How Black Americans Were Tamed to Vote Democrat for 200 Years

December 20, 2023 by Alexander G. Markovsky

Image: The Vanishing Dream by Andrea Widburg, made using Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his “I have a dream” speech by David Erickson.

Beware of those who might feign sympathy or pity on you because theywant power over you.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous speech, had a vision that was, for a long time, woven into the American psyche: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” However, the evolution of the relationship between the sons has been marked by complexity and adversity.

Since its establishment in January 1828, the Democrat party was the Party of Slavery, governed by Plato’s philosophy that it was right for the ‘better’ to rule over the ‘inferior.’

Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the ravages of the Civil War changed the slave owners’ moral convictions. Although the war had settled that blacks were human beings with souls—hence, eligible not just for physical freedom but also for constitutional equality—the Democrats would not allow the former slaves to get too far from their plantations.

For almost one hundred years after the war ended, all the Democrat party’s efforts would be devoted to elaborate political maneuvers to forestall the nightmarish scenario of blacks voting. Since the Republican Party was formed to abolish slavery and was the driving force behind liberating slaves, blacks were expected to vote overwhelmingly for Republicans.

At a moment of greatest weakness, the Democrat-dominated state legislatures passed the Black Codes, followed by Jim Crow laws that enacted racial segregation and a host of discriminatory measures that prevented the former slaves from voting. As Alabama Governor George Wallace Jr., infamously proclaimed in 1963, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” There was no need for any other political or moral justification.

However, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s made it abundantly clear, even to the most zealous racists in the leadership of the Democratic Party, that segregation had run its course. In a 180-degree turn, the Democrats, unembarrassed by the reversal of their previous position, launched themselves on the road to a new approach.

Their newfound conviction was that if they had to let blacks into the voting booth, they needed to create a political process ensuring that blacks would vote Democrat forever. The emphasis began to shift toward dependence. A slave doesn’t necessarily have to work on a plantation to have his existence dependent on a slave owner. Government entitlements would have the same effect of dependence on the sons of slaves as slavery had on their fathers.

In a virtuoso ploy, the new generation of white supremacists stigmatized the sons of slaves as intellectually inferior and portrayed them as victims of slavery who needed help and were entitled to redemption. The Democrats created government entitlement programs, such as the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which included the “affirmative action” provision that conveniently swapped civil obligations with rights and marked the beginning of a system of privileges for the sons of slaves.

The sons of slaves, in an act of historical failure and defiance of their own moral principle to “sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” took the bait and unconsciously accepted the concept of inferiority and, with it, the most grotesque kinds of freedom: Freedom from responsibilities, freedom from work, and freedom from liberty. The Democrats cunningly substituted the “Segregation forever” banner with “Redemption forever.”

The resulting endless bounties, subsidies, and benefits have demoralized the black community, as crime, hereditary welfare, and subsidized unwed pregnancy became a way of life. Consequently, the black family—the cell of a society that had survived centuries of slavery and segregation—began rapidly disintegrating. Steel chains of slavery have been replaced with the even stronger, although invisible, bondage of dependency.

History punishes political frivolity. Dependent on the government handouts, too many blacks lost control over their destiny. They foolishly entrusted their fate to the decisions of the others and thus far have fulfilled Lyndon Johnson’s prophesy, “I’ll have these N­­­---ers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.”

Although the authenticity of the blunt-speaking Texan’s statement remains debated among historians, its essence accurately reflects the sinister intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1965, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a highly intelligent and well-informed individual, in his eloquent testimony, adumbrated the Democrats:

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States. (“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” March 1965)

Though from LBJ ‘til the present, the circumstances have changed, the strategy has remained extraordinarily consistent and successful. Over the years, the Democrats have corralled millions of black voters within the Democrat party by adroitly exploiting the source of grief. Whether it is slavery, segregation, or redemption, the doctrinal objective of the Democrat party has always been in line with Goethe’s famous observation, “The triumph of despotism is to force the slaves to declare themselves free. It may need no force; the slaves may proclaim their freedom quite sincerely: but they are nonetheless slaves.”

That’s why, back in 2012, when then the Democratic Party presumptive nominee, Vice President Joe Biden, spoke at a rally in Danville, Virginia, and insinuated that the Republicans wanted to put black voters back in chains, he was wrong, as usual. He did not realize that he was talking about Democrat chains.

During the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Democrat policies and the Trump economic prosperity agenda placed the black community at the intersection of two worlds—continuing dependency or Martin Luther King’s vision that “the Negro and his compatriots for self-respect and human dignity will not be denied.” Yet, the sobering reality is that dependency for most people is an incurable disease and, given a choice between working for a living or voting for a living, most people opt for the latter.

Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a think tank that examines national security, energy, risk analysis, and other public policy issues. He is the author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It.