The racist antics of Virginia governor Ralph Northam ought not to surprise anyone.  The Democratic Party has long been marinated in racist thinking.  Today, most of that racism is irrational hatred of white people and the denial of white people through such policies that the Nazis practiced — racial quotas — in the name of that moronic and repulsive goal "social justice," which is to say injustice; all justice is individual.

The Democratic Party was even more deeply committed to racism against blacks, and the Ku Klux Klan was simply the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party, which drove Republicans out of the South and compelled blacks to join the Democratic Party, where they were denied the right to vote in primaries or participate in caucuses to choose the Democrat nominee for offices.

Blacks who gave in to this terrorism and became Democrats were said by disgusted black women to be "crossing the Jordan" and were referred to as "Uncle Tom," which is how that derogatory name from Uncle Tom's Cabin entered the American political lexicon.

The Ku Klux Klan did more than just terrorize Republicans.  The Klan was a strong supporter of public schools and a passionate advocate of creating a federal department of education with Cabinet-level status.  The Ku Klux Klan also touted itself in many parts of the nation as "progressive" and opposed big business.

The infestation of Klan members in the Democratic Party — an utterly forgotten story — includes not just nebbishes like Northam, but Democrat icons.  Woodrow Wilson, though not a Klan member himself, re-segregated the federal civil service.  He showed the Klan celebratory film, The Birth of a Nation, in the White House and commented that so much of what was in the film was so true.

FDR won the Democrat presidential nomination in 1932 when, in the later rounds of voting, all the "Solid South" swung to him.  FDR never desegregated the military or tried to end the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South or supported the civil rights bills that conservative Republicans repeatedly introduced in Congress.  Truman himself applied to join the Ku Klan Klan.

Democrat presidents put several Klansmen on the Supreme Court.  Justice Edward White, who had been a Klansman, was put on the Supreme Court by Grover Cleveland.  FDR put Hugo Black, a leftist icon and also a Klansman, on the Supreme Court.  Harry Truman put Tom Clark, father of the odious radical leftist Ramsay Clark, on the Supreme Court.

Is all this ancient political history?  Recall that the presidency of George W. Bush included West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who had been a high official in the Ku Klux Klan and used the term "white nigger" in a television interview.  Byrd was repeatedly chosen as the Democrat leader in the Senate.

The contrast with the Republican Party is stark. Every single Republican presidential candidate since the Civil War supported equality before the law for blacks and invited blacks to join and to participate in the Republican Party at the local and national levels.  Even after serving terms as president, men like Rutherford B. Hayes devoted the rest of their lives to working to educate blacks in the South.

Thaddeus Stevens, who is attacked in most history books for supporting the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, refused to acknowledge Pennsylvania state law changes that, before the Civil War, denied blacks the vote.  In his will, Stevens asked to be buried in a black-only cemetery.

Republican national conventions long before there was any political gain to be had often had the invocation by black clergymen.  The platforms of these conventions almost invariably called for granting blacks genuine political and civil rights.  Virtually all the black leaders, up to W.E.B. Du Bois, were Republicans (and even the Marxist Du Bois, after supporting Wilson in 1912, declined to do so in 1916).

How, then, did the Ku Klux Krats come to be seen as the champions of blacks?  Because, as they always do, leftists — the Ku Klux Klan is clearly a spawn of the Left — promised them unearned goodies, unmerited advantages, and the appearance of power.  Equality before the law became in fact inequality, forcing colleges and companies to hire relatively unqualified blacks, which both destroyed the value of those institutions in many ways and also insured that interracial hostility continued and worsened.

Can anything be done?  Possibly, but probably not.  All those who crossed the Jordan to become Democrats are too addicted to those destructive narcotics that are the tools of enslavement used by the Left.  That is just what the left and its political vehicle, the Democratic Party, want.

Image: Heath Alseike via Flickr.