Legacy of Slavery Quotes
This is an example of how values in politics can get complex. Family Leader put together The Marriage Vow, a pledge it wanted political candidates to sign. The pledge dealt with marital fidelity and other traditional family values. Two Republican Presidential Nomination Candidates signed the pledge rapidly as many of their competitors had notorious affairs and/or had been divorced. The 2 signers thought that they would obtain a substantial advantage. However, another part of the pledge was dealing with the importance of children being brought up in a 2 parent home, The quotation gives their statement on Black families and illegitimacy. However, they organization was so hung up on the evil of children in single parent households, that they said in the pledge that Blacks were better off under slavery than they are under Barack Obama—the first Black President. As might have been expected, there were no Blacks and even very few racist whites who would claim Black children and families were better off under slavery. They two politicians, Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum—neither very sensitive to minority issues and perceived by most Blacks as racists—began to back away from their signing, First Leader, then removed the quoted paragraph from all copies of the signed pledges and removed it from their website. However, original copies—including the quoted paragraph—got into the hands of the media and the scandal began. Family Leader, trying to do damage control, wisely apologized. The other Republican Presidential aspirants both monogamous and otherwise, refused to sign but what it is that made them refuse was probably different for each person.
Indeed, he was wrong in the sense that the Southern whites did NOT even obey the letter of the law. The Klu Klux Klan and the rest of Southern Jim Crow terrorism broke the laws of the states and local communities as well as Federal law but they did so with impunity. Andrews recognized the problem but never suspected that it would be as bad as it got with public torture and lynching commonplace and approved by most white Southerners.
