didn't reject an earlier version of Statue of Liberty that honored slaves For instance, well into the 20th century, the official name of Alabama’s dominant organization was the Democratic and Conservative Party of Alabama.įact check: U.S. A conservative group of politicians known as the Bourbons controlled Southern Democratic parties. The Democratic Party for most of the 19th century was a white supremacist organization that gave no welcome to Black Americans.
Republicans pledged to protect voting rights. African Americans viewed the party as the only vessel for their goals: Frederick Douglass said, “The Republican Party is the ship all else is the sea.”Īnd the sea was perilous.
There were push-and-pull aspects to this. Political parties and a complicated history with raceīlack people who could vote tended to support the Republican Party from the 1860s to about the mid-1930s. “One has to wrap your mind around the fact parties evolve, and they change, and they have points of view and they’re not same in one century as they are in another,” said Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University who is considered the preeminent scholar of the Reconstruction period. By the late 1960s, the national Democratic Party had abandoned its former support for legal segregation and enjoyed strong support from Black voters, while Republicans had embraced a white backlash to voting and civil rights to build their party in the South.įact check: Was GOP founded 'to counter the Democrats’ plans to expand slavery'?įact check: Photo shows Biden with Byrd, who once had ties to KKK, but wasn't a grand wizard Neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties of today are like their 19th century forebearers. “It’s not a big secret.”Ī message seeking comment was sent to Fournier on Wednesday. “This is just front and center in what we teach all the time,” said Kate Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern University who has written extensively about Reconstruction. And the first 23 African Americans in Congress did belong to the Republican Party, due to the GOP's support of voting rights and the Democratic Party’s embrace of white supremacy.īut the idea that Reconstruction-era historians hid those facts – key to understanding the period – is false.
It is mostly accurate that the Republican Party formed to oppose the extension of slavery, although up until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans pledged not to interfere with slavery in states where it existed. “The Republicans were the anti-slavery party.” “You won’t be taught this,” wrote Ryan Fournier, the co-chair of Students for Trump, whose watermark appears on the meme, on his Instagram account. “The first 23 Black congressmen were Republican.” Watch Video: Juneteenth: USA TODAY staff reads Emancipation Proclamation The claim: Historians do not teach that the first Black members of Congress were RepublicansĪ viral meme, posted on Instagram, features a well-known lithograph of the first Black members of Congress, with a bold statement.