Title: Clinton: Robert Byrd Joined KKK To Get Elected Source:
You Tube URL Source:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MfhvCTPflA&feature=related Published:Mar 18, 2011 Author:Justhart23 Post Date:2011-03-18 23:04:28 by CZ82 Keywords:None Views:7433 Comments:16
The point is the inherent racism present in the Democrat Party, not who's shilling for votes.........
Nice try. Nixon invited the racist wing of the Democratic party into the Republican party as part of his Southern Strategy. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond switched parties from Democrat to Republican in 1964. Thurmond ran for president in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) candidate.
Harry S. Truman was 33rd President of the United States from 1945 to 1953, and was from Missouri.
In 1924, Harry S. Truman was a judge in Jackson County, Missouri, which includes Kansas City. Truman was up for reelection, and his friends Edgar Hinde and Spencer Salisbury advised him to join the Klan. The Klan was politically powerful in Jackson County, and two of Truman's opponents in the Democratic primary had Klan support. Truman refused at first, but paid the Klan's $10 membership fee, and a meeting with a Klan officer was arranged.[2]
According to Salisbury's version of the story, Truman was inducted, but afterward “was never active; he was just a member who wouldn't do anything”. Salisbury, however, became Truman's bitter enemy in later years, so this version is suspect.[3]
According to Hinde and Truman's accounts, the Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics or Jews if he was reelected. Truman refused, and demanded the return of his $10 membership fee; most of the men he had commanded in World War I had been local Irish Catholics.[4]
Truman had at least one other strong reason to object to the anti-Catholic requirement, which was that the Catholic Pendergast family, which operated a political machine in Jackson County, were his patrons; Pendergast family lore has it that Truman was originally accepted for patronage without even meeting him, on the basis of his family background plus the requirement that he was not a member of any anti-Catholic organization such as the Klan.[5] The Pendergast faction of the Democratic Party was known as the “Goats”, as opposed to the rival Shannon machine's “Rabbits”. The battle lines were drawn when Truman put only Goats on the county payroll,[6] and the Klan began encouraging voters to support Protestant, “100% American” candidates, which was anathema to the Catholic Pendergasts. The Klan allied itself against Truman and with the Rabbits, and Shannon instructed his people to vote Republican in the election, which Truman lost.[7] Truman later claimed that the Klan “threatened to kill me, and I went out to one of their meetings and dared them to try”, speculating that if Truman's armed friends had shown up earlier, violence might have resulted. However, biographer Alonzo Hamby believes that this story, which is not supported by any recorded facts, was a confabulation based on a meeting with a hostile and menacing group of Democrats that contained many Klansmen, showing Truman's “Walter Mitty-like tendency […] to rewrite his personal history”.[8] Sympathetic observers see Truman's flirtation with the Klan as a momentary aberration and point out that his close friend and business partner Eddie Jacobson was Jewish, and assert that in later years, Truman's presidency marked the first significant improvement in the federal government's record on civil rights since the post-Reconstruction nadir marked by the Wilson administration.[9] It is also possible to interpret it as a young politician's opportunistic attempt to get ahead. The incident was clearly entwined with the intricacies of machine politics, and may also be seen as an indication of Truman's long evolution in his outlook on race relations.
Robert Byrd Senator Robert Byrd was a Kleagle, a Klan recruiter, in his 20s and 30s.
West Virginia's Democratic United States Senator Robert C. Byrd was a recruiter for the Klan while in his 20s and 30s, rising to the title of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops of his local chapter. After leaving the group, Byrd spoke in favor of the Klan during his early political career. Though he claimed to have left the organization in 1943, Byrd wrote a letter in 1946 to the group's Imperial Wizard stating "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia." Byrd defended the Klan in his 1958 U.S. Senate campaign when he was 41 years old.[10]
Despite being the only Senator to vote against both African American U.S. Supreme Court nominees (liberal Thurgood Marshall and conservative Clarence Thomas) and filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Byrd has since said joining the Klan was his "greatest mistake." The NAACP gave him a 100% rating on their issues during the 108th Congress.[11] However, in a 2001 incident Byrd repeatedly used the phrase "white niggers" on a national television broadcast.
[edit] Edward Douglass White Chief Justice Edward Douglass White allegedly admitted to having been a member of the Klan.
Wyn Craig Wade has asserted that Edward Douglass White, the Chief Justice of the United States from 1910 to 1921, told Thomas Dixon "I was a member of the Klan" at the 1915 White House screening of The Birth of a Nation.[13] No evidence has been found that corroborates his alleged admission. White, in any event, never joined the second KKK
Harry S. Truman was 33rd President of the United States from 1945 to 1953
That qualifies as 2 generations ago. Modern era people know what is what and vote accordingly. I mean all this Dems were once racists talk has been around since Nixon (it was used to mask bringing in the very same racists as part of the Southern Strategy) and it has not worked on blacks to convince them to vote Republican yet. It makes racists in the GOP feel like they are actually the good non-racist party though.....
