Investors Business Daily
Article Title: "Lynch Mob "
Section: Issues & Insights  
Date: 6/22/2005  
 
 
There's a certain irony in this apology coming so soon after the Democrats engineered a deal to preserve the hallowed Senate tradition known as the filibuster to protect the rights of the Senate minority. It was the use of the filibuster by Democrats that prevented anti-lynching legislation from passing the Senate and helping protect the rights of black Americans.

As the Senate resolution duly notes, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills, backed by seven presidents, were introduced in Congress during the first half of 20th century, with the House passing such bills three times. As far back as 1938, 70 senators were willing to sponsor an anti-lynching bill. Yet each of those three times, it was the use of the filibuster by Southern Democrats that caused the bills to fail.

When important civil rights legislation needed passing, it was Republicans who got it done while Democrats filibustered. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 would never have been possible without Republican leadership.

That legislation was not only a personal victory for Illinois Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, then minority leader, but Republicans in both the House and Senate, who supported the measure in far greater percentages than Democrats. Only six GOP senators voted against the act, compared with 21 Democrats.

Sen. Robert Byrd, who in a new book says his past as an Exalted Cyclops of the Klu Klux Klan was "due to immaturity," led a 52-day filibuster against this legislation. Byrd holds the distinction of being the only senator to have opposed both of the only two black nominees to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.

In Byrd's 770-page memoir, it is amazing he could leave anything out, but he did, with even The Washington Post saying Byrd's account of his KKK activity "is not complete." One of the things he left out was a 1945 letter he wrote to the infamous racist Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo saying he would never fight "with a Negro by my side."

Sen. Al Gore, father of the former vice president, voted against the act, as did Sen. J. William Fulbright, to whom Bill Clinton recently dedicated a memorial. Other opponents included South Carolina Democrat Ernest Hollings, Sen. Richard Russell and, of course, Sen. Strom Thurmond, who was a Democrat at the time.

In 2002, Bill Clinton traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., to honor the life of Fulbright by dedicating a seven-foot-tall bronze statue of the man. In 1956, Fulbright was one of 19 senators who issued a statement titled the "Southern Manifesto." This screed condemned the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

We forget that it was Democrats who unleashed the dogs and turned fire hoses against civil rights marchers. It was Democrats who stood in the schoolhouse door and are still there by opposing school choice and trapping minority children in failing schools.

It was Republican welfare reform that ended a Democrat welfare plantation that devastated black families by encouraging fathers to leave the home and rewarding mothers for having illegitimate babies, a policy that left a legacy of poverty and crime.

As long as apologies are in vogue, maybe somebody owes the GOP an apology as well.   

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