While Democrats derided Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, calling him a racist, Sen. Ted Cruz reminded America that the “Klan was founded by a great many Democrats.”

“The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan,” Cruz (R-Tex.) said in an interview on Fox News on Wednesday. “You look at the most racist. You look at the Dixiecrats; they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats. Now, the Democrats just accuse anyone they disagree with of being a racist”:

.@tedcruz: "Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan." pic.twitter.com/QRm9irQwmd — Fox News (@FoxNews) February 9, 2017

Indeed, Sen. Sessions, President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed U.S. attorney general, faced a ceaseless barrage of personal attacks from left-wing activists and his Democratic colleagues in Congress. Immediately after Trump picked sessions for attorney general, the left launched a concerted campaign to cast the Alabama senator as a bigot unfit to head the Justice Department.

Senator Cruz’s defense of Sessions puts the Democratic party’s pernicious past in the national spotlight.

Cruz accused Democrats of imposing “Jim Crow” laws. Every former Confederate state (including Kentucky, Kansas, Wyoming, Missouri, Ohio, Utah, and Oklahoma) had enacted Jim Crow laws, which prohibited everything from interracial marriage to racially integrated public school systems. While Democrats lost the war to keep blacks in slavery, Jim Crow laws in states in the so-called “Solid South” served to place blacks back on a virtual plantation.

Democrats supported slavery and nearly a hundred years of segregation:

Indeed, the closer one looks across the arc of black history, the more ironic it seems that voters would associate civil rights with the Democratic Party. Founded as the anti-slavery party, the Republican Party was responsible for winning passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the Reconstruction Acts, and the 1866, 1875, 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts. In fact, had Democrats not overturned the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the strikingly similar 1964 Civil Rights Act might never have been necessary.

It is no coincidence that more than a hundred years of history are missing from the Democratic party’s official website.

Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson.