Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) father said that African Americans “need to be educated” about Democrats, adding that “the average black does not” know that the minimum wage is bad.

Rafael Cruz, the junior senator from Texas’s father, made the comments at the Western Williamson Republican Club’s August meeting on Aug. 21. The comments were highlighted by Buzzfeed on Tuesday. The event was advertised as the elder Cruz speaking “passionately on what can be done to return our nation to the principles that made America exceptional.”

“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that Civil Rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,'” Cruz said. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”

Democrats actually controlled the Senate when the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed the chamber. Cruz might be referring to the bloc of Southern Democrats that opposed the Civil Rights Act.

Cruz went on to tout Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed by Jason Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board who is African-American. Riley, Cruz said, talks about how “all the handouts to blacks have kept blacks in the poorhouse.”

“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”

Watch video of the elder Cruz here.