Sanity -> RE: White supremists and the grand old party...... (6/23/2015 11:34:13 AM)
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ORIGINAL: KenDckey Wasn't the KKK founded by a democrat from the 10th tennessee congressional district? Oh, that is George Gordon (amongst the first 6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gordon_%28Civil_War_General%29 Democrats started and ran the KKK, and until very recently kept a senior Klan leader in one of the highest offices in the land quote:
Robert Byrd Let’s look at Byrd first. In retrospect, it’s rather remarkable that he rose — twice — to be Senate majority leader with such a past. He not only led a KKK chapter, but he organized it and recruited 150 friends to join it. He was unanimously elected an “Exalted Cyclops.” In fact, the effort launched his entrée into politics, as an impressed Klan official told him “the country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation.” As our former colleague Eric Pianin wrote in a 2005 article for The Washington Post titled “A Senator’s Shame,” Byrd repeatedly tried to write off his membership in the KKK as some sort of youthful indiscretion. “My only explanation for the entire episode is that I was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions,” Byrd wrote in his book, “Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields.” But Pianin noted that the book left out some key facts: “He does not acknowledge the full length of time he spent as a Klan organizer and advocate. Nor does he make any mention of a particularly incendiary letter he wrote in 1945 complaining about efforts to integrate the military.” In the letter, written to one of the Senate’s most notorious segregationists, Theodore Bilbo (D-Miss.), Byrd said he would never fight in the Army with African Americans at his side: “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”
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