Republicans, Race and Civil Rights

The Los Angeles Times has an article in Saturday's edition headlined "Recasting Republicans as the Party of Civil Rights" beneath a large picture of Condoleezza Rice being swarn in as Secretary of State, along with smaller pictures of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Personally, I prefer this picture of the event from diarist Dood Abides at DailyKos. As for representative pictures of Black Republicans, why go back 150 years to reference Douglass, why not use these pictures instead?


In the artcicle, it claims that "Republican strategists are aiming to win as much 30% of the nation's black vote in the 2008 presidentia election --an ambitious goal, given that polls have shown Bush won 11% in his reelection last year and that Democrats remain widely viewed as party of civil rights." Gee, I wonder why that is? As diarist Hunter at DailyKos notes:

Yeah, there's still that whole ongoing Jim Crow thing.
Yeah, we've seen even as recently as three months ago the Republican
strategies of stationing law enforcement officers outside polling places in
order to intimidate minority voters, and of stationing Republican "challengers"
inside heavily-minority polling places to "verify" the identification of black
voters. And yeah, Jeb Bush himself has been instrumental in pushing hard,
both in 2000 and 2004, for a known-bogus "felon's list" with the primary purpose
of simply removing Democratic-leaning black voters from the voting rolls.

But the Republicans are now the party of civil rights. You
can tell because they're distributing a calendar.

The facts speak for themselves, as noted in the article and by Hunter, "Republican strategists concede that recasting the GOP as the party of civil rights is a challenge. The party, for example, boasts no black members of Congress, compared with 43 Democrats."

Since a picture is worth a thousand words (which I could probably write on this subject, but I won't!) check out this great cartoon that Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Matt Davies posted to DailyKos in response to Hunter's dairy: