Flip-Flop on Civil Rights

Re “Recasting Republicans as the Party of Civil Rights,” Jan. 29: Reaching “back into history to invoke the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conveniently ignored the fact that anti-slavery Republicans were the liberals of their day. Accordingly, for almost a century after the Civil War, the “Solid South” was a Democratic bastion of segregation.

Then, beginning with Sen. Strom Thurmond’s defection from the 1948 Democratic Convention over the party’s liberal civil rights plank that had been introduced by Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey and climaxing with Sen. Barry Goldwater’s sweep of the South in 1964, the ideological transposition of the two parties was complete. If Lincoln and Douglass were alive today, they would be Democrats.

Forrest G. Wood

Professor of American

History, Emeritus

Cal State Bakersfield

*

Your bias never ceases to amaze me. The Republican Party was indeed formed to fight the American Civil War. That effort was led by Lincoln and resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation. For 150 years, the Democratic Party did everything in its power to frustrate black aspirations for equality by forcefully maintaining the Jim Crow South. All those “whites only” ordinances and statutes were enacted by Democrats.

The presence of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division at Little Rock High School was on the order of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower to overcome the orders of Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus. Eisenhower also created the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

John Kennedy had to be backed into a corner by Martin Luther King Jr. before he finally came forward on civil rights. Why? Because Kennedy had to fight his own Democratic Party to protect African American citizens in the South.

Larry Stirling

San Diego

*

Your article left out some important information. It should have noted that more Republicans than Democrats voted for the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. The Southern Democrats, like Al Gore’s father, voted against the legislation. It was the Southern Democrats who wanted to enforce “separate but equal.” Gov. George Wallace was a Democrat. Even today, Sen. Robert Byrd, who was a member of the KKK, is a Democrat. He voted against the legislation.

Judy Herbst

Beverly Hills

*

Your article describes the new official “2005 Republican Freedom Calendar,” which the GOP hopes will appeal to black voters. The degree of cynicism in this project is astonishing, especially its praise of Eisenhower for appointing Earl Warren to the Supreme Court.

Eisenhower later said that the appointment was “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.” The authors of this propaganda must be the same folks who invoke FDR to privatize Social Security.

David Allen

Los Angeles

*

I’d like to think that a glossy calendar adorned with Lincoln’s face and studded with supposedly notable civil rights achievements by the Republican Party would not be sufficient to alter history, but I have no such confidence. Under the current administration, day is night, up is down and now white is black. Repeat a lie often enough and not only does the perpetrator come to believe it, but also those barraged by revisionist history.

In Lincoln’s day, the Republican Party was, in fact, the party of civil rights. In the years since, it has been co-opted largely by white males intent on increasing white male wealth and power.

If Lincoln were to register today, which party do you think he would associate with?

Judi Birnberg

Sherman Oaks

*

Every time Republicans say something is so -- “we’re compassionate!” “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, we know where they are,” “Mission Accomplished!” -- U.S. voters believe them, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

This latest attempt at doublespeak should be exposed as the fraud it is. Hopefully, a majority of Americans will begin to see there’s a man behind the curtain (Karl Rove), and that no, Toto, this isn’t Kansas anymore.

Eric Forst

Culver City

*

The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, is noted as saying “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” The theme of the latest Republican president seems to be government of the few, by the few and not for you.

Joseph Gius

Los Angeles