 congressional appropriation to finance a pilot program for Negroes freed by the Civil War to emigrate to Africa. He met with a delegation of Black leaders:
The letter was written in the supposed style of a Black after Emancipation and includes most of the ugly false stereotypes of the worst of the racists of the present and the slaveowners of past times. Williams stated that he was not a racist and was trying to make a point about freedom required risk and responsibility. However, the effort was interpreted by many people, Black and white, to be insulting and a put down of African Americans. At the same time, although most of the Tea Party members were not racists, most of the racists in America were supporters of the Tea Party. Those people interpreted the quotation as "telling it like it is" about Blacks who do not want the responsiblities and risks of freedom and are not yet developed sufficiently to be equal citizens in a democracy.
Johnson was then Vice President.
Bilbo was one of the worst racists who ever served in the Congress.
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 became one of the most widely quoted statements of the 1960s and 1970s.
David Salzer Broder, was an American journalist, writing for The Washington Post for over 40 years. He was also an author, television news show pundit, and university lecturer.
