If we are going to have any hope of decent race relations in this country we have to dispel the notion that wanting less taxing has anything to do with racism. Calvin Coolidge fought for civil rights while also being very fiscally conservative.
If you advocate cutting programs that help the poor when non-white people are disproportionately more likely to be poor than whites are, the burden of proof is on you to prove your intentions are not racist.
I really want to help people. I'm just convinced that capitalism is the right way to go about doing this.
If we are going to have any hope of decent race relations in this country we have to dispel the notion that wanting less taxing has anything to do with racism. Calvin Coolidge fought for civil rights while also being very fiscally conservative.
Regional difference ninety years ago.
Northern industrialists had no stake in the brutal treatment of Southern blacks by Southern agrarian Democrats. The Democratic Party in the 1920s was basically a coalition of northern industrial workers (including practically all non-WASPs in the day) and Southern agrarians. The Republicans were a coalition of northern industrialists, small businessmen, and small farmers and such few blacks who actually had the vote. For blacks, the Republican party was still the Party of Lincoln, as it had been for the short era of genuine democracy in the post-Confederate South.
By 1920 Southern blacks had no say in the political process. They could only comply, die, or flee.
That is certainly true, but I feel confident in saying that if the 14th and 15th amendments were fully enforced in 1920, you wouldn't have found very many blacks in Mississippi voting Democrat. And the people who cared about civil rights at that time were much more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. The Republicans were clearly the better party on civil rights at the time. Of course, many Democrats stood up to their party on civil rights in the following decades, and many Republicans shamefully took advantage of the split between Northern and Southern Democrats.
