“No Democratic Party”
No Democrat Party. Idiot Republicans keep using that term.
“Robert Byrd was a member of the Klan and a U.S. senator.”
Ed Jackson was a KKK member and Governor of Indiana. Clarence Morley was a KKK member and Governor of Colorado. Both were Republicans. Calvin Coolidge openly sought KKK support in 1924. William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover actively tried to purge the Republican Party of Black’s, particularly in the South, and largely succeeded, in something called the “lily white movement”. Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction and allowed Jim Crow to proceed unabated. Not until 1936 would the Republican Party finally stop the racism, but it instead turned to anti-Semitism in the lead up to World War II. A miracle happened in 1940 when it nominated lifelong Democrat Wendell Willkie for President and endorsed Civil Rights but that ended in 1964 for good. Richard Nixon, who as late as 1960 had a good civil rights record, welcomed the racists into the Republican Party whom the Democrats had expelled. The last good thing a Republican president did for civil rights was when Nixon appointed Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. Powell, an otherwise conservative corporate lawyer, was loved by Virginia civil rights activists. Lewis Powell was a Democrat, the last person to be nominates to the Supreme Court by a President of the opposite Party.
There were exceptions. My great grandfather was a big Republican activist in Kentucky a century ago. He helped to get Edwin Morrow elected Governor in 1919. Morrow got the legislature to enact an anti-lynching law, and he sent the National Guard to Lexington to prevent a lynching. The National Guard opened fire on the lynch mob, killing a number of them. That of course ended Morrow’s political career. 🙁
Republican apologists for their party’s terrible recent civil rights record rarely admit the party’s history. Only from 1940 to 1960 was it superior to the Democrats.