Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.
Another former “Dixiecrat” is former Democrat Sen. Ernest Hollings, who put up the Confederate flag over the state Capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Sen. Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been “a great senator for any moment,” including the Civil War. Yet Democrats denounced then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott for his remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.). Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Byrd and Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.
After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004, blocked passage of a bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and vetoed twice by President Clinton before he finally signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).
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