Remember how in 1996 the conservatives in this country cried when the NAACP put out a radio ad saying that if you don’t vote you allow another cross to burn? If they were so pissed off about them appealing to racial concerns, why would they think that it was fine to do so ten years later? There are three African Americans who are running for statewide office this year, all of them running as Republicans. Yes, they are losing – badly – and the National Black Republican Association decided to further that decline by putting out one of the most ignorant radio ads this year. In the ad, they thought it would be a good idea to smear the Democratic Party by suggesting that it was them that started the Ku Klux Klan. Now we know where this is coming from. The Democrats were responsible for the rise of Jim Crow and the oppression that African Americans spent generations trying to fight. Of course, the NBRA chose to leave out the part that says the Democrats at that time were the conservative party, but if facts were what they were working with, they would not have also asserted that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. On their website, they defend this, not by showing any proof that King ever registered or declared that he was a Republican, but instead note some stances and simply base their assertions on their own opinions! As biographers and associates note, King was nonpartisan and never endorsed candidates. What’s funny is if these idiots took the time to do some research, they might have been able to save some face by noting that Martin Luther King, SR. was a lifelong Republican. Of course, they would also have to acknowledge that Daddy King began to throw his support to the Democrats after they responded to his son being locked up in Birmingham. Now this group is based in Maryland, where one of those Black Republican candidates, Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, is going for an open Senate seat. He is the only one of the three who is telling the National Black Republican Association to go to hell. The other two (Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is making a bid for Governor of that state, as is former pro-football player Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania) have not found their voice. This group is fairly new, and they are particularly well-funded – by white conservatives mostly. They are off to a very rocky start, and if they think they are going to accomplish anything pulling this crap – well actually they might get some passes, considering the liberal opposition you see out there is comprised of a whole bunch of Alan Colmes wanna-bes. The black community are a bit more assertive in their objections to this, however, and they will hurt their feelings, to underscore a fact. And that, folks, is why the three Black Republican candidates are losing at this time.
Newsday
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers.
Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the black Republican nominee for Maryland’s open Senate seat, disavowed the ad Thursday as “insulting to Marylanders”. He said his campaign asked the Washington-based National Black Republican Association to stop running it.
At an event in Baltimore, Steele said, “I don’t know exactly what the intent of the ad was” but that “it’s not helpful to the public discourse.”
The ad does not mention Steele or his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ben Cardin.
The association’s president, Frances Rice, did not return calls for comment. The group, founded a year ago, promotes the GOP to black voters.
It was not immediately clear which radio stations were airing the 60-second ad or how long it had been running. The group’s Web site announced the ad’s release in a statement dated two weeks ago. The Washington Post reported Thursday that the ad was running on Baltimore stations.
The spot begins with one woman telling another, “Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican.”
Steve Klein, a senior researcher with the Atlanta-based King Center, said Thursday that King never endorsed candidates from either party.
“I think it’s highly inaccurate to say he was a Republican because there’s really no evidence,” Klein said.
A King biographer, Taylor Branch, also said Thursday that King was nonpartisan.
In the ad, the woman goes on to say, “Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.” Her companion replies, “The Klan? White hoods and sheets?”
The KKK, never a political party, was a racist group of white men that started in the South after the Civil War, when Republicans were almost unheard of in former Confederate states. The mainstream Democratic Party never endorsed the Klan nor claimed to have founded it.
The first woman also says, “Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.”
The ad asserts that “Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat” and, “Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent’s consent and suing the Boy Scouts for saying ‘God’ in their pledge.”
About the GOP, the ad says: “Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution.”
The group running the ads describes itself on its Web site as “a resource for the black community on Republican ideals.” It does not say how many members it has.
Race is a prominent theme in the Maryland race for the seat held by retiring Democrat Paul Sarbanes. Steele, the first black candidate elected statewide in Maryland, faces a white Democrat in a heavily Democratic state with the highest percentage of black residents — 29 percent — of any state outside the South.
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