The Democratic Party’s History Americans Rarely Hear: From Slavery to Jim Crow

History Doesn't Lie, Democrats Do.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has repeatedly drawn attention to a chapter of American political history that generates heated arguments whenever it appears on social media: the Democratic Party's historical association with slavery, segregation and Jim Crow and the Republican Party's origins in the political struggle against the expansion of slavery. Watch: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1640336824548152

Strip away the campaign rhetoric and there is a substantial historical record underneath that argument. The Democratic Party's history includes Southern Democrats' defense of slavery before the Civil War, Democratic political dominance across the post-Reconstruction South and decades of resistance by Southern Democrats to federal civil-rights legislation.

That history deserves to be examined on its own terms.

Democrats, Slavery and the Coming Civil War

The Democratic Party emerged as a national political force during the era of Andrew Jackson. By the middle of the 19th century, slavery had become the issue threatening to tear the country apart, and the Democratic Party contained a powerful Southern faction committed to protecting the institution.

The Republican Party emerged during the 1850s after the collapse of the Whigs. The U.S. Senate's own historical account describes the new Republicans as a coalition dedicated to preventing slavery from spreading into America's western territories.

Democrats themselves eventually fractured over slavery. Northern and Southern Democrats could not agree on the issue during the 1860 presidential campaign. Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, while Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge.

Republican Abraham Lincoln won.

Southern states subsequently seceded, the Civil War began, and Lincoln ultimately issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The 13th Amendment permanently abolished slavery in the United States in 1865.

Republicans and the Reconstruction Amendments

The constitutional transformation didn't end with abolition. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, established citizenship and constitutional equal protection, while the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited denying voting rights on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

The Republican-controlled federal government also confronted organized racial terrorism during Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations terrorized Black Americans for voting, seeking office and exercising their newly recognized constitutional rights.

Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, sometimes called the Force Acts. Those laws gave the federal government greater authority to prosecute interference with constitutional rights and empowered the president to use federal power against organized racial violence.

The political divisions of the era were stark. Republicans generally supported Reconstruction and federal protection of the rights of formerly enslaved Americans, while white Southern Democrats fought Republican Reconstruction governments and eventually reestablished political control throughout most of the former Confederacy.

The Democratic “Solid South”

After Reconstruction collapsed, Democrats came to dominate Southern politics so completely that the region became known as the Solid South.

That dominance lasted for generations.

Southern governments erected the system Americans remember as Jim Crow. Segregation separated Americans by race in schools, transportation, restaurants, public facilities and numerous other areas of everyday life. Poll taxes, literacy tests and other mechanisms were used to prevent Black Americans from exercising voting rights supposedly guaranteed by the 15th Amendment.

These policies weren't abstractions. They were enforced through state and local governments and reinforced by intimidation and violence.

The Democratic Party's historic Southern establishment was an integral part of that political system.

The Long Battle Over Civil Rights

Congress repeatedly struggled with civil-rights legislation during the decades that followed. By the 1960s, the confrontation culminated in one of the most consequential legislative battles in American history: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The legislation was proposed under Democratic President John F. Kennedy and aggressively championed after Kennedy's assassination by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.

But some of its most determined congressional opponents were also Democrats.

The National Archives records that Southern Democratic senators attempted to kill the legislation through a filibuster. The Senate debate continued for 60 days, making it one of the longest continuous debates in Senate history.

Among the opponents was Democratic Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, leader of the Southern bloc. Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia delivered an overnight speech against the bill lasting more than 14 hours.

The Democratic label therefore appeared on both sides of one of America's defining civil-rights battles. But the Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, made the news stick. He was the key to the progress and he was Repblican and former Republican Governor of California.

Republicans Help Break the Filibuster

Republican votes became indispensable to overcoming the Senate filibuster.

Democratic Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey worked with Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who helped negotiate language capable of attracting enough Republican support to invoke cloture.

The numbers are worth remembering.

When the Senate finally voted to end the filibuster on June 10, 1964, 27 Republicans and 44 Democrats voted for cloture, while six Republicans and 23 Democrats voted against it.

That bipartisan coalition broke the filibuster.

The Senate subsequently passed the Civil Rights Act 73-27, and President Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964.

So it would be historically inaccurate to say Democrats uniformly opposed the Civil Rights Act. Democratic presidents Kennedy, whose nephew is in the Trump Cabinet, and Johnson championed it, and many congressional

Democrats supported it. But for the entire history of the Democrat party they have been based on racial discrimination.

But it is equally inaccurate to erase the role of the powerful Southern Democratic bloc that fought it.

The Voting Rights Battle Continued

The following year brought the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to confront racial barriers that continued preventing Black Americans from voting.

Again, Congress faced a filibuster.

The Senate ultimately invoked cloture 70-30 and passed the Voting Rights Act 77-19. President Johnson signed it into law on Aug. 6, 1965.

The legislation attacked practices that had allowed supposedly constitutional voting rights to remain largely meaningless for generations of Black citizens in portions of the South.

History Shouldn't Be Selectively Remembered

The Democratic Party's historical record contains chapters that deserve considerably more attention than they sometimes receive.

Its powerful Southern wing defended slavery before the Civil War. Democrats dominated much of the post-Reconstruction South. Democratic-controlled Southern governments maintained Jim Crow segregation and voter suppression, and Southern Democratic senators played a central role in fighting federal civil-rights legislation well into the 20th century.

Republicans, meanwhile, can point to the creation of their party in opposition to slavery's expansion, Abraham Lincoln and emancipation, the Reconstruction Amendments, federal action against the Ku Klux Klan and substantial Republican support that proved essential to breaking the 1964 civil-rights filibuster.

But historical accuracy requires one qualification that shouldn't be omitted merely because it complicates the story: Democrats also played indispensable roles in dismantling that system. Kennedy proposed the landmark 1964 legislation, Johnson pushed it through Congress and signed it, Hubert Humphrey helped manage the Senate battle, and 44 Democratic senators joined 27 Republicans in breaking the filibuster.

That isn't an argument for either political party today. It is the congressional record.

Americans should be able to confront the ugly portions of political history without rewriting them and without pretending every member of either party always stood on the same side.

Slavery existed. Jim Crow existed. Black Americans were systematically deprived of constitutional rights. Southern Democratic political machines played an enormous role in that history, and Republicans played an enormous role in Reconstruction and the fight for federal civil-rights protections. Those facts belong in America's history books regardless of whose modern political narrative they complicate.

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