Slavery and historical memory

Don't Know Much About History "The Senate unanimously passed a resolution yesterday apologizing for slavery," the Washington Post reports: "You wonder why we didn't do it 100 years ago,"  Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), lead sponsor of the resolution, said after the unanimous-consent vote. "It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice." Harkin's resolution contains the answer to his own question: In addition to slavery, it apologizes "for the wrongs committed . . . under . . . Jim Crow laws." Since those laws were still very much in effect 100 years ago, and for decades thereafter, an apology back then would have been the emptiest of gestures. Moreover, Congresses of the past took substantive actions against slavery and Jim Crow, even if belatedly--most notably by proposing the 13th Amendment, which was ratified in 1865, and by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.   But here is a truly astonishing statement: Even among proponents of a congressional apology, reaction to yesterday's vote was mixed. Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University who had pushed for the Bush administration to issue an apology, called the Democratic-controlled Senate's resolution "meaningless" since the party and federal government are led by a black president and black voters are closely aligned with the Democratic party. "The Republican Party needed to do it," Swain said. "It would have shed that racist scab on the party." The Republican Party came into existence in the 1850s as an antislavery party. It was the first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ordering slaves in Confederate states freed. Republican Congresses proposed the 13th Amendment, along with the 14th (granting former slaves citizenship and equal protection under the law) and the 15th (giving them the right to vote). Republicans pushed for Reconstruction only to be thwarted by Democrats.   Segregationists remained a core component of the Democratic coalition well into the 20th century. No Democratic president before Harry S. Truman made any significant moves to expand civil rights for blacks; and although President Lyndon B. Johnson was instrumental in pushing the Civil Rights Act through Congress, a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats supported it.   True, Republicans nominated a senator who had voted against the Civil Rights Act (albeit on limited-government rather than segregationist grounds) to oppose Johnson in 1964. And beginning that year, some segregationists, including 1948 Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond, switched their allegiance to the GOP.   Nineteen sixty-four also marked the beginning of the period in which, as the Post put it, "black voters are closely aligned with the Democratic party." In other words, the current racial alignment of the parties is the product of segregation's end. To the extent that still-living individuals bear culpability for segregation, it may be true that more of them are Republicans than Democrats. But as an institution, the Democratic Party has far more to answer for.   http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB124543121354331927.html

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