It didn’t come as too big of a surprise when the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida this past weekend. After all, the state’s Republican policymakers, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, have taken a series of steps related to education, voting rights, and diversity programs that moved the Sunshine State in a sharply regressive direction.
A day later, however, Sen. Ted Cruz thought it’d be a good idea to admonish the civil rights organization in a tweet:
“This is bizarre. And utterly dishonest. In the 1950s [and] 1960s, the NAACP did extraordinary good helping lead the civil rights movement. Today, Dr. King would be ashamed of how profoundly they’ve lost their way.”
Yes, the far-right Republican from Texas wants Americans to believe that he knows what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be thinking right now, and the iconic leader of the civil rights movement would be “ashamed” of the NAACP. We’re apparently supposed to take Cruz’s word for it.
Not surprisingly, this generated some pushback from reality-based observers, including historian Kevin Kruse, leading the GOP senator to add that his party has a record to be proud of when it comes to civil rights.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s a point Cruz seems to enjoy periodically emphasizing. Around this time two years ago, for example, the Texan argued that Democrats created Jim Crow. A few years earlier, the senator told Fox News, “The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan.”
About once per year, I like to revisit this thesis, and now seems like as good a time as any to set the record straight.
The Democratic Party, in the first half of the 20th century, was home to two broad, competing constituencies: southern whites with abhorrent and indefensible views on race, and white progressives and African Americans in the north, who sought to advance the cause of civil rights. The party struggled with this conflict for years, before ultimately siding with an inclusive, progressive agenda.
The…
Read the full article here