Republican is the Party of Civil Rights and Social Justice. Democrat is the Party of Racism, Slavery, and Enslavement [SHORT VERSION]

This is a list of facts.  They are a matter of record; specifically the Congressional Record, speeches, writings, the work of historians, etc.  It is presented in roughly chronological order.  Sources are listed at the end of this post. You’re invited to check all of them. 

1. Number of slaves owned in 1860
   
   1. By Republicans: Zero
   2. By Democrats: All of them
2. The First Civil Rights Revolution
   1. The Thirteenth Amendment
      1. ending slavery
      2. passed with 100% Republican support and 23% Democratic support.
      3. in 1864 (Senate) and early 1865 (House)
   2. The Fourteenth Amendment
      1. overturning Dred Scott (which said “separate but equal” was Constitutional) and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks
      2. passed with exclusive Republican support and 0% Democratic support.
      3. in 1866
   3. The Fifteenth Amendment
      1. granting suffrage – the right to vote – to blacks
      2. All “Yes” votes came from Republicans. A few Republican Senators abstained because they wanted the amendment to go further than it did.
      3. All “No” votes came from Democrats.
      4. passed in 1868
   4. The Civil Rights Act of 1866,
      1. guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks.
      2. Passed by Republicans,
      3. Vetoed by Democratic President Johnson.
         1. “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am President, it shall be government of white men.” – President Andrew Johnson
      4. Republicans overrode Johnson’s veto.
   5. Reconstruction Act of 1867
      1. Aimed at rebuilding the South on a new plane of equality of rights between the races
      2. Passed by Republicans
      3. Aimed at rebuilding the South on a new plane of equality of rights between the races
      4. Established
         1. the Freedman’s Bureau.
         2. A reparations bill
   6. Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, aka the Force Bill
      1. Restricted northern Democratic inflows of money and weapons to the Klan
      2. Empowered federal officials to crack down on Klan’s organized violence
      3. Implemented by military governors appointed by Grant
      4. Passed by Republicans
      5. Signed by Republican President Ulysses Grant
   7. The Nineteenth Amendment
      1. Republicans proposed women’s suffrage as early as 1878, it was voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress
      2. Republicans re-introduced it the issue each year but for many years Democrats tied it up in committees.
      3. It got to the floor in 1887, Democrats defeated it.
      4. Frustrated the suffagettes – who were mostly Republican – took the issue to the states
         1. By 1900 several Republican-dominated states granted women the right to vote
         2. In 1916 Montanna Republican Jeannette Ranking became the first woman elected to Congress
      5. Congress took up the issue again in 1914, when it was again rejected by Senate Democrats.
      6. Only when the GOP won landslide majorities in both houses in 1918 did the Nineteenth Amendment finally have the necessary two-thirds majority to pass
      7. The Democrats took their opposition to the states
      8. Eight of the nine “no” votes on the Nineteenth Amendment came from Democrat-controlled state legislatures.
3. The Second Civil Rights Revolution
   1. Brown v Board of Education
      1. Ending school segregation
   2. Civil Rights Act of 1964
      1. Guaranteed blacks, women and other minorities the right not to be discriminated against in jobs and government contracts
      2. passed the House with
         1. 63 percent of Democrats and
         2. 80 percent of Republicans voting “yes.”
      3. Passed the Senate with
         1. 69 percent of Democrats and
         2. 94 percent of Republicans voted “yes.”
   3. Fair Housing Bill of 1968
      1. Extended the antidiscrimination provisions of the CRA of 1964 to housing.
   4. The Voting Rights Act of 1965
      1. guaranteed to blacks and other minorities full enfranchisement
      2. passed the House 333-85,
         1. No votes
            1. 61 Democrats
            2. 24 Republicans
      3. It passed the Senate with
         1. 73 percent of Democrats and
         2. 94 percent of Republicans.
   5. Had Republicans voted in the same proportion as Democrats the laws would not have passed.
   6. Where did these rights come from?
      1. Desegregation and anti-discrimination laws both relied on the notion that blacks weren’t slaves any longer; rather, they were free and could make their own choices. This freedom had been secured for blacks by the Thirteenth Amendment which permanently abolished slavery.
      2. The desegregation court rulings and the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Bill were also based on the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment
      3. The Voting Rights Act attempted to secure for blacks full enfranchisement, the right to vote. The right was specified in the Fifteenth Amendment. This amendment declared that, as citizens, blacks had the same prerogative to cast their ballots as whites and all others. The 1965 Voting Rights Act merely sought to enforce an equality provision that had been constitutionally affirmed much earlier.
      4. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. They were passed by the Republican Party.
4. The ACTUAL “Big Switch” Part 1:
   1. Black votes during the New Deal era moved steadily toward the Democratic Party, in a sense selling their votes for a mess of pottage.
      1. From 1865 to 1933 approximately 90 percent of blacks voted Republican
      2. By 1936, 75 percent of blacks became Democrats
      3. This tend has only continued since then, so that today around 90 percent of blacks vote Democratic and only 10 percent vote Republican
   2. The black vote switched from Republican to Democrat mostly during a period of four years during the 1930s.
   3. Democrats could scarcely believe their good fortune. They found that they could continue to exclude, exploit, and subjugate blacks, and still get the black vote. Democratic strategists at the time expressed their amazement and delight that blacks votes came so cheap. In subsequent decades, progressive Democrats recognized that they could secure a virtually permanent hold on the black vote by creating plantation-style dependency on the state.
5. The ACTUAL “Big Switch,” Part 2:
   1. The south became more Republican over a period of decades during the 1950s and 1960s as it gradually became less racist
      1. As the South became more prosperous economically during the 190s and 1960s, the racist appeal lost its currency and white southern Democrats realized that they had more in common with the Republican Party. The identified with the GOP idea of controlling your own destiny and improving your own life.
      2. In a remarkable book, The End of Southern Exceptionalism, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston make the case that white southerners switched to the Republican Party not because of racism but because they identified the GOP with economic opportunity and upward mobility. As the agrarian South became more industrial and then post-industrial, white southerners switched parties not because of race but because of economic prospects. Interestingly, whites moved to the Republican Party for the same reason blacks moved to the Democratic Party: both groups saw the journey as congruent with their economic self-interest.
      3. Shafer and Johnston show how Democrats tried, and failed, to keep southern whites in the fold by appealing to racism. Southern whites, however, migrated to the GOP as the party that better represented their interests and aspirations. Shafer and Johnston supply reams of data to substantiate their claim that the poorest, most racist whites remained Democratic, while more prosperous whites who were not racist were more likely to become Republicans. To the horror of the Democratic Party, the South moved in the Republican direction as white southerners embraced the GOP as the non-racist party of economic opportunity and patriotism. 21
   2. Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy” never happened.
      1. Progressives who cannot refute this history—facts are stubborn things—nevertheless create the fantasy of a Nixon “Southern strategy” that supposedly explains how Republicans cynically appealed to racism in order to convert southern Democrats into Republicans. In reality Nixon had no such strategy—as we have seen, it was Lyndon Johnson who had a southern strategy to keep blacks from defecting to the Republican Party. Johnson, not Nixon, was the true racist, a fact that progressive historiography has gone to great lengths to disguise.
      2. Nixon’s political strategy in the 1968 campaign is laid out in Kevin Phillips’s classic work The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips writes that the Nixon campaign knew it could never win the presidency through any kind of racist appeal. Such an appeal, even if it won some converts in some parts of the Lower South, would completely ruin Nixon’s prospects in the rest of the country. Nixon’s best bet was to appeal to the rising middle classes of the Upper South on the basis of prosperity and economic opportunity. 22 This is exactly what Nixon did.
      3. There are no statements by Nixon that even remotely suggest he appealed to racism in the 1968 or 1972 campaigns. Nixon never displayed the hateful, condescending view of blacks that Johnson did. The racist vote in 1968 didn’t go to Nixon; it went to George Wallace. A longtime Democratic segregationist, Wallace campaigned that year on an independent ticket. Nixon won the election but Wallace carried the Deep South states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
      4. Nixon supported expanded civil rights for blacks throughout his career while Johnson was—for the cynical reasons given above—a late convert to the cause. Nixon went far beyond Johnson in this area; in fact, Nixon implemented America’s first affirmative action program which involved the government forcing racist unions in Philadelphia to hire blacks.
6. To sum up,
   1. Starting in the 1930s and continuing to the present, progressive Democrats developed a new solution to the problem of what they saw as useless people. In the antebellum era, useless people from the Democratic point of view were mainly employed as slaves. In the postbellum period, southern Democrats repressed, segregated, and subjugated useless people, seeking to prevent them from challenging white supremacy or voting Republican. Meanwhile, northern progressives like Margaret Sanger sought to prevent useless people from being born. Today’s progressives, building on the legacy of Wilson, FDR, and Johnson, have figured out what to do with useless people: turn them into Democratic voters.

This list of basic facts of American history in roughly chronological order is culled from Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, by Dinesh D’Souza.  The facts are either quoted directly from the book or paraphrased for clarity.  The original sources (e.g., Congressional voting Record, speeches, writings, the work of historians, or original records) for this material are provided in the book, and online here.  You’re invited to check any/all of them.