Political angle missing from stories on KKK documentary

Is it just me, or did anyone else notice something missing from the stories in the Salisbury Post concerning racism and the KKK on Sunday?

Let’s go back. The 1915 movie “Birth of a Nation” portrayed blacks rampantly raping white women, and the KKK riding in to save the day. President Woodrow Wilson (a Democrat) watched this movie in the White House and was quoted as saying “my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”  This movie helped fuel the re-emergence of the KKK during the 1920s, which had pretty much died out completely. Around this same time, the Republican-led “Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill” was passed in the House of Representatives, but was blocked by Senate Democrats.

This same Democrat (Woodrow Wilson) locked up German-Americans in internment camps during WWI, much like Franklin Roosevelt (the next Democrat to become president after Wilson) did to Japanese-Americans during WWII. Roosevelt also refused to support Republicans’ anti-lynching legislation.

Democrat Harry Truman was once a member of the KKK. The Jim Crow laws came from Democrats. It was the actions of a Democrat, Governor Faubus of Arkansas, that forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower (a Republican) to use troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock in 1957. It was Democrats who officially condemned Brown vs Board of Education. It was Democrats who cast most of the “nay” votes to both the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts. It was Democrats who brought about the re-emergence of the KKK in the 1950s.

In 2007, the largest fundraiser of the year for North Carolina State Democrats, the Vance-Aycock Dinner, had to consider changing its name, because of Aycock’s ties to white supremacists.

— Steve Pender

Rockwell

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