Watching political history unfold and sanitized in the Black community E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot September 20, 2014  Just when you think you have heard it all about why Blacks vote Democrat, a new theory turns up: Republicans' opposition to the Voter Registration Act of 1965 and matters emanating from it!  Before this, the justification was that Blacks had reacted against the Republican party because of Barry Goldwater, their presidential candidate for 1964, who together with Southern Democrats, had voted against the Civil Rights Bill of that year.  Southern Democrats, in the lexicon of revisionists these days, are always described as Southern Conservatives.  There was nothing like that in the lexicon of Jim Crow's history.  But now there it is to provide the perfect hook to pull Republicans into the racist bay.  Racist is the word used these days for Democrats to taint Republicans.  As a result, Blacks have been voting overwhelmingly for the Democrats for the past 50 years or more.  On the back of Blacks, Democrats have managed to hold on to political power for decades, as noted by Malcolm X.  In 1965, Malcolm X asked Blacks, “The fact that you threw 80% of your votes behind the Democrats that put the Democrats in the White House…. but …. what do you get out of it?”  The Black vote was to increase to 95% for Democrats as recent as the last presidential election of 2012, understandably that was for Barack Obama.  But the decrease since has been marginal.  And the excuse for the voting disparity remains the same: Republicans were the villains who opposed the Civil Rights Bills.  Not true.  This accusation is just so brazenly untrue.  Worse, it is derogatory to Blacks in its assumptions and assertions.  To think that Black loyalty can shift on a dime, on a perception gained over a mere three months of legislative debate, is to imply a fickle-minded constituency that was willing to go blind in one political eye for nothing. An analysis of what happened in that Civil Rights era would show the Black orthodoxy to be contradictory.  This  bent and willingness to sanitize history to prevent Democrats from ever being called racists shall always be insulting to the political acumen of discerning Blacks.  But this has been the historical stance of Blacks.  So, the Democrat party, the party of Jim Crow, is no longer racist.  Republicans are!  The problem is "The 1964 Civil Rights Act"", this more historic Civil Rights Bill, could not have passed without the majority Republican support vote.  Left for Democrats alone, the Bill would have crashed. But Blacks hardly give Republicans the credit for passing it.  At the signing of the Bill, however, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, had to admit that the passage would not have been possible without the Republican majority vote.    The facts on that historic day were as follows; Eighteen Democrats senators and a lone Republican filibustered the 1964 legislation.  But only Strom Thurmond, the lone Republican, would turn up as the villain for Black politics.  Senator Robert C. Byrd (Democrat) led the filibuster attack.  Senator Richard Russell of Georgia (Democrat) closed the argument in the opposition to the Bill.  The opposition to both the 64 Civil Rights and 65 Voting  Rights Acts was dominated by Democrat names; names whose progenies are prominent in the party’s affairs of today – Albert Gore, Richard Russell, William Fulbright, Robert Byrd, and more.   But the blind eye of Black politics can only see Republicans as the racists.  And even if some Democrats were, they all moved to the Republican side.  Not true!  At least, there were some bi-partisan opposition and support for both two key Bills. The 1965 Voting Registration Act was one of those bills. it was first and jointly proposed at the Senate by then-Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield (Democrat) and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (Republican).  In the House, two committee leaders, William McCulloch (Republican) and Howard W. Smith (Democrat) opposed it and sought to delay or dilute the bill In the end, the Bill was passed in the Senate by a 79-18 vote (Democrats 49-17), (Republicans 30-1) on August 4, 1965.  The Bill had 97% support from Republicans and 65% on the Democrat side.   Democrats had enough vote in Congress to put the Bill in force without Republican support, but didn't. Surprisingly, the moral victory among Blacks for this historic Bill now belongs only to Democrats, as explained by the seismic shift in Black votes to the Democrat party.    In the process, all the good works on the Republican side, from the Civil War years to the signing of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, would be spun to nothing.  Conveniently, the part played by Senator Sam Irvin (Democrat) in opposing the 1964 Act would be forgotten.  Sam Irvin is lionized today. He had been an ardent supporter of the pro-Jim Crow document, the Southern Manifesto, signed in Congress in 1956 by 96 Democrats and Four Republicans.  Richard Russell (Democrat) was on the Southern Manifesto roster too but the Senate Office Building has been named after him. Strom Thurmond had only Trent Lott to speak for him on his 100-year birthday.  For this, Lott (Republican} was driven from his Senate leadership office mostly by Black outcry.  The myth about racist Republicans persists. Mention any electoral reform proposed by them and you would hear the refrain “Republicans want to suppress the Black vote”!  Requiring voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot in an election is now racist.  And true enough; opposition to the “photo id” requirement approach had since scored some legal victories in several states.  But whose rights are being protected – the law-abiding Black citizen, the illegal alien from across the border, or the electoral fraudster within the state? But the funny part is how much of the Black vote can be suppressed since Democrats already own 90% of that legal vote!  Meanwhile, Black political power is being suppressed by others who also vote Democrat.  New arrivals from across the border and other reclassified minority groups, all of who add nothing to the Black political clout.  Each year thousands of undocumented “immigrants, “mostly Hispanic whites, walk across the Southern border to live and work in America.   Unsurprisingly, Hispanics now form the lead minority group; with growing, exclusive economic and political clout in America.  And thanks to the opposition to photo identification, many more non-citizens, mostly non Black, can vote.  Just two decades ago, Blacks were the dominant minority group. The decline to second place happened while all attention was on racist Republicans!     This one-way voting pattern has produced little gains for Blacks but a lot more for others.  A discerning person might think that the whole racist scheme was designed to keep Blacks down and under; to keep the ever-boiling pot going.  How long would it take for the descerning to jump out of it?  But just in case you are offended by the frog allusion from above, please remember Malcolm X called us  "A POLITICAL CHUMP!" in 1965 for doing just that!   E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, September 20, 2014 Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits, unedited. If posted at a website, email a copy of the web page to publisher@ghanadot.com . Or don't publish at all.