"Rather I should die a thousand times … than see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds." - Robert Byrd, Democrat Senator (1959 through 2010) and founder of the Sophia, West Virginia chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (150 members)

“I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes.” – Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, 1961 “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness” - Lyndon B. Johnson (1963) “I’ll have those n**gers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” - Lyndon B. Johnson confiding in two governors why the passage of his civil rights and welfare legislation was important (1963)

In a recent American Thinker article (The Secret Racist History of the Democratic Party), Kimberly Bloom Jackson made the case that the Democrats were the party of racists. She presents concrete examples from the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is a relatively straightforward case to make and Democrats will usually acknowledge their racist heritage. They insist, however, that the two parties switched places in the 1960s: Democrats are now the champions of African Americans, while Republicans are the racists. This article makes the case that no such switch occurred.

In reality, the underlying racist views of the modern Democratic Party have changed little in the last 200 years, since their founding by Andrew Jackson, celebrated slave owner and Indian fighter. As long as Democrats were able to suppress the black vote, they regarded African Americans as beasts to be suppressed. Once blacks achieved political power in the 1960s (more so through the efforts of Republicans than Democrats), the left decided to treat African Americans with gentleness, sympathy, and understanding -- as pets. In other words, the Democrats simply changed tactics once they recognized that African Americans had achieved political power.

Perhaps there is no clearer indicator that the Democratic Party cannot shake its historic view of African American potential than affirmative action. They refuse to consider replacing race based affirmative action with affirmative action based on socio-economic status. In other words, they insist that colleges lower admission standards for black students from wealthy families as compared to white students from poor families, since the African Americans are (always) “disadvantaged.”

Further signs that, in reality, Democrats continue to hold African Americans in low regard is their venomous attack on blacks that don’t support the liberal cause. Today, Democrat treatment of conservative blacks is reminiscent of their treatment of all blacks before the “great party switch” of the 1960s.

At the heart of nearly all Democrat charges of Republican racism is the GOP’s belief that all people should be judged on individual merit. This is unacceptable to the left, since their obsession with race remains intact. The following examples support the contention that the left has not missed a beat in their 200-year insistence that lower standards must be used to judge blacks. For convenience and specificity, we usually use 1964 (Johnson-Goldwater election) as the point where Democrats claim the two parties switched places.

Blacks and Education

Pre-1964 Democrat: Blacks are violent and exhibit little interest in or aptitude for learning.

Post-1964 Democrat: Correcting people’s bad grammar and punctuation is racist.

Post-1964 Democrat: Standardized tests are inherently flawed and culturally biased. They fail to properly measure student progress or knowledge. The testing is racist.

Post-1964 Democrat: Individual student grades should be banned. A more reasonable approach is for the instructor to evaluate overall class performance when working as a team (2016 White Privilege Conference Talk).

Post-1964 Democrat: Obama Department of Justice mandates school discipline quotas to ensure black students are not punished at rates higher than white students.

Pre-1964 Democrat: Black and white education should be separate and unequal.

Post-1964 Democrat: Black affirmative action college students graduate with degrees in African-American Studies, as taught by African American professors. White students graduate with degrees in business and Asians graduate with degrees in engineering. All have separate but equal student debts of $200,000. All have separate but unequal job prospects.

Blacks and Voting

Pre-1964 Democrat: African Americans are denied the opportunity to run for political office and even denied the right to vote.

Post-1964 Democrat: Blacks were not racist when 95% of them voted for Obama, but whites were racist because 55% of them supported McCain.

Pre-1964 Democrat: Blacks lack the intellect and wherewithal to vote.

Post-1964 Democrat: Blacks lack the intellect and wherewithal to get voter ID

Post-1964 Democrat: The only real blacks are the ones who vote Democrat (i.e. African Americans lack the intellect to understand issues such as school choice and the suppression of wages due to open border policies). The DNC invests heavily to defeat all conservative black politicians (e.g. Allen West and Mia Love) and then blames Republicans for their lack of diversity in Congress.

Blacks and Crime

Pre-1964 Democrat: Blacks are inherently violent and lack impulse control

Post-1964 Democrat: It is racist to blame African Americans for riots, looting, arson, flash mobs, the knock out game, or any other criminal act that Democrats attribute to the historic oppression of blacks.

Pre-1964 Democrat reporters and journalists: Black on white crime, especially rape, is placed on page 1, above the fold.

Post-1964 Democrat reporters and journalists: It is racist to disclose the race of a criminal unless the criminal is white (or a “white Hispanic”). Cases involving black victims and white criminals warrant extended and prominent coverage

Pre-1964 Democrat: Blacks are denied gun ownership

Post-1964 Democrat: The most restrictive gun ownership laws are in areas with the highest concentration of African Americans

Post-1964 Democrat: Crime is blamed on guns rather than criminal behavior, since blacks don’t know right from wrong (The problem is always called “gun violence” rather than criminal violence).

Blacks and Eugenics

Progressive Democrats in the early 20th Century: Mandatory sterilization of people with low intelligence and low moral character (“Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough”)

Post-1970s Democrat: The highest concentration of Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics (operated and run mostly by Democrats) are located in poor black neighborhoods

Black and White Organizations

Pre-1964 Democrat: The Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, poll taxes, impediments to black education, and an occasional lynching are appropriate tools to keep blacks in their place.

Post-1964 Democrat: All white advocacy groups are, by definition, white-supremacist groups. Organizations that don’t explicitly exclude blacks, but are overwhelmingly white, such as the Boy Scouts of America and the Republican Party, are racist. Whites, in fact, are the only racial group in the western world forbidden to form exclusive groups, even in cases where they are a regional minority. Blacks are encouraged to establish and promote black advocacy organizations and even black pride groups.

The Democratic Party continues to set low standards for all African Americans, but now in exchange for their votes.