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Discussion for article #241671

I don’t recall this in the Ken Burns Roosevelt documentary. Would have made an interesting addition to it, and it wouldn’t have taken very long.

Thanks for this fascinating tidbit! Certainly in those days, at least in the South, the GOP could still be far more credibly supportive of African Americans than the Demo(Dixie)crats.

Historical Republican support by African-Americans isn’t that well-known now. Until candidate John F. Kennedy made a fateful phone call to Martin Luther King Jr. in jail at the time, Martin’s father supported Richard Nixon. JFK being Catholic didn’t help either. Hearing MLK Sr’s support of Nixon, JFK reportedly said: “We all have our fathers.”

Shameful. Haiti had a successful revolt against slavery, and France, and the US, never really accepted it. It is sobering to realize, once again, that our country´s core racism continued, and still continues, decades after Emancipation.

But at least Roosevelt, and some Democrats, learned something from it, and responded to his AA constituents. The Republicans, however, have gone the other direction in the past few decades.