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GOP group's campaign ad says Democrats started KKK

POSTED: 6:52 p.m. EDT, September 21, 2006


"10/21/2006";ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers.

Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the black Republican nominee for Maryland's open Senate seat, disavowed the ad Thursday as "insulting to Marylanders." He said his campaign asked the Washington-based National Black Republican Association to stop running it.
At an event in Baltimore, Steele said, "I don't know exactly what the intent of the ad was" but that "it's not helpful to the public discourse."
The ad does not mention Steele or his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ben Cardin.
The association's president, Frances Rice, did not return calls for comment. The group, founded a year ago, promotes the Republicans to black voters.
The spot begins with one woman telling another, "Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican."
Steve Klein, a senior researcher with the Atlanta-based King Center, said Thursday that King never endorsed candidates from either party.
"I think it's highly inaccurate to say he was a Republican because there's really no evidence," Klein said.
A King biographer, Taylor Branch, also said Thursday that King was nonpartisan.
In the ad, the woman goes on to say, "Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan." Her companion replies, "The Klan? White hoods and sheets?"
The KKK, never a political party, was a racist group of white men that started in the South after the Civil War, when Republicans were almost unheard of in former Confederate states. The mainstream Democratic Party never endorsed the Klan nor claimed to have founded it.
The first woman also says, "Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks."
The ad asserts that "Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat" and "Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent's consent and suing the Boy Scouts for saying 'God' in their pledge."
About the Republicans, the ad says: "Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution."
The group running the ads describes itself on its Web site as "a resource for the black community on Republican ideals." It does not say how many members it has.
Race is a prominent theme in the Maryland race for the seat held by retiring Democrat Paul Sarbanes. Steele, the first black candidate elected statewide in Maryland, faces a white Democrat in a heavily Democratic state with the highest percentage of black residents -- 29 percent -- of any state outside the South.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press /////////////

Let the carnival continue :hihi:

Seems to be more fact than fiction.

Democratic Senetor Robert Byrd was in the KKK.

Anyone want to wager today where most of the racial bigotry in this county doth lie?

The ad and both your responses are pathetic.

Snipr, the crib price just went up 2 dollars :hee:

-spence

That was then.... what about now?

no room for those a$$h__es then or now.

Actually, for the last third of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, membership in the Klan was almost a prerequisite to win local political office in the South. It was like belonging to the Rotary Club. Belonging to it didn't mean you went out and lynched people.

Ironically, when I was living in NY, there was a big brouhaha involving a local volunteer FD, in a town with a very large percentage of black and Latino residents, that had a trophy donated by the local Klan chapter in it's trophy case. The trophy was awarded back in the 1920s. This was on Long Island. Imagine how it was in the South. The Klan was actually considered to be a civic minded organization.

It's also a historical fact that the Republican party was founded by abolitionists in the 1850s, and the elimination of slavery was one of their issues. Unfortunately, it's also a historical fact that Lincoln himself was probably as bigoted as old Jeff Davis. He supported the elimination of slavery, but his hope was that after emancipation, most blacks would return to Africa.

The anti-semitism and racism that was displayed during the recent Israel / Hezbollah war left no doubt in my mind as to who is the most racist, hateful faction in America.

Who?


please