The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party's History of Racism

Radio show host Dennis Prager’s conservative/libertarian educational video group Prager U teamed up with author and controversial Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain to dispel the notion that the Republican Party is the racist entity in Washington, D.C.’s, two-party system.



Swain has caused uproar in the past by stating in a 2015 article for The Tennessean that we must “institute serious monitoring of Islamic organizations.” She is also a heavy critic of the racial activist group, Black Lives Matter, calling it a “very destructive force” during an interview on CNN last July.



In the video titled, “The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party,” Swain explained that despite modern notions that the Republican Party is causing grief for minorities, its record of fighting for the freedom and civil rights of minorities is stellar, and that it was the Democratic Party that consistently attempted to stand in the way of civil rights.



“Since its founding in 1829, the Democratic Party has fought against every major civil rights initiative, and has a long history of discrimination,” Swain said.



“The Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, founded the Ku Klux Klan, imposed segregation, perpetrated lynchings, and fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s,” she said.



Swain recounted the founding of the Republican Party in 1854 as the anti-slavery party, with the intention of abolishing the practice of slavery, and stopping its expansion into the western territories. Their first attempt to abolish slavery failed when the Supreme Court ruled that slaves were not citizens, but were property in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Of the nine justices on the Supreme Court at that time, the seven who voted for slavery were all Democrats, but the two dissenting justices were both Republican.