Bucknam: Black Americans belong in the GOP

By Deborah Bucknam

It is time for black Americans to abandon the Democrat Party and come home to the Republican Party, the party of their forebears.

Freedom has been the guiding star for both Republicans and black Americans from the beginning. Republicans fought and died to free American slaves, while Democrats fought to keep blacks in bondage. The first Republican President, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, died by a Democrat assassin’s bullet. And Republicans, over the vociferous opposition of Democrats, passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, giving black Americans the right to citizenship, to vote, and to their God given rights under the our Bill of Rights.

Public domain

An African American family with their new Oldsmobile. Washington, D.C., April 1955

The Democrat Party has been anti-black from its beginning. The ghastly practices of slavery, then after the Civil War, Black Codes, lynching, Jim Crow, KKK and segregation were all policies and practices of America’s Democrat Party alone. Worse, they weren’t practices that lasted a little over a decade, like the Third Reich, or even 50 years, like South Africa’s apartheid. Racist policies and practices of the Democrat Party lasted, in one form or another, over 165 years.

The Democrat Party of today has never acknowledged, let alone atoned for, that appalling legacy, even while denouncing others as racist. You have to admire the chutzpah of the Democrat party, with its shameful history, which hears “dog whistle” racism in the most innocent speech of its opponents. As late as 2010 former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Democrat Robert Byrd held the title of President Pro Tempore in U.S. Senate and was eulogized at his funeral by the Democrat President, Vice President and former President of the United States. Even now, the United States Senate Office Building is named after white supremacist Democrat Senator Richard Russell.

More importantly, current Democrat Party policies continue to undermine blacks by placing all African Americans in a box labeled “victim.” The effect has been to actually victimize black Americans by enacting welfare programs that have decimated black families. While the marriage rate among African Americans before the 1960’s was higher than white Americans, now 60 percent of black children live in single parent households, with well documented despair, debilitation and poverty resulting.

American cities ruled by Democrats have become dangerous netherworlds for black Americans, with black kids terrorized by violence in school and on the streets. The city of Chicago has been governed by Democrats for more than 80 years. Today, 49 out of 50 Chicago city council members are Democrats. Yet black Americans are being murdered in that city at a rate far greater than the homicide rates in Iraq, Afghanistan, or most countries in Africa.

On the other hand, the Republican Party today is a natural fit for black Americans. While “black lives matter” has turned out to be merely a Democrat talking point, Republicans have actually demonstrated that black lives do matter to them. Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani instituted a policing program which dramatically reduced black on black crime and saved thousands of black lives in the process. Under President Trump, African American unemployment is at a record low. Perhaps most tellingly, the President’s dramatic school choice initiatives that support black families’ yearnings for a better education for their children are opposed overwhelmingly by Democrats.

So, it’s past time for black Americans to re-evaluate their self-defeating allegiance to the Democrat party. And it’s past time for the Republican Party to aggressively court black Americans back to the Republican Party, to which their ancestors belonged in overwhelming numbers for over 80 years. Such a shift would be beneficial for black Americans, the Republican Party, and the country.

Deborah Bucknam is a St. Johnsbury-based attorney and former Republican candidate for state attorney general.

Image courtesy of Public domain

4 thoughts on “Bucknam: Black Americans belong in the GOP

  1. I was shocked to read a letter by Martin Luther King in the Nixon library on a trip in 2005. He was writing to thank Nixon and Eisenhower for trying to push through the 1957 Civil Rights Law. I had never heard of it but what happened was this law never got to a vote in the Democrat controlled Congress. LBJ and JFK blocked the bill, not because they were racists, but because they didn’t want a Republican president to be associated with Civil Rights. Too many blacks were Republicans already.
    It turns out that a Civil Rights bill wasn’t passed until a Democrat was president and enough Republicans were elected in the mid terms to carry the vote. The media never mentioned any of this and only focus on the Republican Senator, Goldberg, who voted against the bill. He said you can’t change people’s hearts through lawmaking, missing the point altogether. It wasn’t hearts that needed to be changed, it was the behavior of one group toward another.

  2. Excellent, excellent article. Far from the democrats ever apologizing for their appalling, destructive treatment of blacks, they actually want them to believe it was Republicans who perpetrated this tragedy. Recall Uncle Joe Biden saying Republicans want to “put y’all back in chains.” Democrats lie shamelessly to keep control over blacks and to keep them voting democrat. Chicago is by far the best example of how democrats now treat blacks. They couldn’t care less about the advancement and success of the black community. They just want the votes. How anyone can vote for a democrat I have no idea.

  3. “All the DemocRATS want is your vote, they’ll promise you anything and everything for it.”

    So true. It seems as though every election cycle, Bernie Saunders comes to Bennington county and offers a free chicken dinner, what a guy! Of course, if the voters are so shallow as to not see through this bribery, then they deserve what they get. Bernie has, throughout his tenure been “a fighter for SS and Veterans.” Anyone can say that. But what has he and others accomplished? The proof is in the pudding.

  4. Bucknam: Black Americans belong in the GOP, they sure do if they want to get out from
    under the DemocRATS holding them down with all the Social Programs and not showing
    them how to achieve any form of success …..We’ll care for you …..Sure !!

    All the DemocRATS want is your vote, they’ll promise you anything and everything for it.

    Jobs are getting plentiful with wages are starting to rise, time to reach for the ” American
    Dream ” and the Dems will not get you there !!

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