Preston Brooks-Charles Sumner
In 1856 on the senate floor, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a rousing speech titled “The Crime against Kansas” disparaging slavery in the Kansas territory. A few days later, Democrat Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate chamber and beat Sumner viciously with a cane until the senator was unconscious. It took three years for Sumner to recover sufficiently to return to the Senate. Democrat Brooks, of course, was pro-slavery.

Lincoln-Douglas
During the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas, while debating Republican Abraham Lincoln announced, "For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians and other inferior races."

Yet the history has become so convoluted that the attitudes of the Democrat Douglas are now thought to be those of Republicans.

Jim Crow
Laws that prevented blacks from enjoying full citizenship mandated in the Constitution became known as Jim Crow laws. All of these laws and Black codes were enacted by Democrat legislatures and governors. The Ku Klux Klan was formed under the auspices of the Democrat Party, and Democrat legislatures passed gun-control laws to keep blacks from defending themselves against lynchings and beatings that the Klan often perpetrated against them.

Woodrow Wilson-Segregationist
After taking office in 1913, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson reinstated a segregationist policy in the federal government. He nominated known racists such as Josephus Daniels and Albert Burleson to cabinet posts. Black leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois had supported Wilson, even though Wilson’s record as President of Princeton University should have alerted them of his racist views. Under Wilson, blacks found it difficult to impossible to gain admittance to the university. As governor of New Jersey, Wilson refused to award any blacks with state jobs.

FDR
In 1937, Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt was faced with nominating a justice to the Supreme Court: he tapped Alabama Democrat and KKK member Hugo Black. Then in 1944, running for president for the fourth time, FDR chose Missouri Democrat and KKK member Harry Truman for his vice-president.

During his entire presidency, FDR fought the Republicans in Congress who tried to pass legislation forbidding lynching. Roosevelt also insisted on the retention of segregation in the military.

KKK Member Robert C. Byrd
More contemporary racist Democrats still hold elected office. Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who was also a Ku Klux Klan member, filibustered for fourteen straight hours against the Civil Right Act of 1964.

Republicans for Women and Minorities
It was also the Republican Party that supported suffrage for women. And just as the first black congressmen and senators were Republicans, the first congresswomen and women senators were Republicans. It is certainly a great irony that in this election year of 2008, that the first African American and the first woman to be serious contenders for the presidency are both Democrats.

For more information:
The History of Jim Crow
The Democrats Own History with Race