In 1865, the last year of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was passed by Congress. This was the amendment that abolished slavery, and began to open up full citizenship to American blacks. Did you know that 100% of the Republicans in Congress voted for this, and only 23% of the Democrats?
Did you know that in 1868, when Congress passed the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave citizenship rights to blacks, that 94% of the Republicans voted for it, but not one single Democrat in either the House or the Senate voted for it? Similarly, in 1870, when the 15th Amendment gave blacks the vote, !00% of the Republicans in Congress voted for it, and not a single Democrat.
Did you know that the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution, which says that slaves shall only be counted as 3/5ths of a human being when figuring the representation from the various states for the House of Representatives, was pushed through by the anti-slavery delegates from New England? This was not done to hurt the slaves, but rather to help them! The point is that the anti-slavery delegates from northern states wanted to keep the slave-holding states from counting their slaves at all, whereas the Southern delegates insisted on counting them as full persons. (O, the irony of that. Southern slaveholders viciously insisted that slaves were property, not persons — except when it was convenient to call them persons!). If the Southerners had had their way in the Convention, there would have been a huge increase in their representation (and their power) in the House in Washington. Slavery would have been fastened even more tightly on America. A compromise was finally reached: the slaves would be counted as 3/5 of a person. The record needs to be set straight about this, because a perverted understanding of this history is currently floating around the black community in America, to the effect that the Northern delegates thought of slaves as only 3/5ths of a person. Wrong! They were fighting for them!
Well, these revelations are just part of the eye-openers packed into “Emancipation Revelation/Revolution,” a new powerful 92 minute documentary produced by a long-term friend of mine, Nina May, who heads a company called Renaissance Foundation. This terribly important documentary sets the record straight on many of the distortions and lies concerning the historical attitudes of the Republican and Democratic parties toward blacks, and the partys’ true records on civil rights legislation.
The major part of the documentary consists of clips of historical teaching by historian David Barton, a few others, and myself, interspersed with dozens of in-depth interviews with important black leaders in American society, including Star Parker, Alveda King (neice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), Bishop Harry Jackson, Shelby Steele, Niger Innis, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, Armstrong Williams, Bishop Bobby Henderson, Rev. Keith Butler, Deroy Murdock, Gloria Jackson (great grandaughter of Booker T. Washington), and Mason Weaver — author of It’s OK to Leave the Plantation!”
Many of these black leaders give their own testimonies about having lived on “Uncle Sam’s plantation,” dependent on the welfare system for their very existence. Star Parker minces no words as she relates her life of drugs and abortions, and how she personally learned in the 1980’s that if a mother re-united with the father of her children, she immediately lost her Section 9 housing benefits. In other words, the Federal government was funding and promoting the break-up of the family among the poor!
The program forcefully brings out the fact that prior to 1965, before the Great Society welfare programs began to kick in, 82% of all black children were living in families with both a mother and a father. 82%!!
Star Parker and many others also make it transparently clear that the Democratic Party leadership has been lying to American blacks for years, trying to convince them that blacks cannot make it in society without them. Robert L. Woodson, Sr. presents convincing testimony of the truth about historic black self-achievement having to be suppressed from the mid-1960’s on, because blacks quickly learned that unless they presented themselves as the helpless victims of racism they would not be able to “qualify” for the massive government handouts.
This documentary could produce a massive change in the attitudes of American blacks about their political allegiance, and how they vote. When a prominent black minister in the city of Atlanta saw the preview version of ERR, he immediately went out and changed his voter registration from Democratic to Republican. Why did he do that?
Perhaps because of the historical evidence presented in the program about how the Republican and Democratic parties handled the issue of segregation. A quite well-done segment of the program presents a brief but revealing history lesson from David Barton on the post-Civil War decades in the South This was a dark time for America, for the crushing of slavery and the triumph of freedom at the end of the Civil War was rolled backward by the rise of the Klu Klux Klan and the re-imposition of White supremacy through Jim Crow segregation laws.
In the years immediately following the Civil War, the Republican Party — the party of the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, helped the ex-slaves begin to exercise their new civil rights. The Republican Party of Texas was founded in 1867 by 150 blacks and 20 whites — in fact, in every southern state the Republican Party was founded by blacks. In Mississippi, the first 112 blacks elected to the state legislature were Republicans; in Alabama it was the first 103; in Louisiana the first 127; in South Carolina the first 190; and in Georgia the first 41.
In New Orleans, Louisiana, the KKK joined with the police and the mayor in a physical assault on a Republican convention being held in the city. 40 black delegates and 20 white delegates were killed, and 150 others were wounded. In South Carolina, the KKK published the photographs of 63 state legislators to be targeted for elimination — 50 blacks and 13 whites, all Republicans. In 1872, when the Congress finally held hearings on the KKK menace, those who spoke for the Klan made it quite clear that they had not founded the organization to kill Negroes per se, but to restore Democrats to power throughout the nation. However, they saw it as wonderfully convenient for the expression of their murderous racism that so many Republicans were Negroes.
In 1875 a Republican Congress had abolished segregation in America, but by the 1890’s, the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ignored the 14th Amendment, and all the civil rights laws were overturned. From then on, until 1964, no civil rights legislation was passed by the Congress. Jim Crow laws ruled Southern society until the 1960’s. And, when the pressure for integration mounted, it was Southern Democratic governors like Faubus in Arkansas and Wallace in Georgia who stood in the doors of their state universities and public schools rather than seeing them integrated. As a matter of fact, several Democratic governors shut all their state’s public schools down for an entire year, depriving all the children of an education while they tried to maintain the evil of segregation.
The documentary further reveals that the segregationists in Congress had, in 1956, written an infamous statement called the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the Supreme Court’s famous1954 overturning of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. 100 Democrats signed this awful paper — 81 members of the House, and 19 Senators. Not a single Republican would touch it!
In light of this history, how could modern American blacks become totally captive to the Democratic Party? The first answer is that the black community is almost completely ignorant of the historical facts presented in the ERR documentary. They are also ignorant of the achievements of blacks in the decades following the Civil War, when they were dependent on their own efforts instead of government handouts, and built an impressive record of success. These realities, like so much of American history, have simply been ommitted from the modern history books.
But, as noted above, the modern defection of blacks to the Democratic Party is largely due to the rise of Uncle Sam’s plantation system and the welfare industry. It is a fairly recent development.
An interesting footnote to this defection, by the way, is the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King’s father was a registered Republican when Dr. King, Jr. was arrested in Atlanta and thrown in jail during the 1960 Presidential campaign between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. Senator Kennedy was unwilling to make a public statement supporting King, but he did call King’s wife Corretta to tell her that they were working behind the scenes to get him released. Dr. King, Sr. was impressed enough with that gesture to vote for Kennedy.
In the decades since the mid ’60’s, with the rise of the Great Society legislation and the hideous growth of the Federal and State governments, the welfare industry in America has developed into a bloated monster. There are by now, more than a few million federal and state employees whose jobs depend on keeping black people on the Federal plantation.
But “Emancipation Revelation/Revolution” is a powerful reality check, and could begin a quiet revolution in the black community. It would appear that any black person who watches this dynamic documentary is going to have to ask himself or herself this question:
“Why should black Americans continue to blindly support the party that has historically always opposed civil rights legislation?
For further information, contact Nina May @ the Renaissance Foundation web site.
Copyright, 2005, Rev. Peter J. Marshall. All rights reserved.
Anyone wishing information about Mr. Marshall’s availability to preach or speak at your church or event, or donating to the ministry, or purchasing any of the products in the store, is invited to visit and explore his web site. The address is: PeterMarshallMinistries.com