Hudson: Democrats Decry Trump’s ‘Lynching’ Tweet, Ignore Their Party’s History of Lynchings

A hangman's noose dangling from an automobile driven by a hooded Ku Klux Klan member
AP Photo
Jerome Hudson

Whatever evil lynchings evoke — the extrajudicial massacre of thousands of blacks and whites in America by hanging — is a legacy of cold blooded murder. And it’s barbarism that belongs almost exclusively to the Democrat Party.

In 1871, black South Carolina Republican Rep. Robert Brown Elliott said “the declared purpose [of the Democratic party is] to defeat the ballot with the bullet and other coercive means. . . . The white Republican of the South is also hunted down and murdered or scourged for his opinion’s sake, and during the past two years more than six hundred loyal [Republican] men of both races have perished in my State alone.”

Elliot was speaking before Congress, which was set to vote on a Reconstruction-era bill that would empower the president to use the federal military to subdue and federal courts to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had become the terrorist wing of the Democrat Party after the Civil War. Mass murder, many by hanging, rape, robbery, and arson, was their modus operandi. President Ulysses S. Grant’s use of the Ku Klux Klan Act resulted in a short-term destruction of the KKK. But about a decade after Elliot’s warning to Congress, lynchings in America peaked. 

Some 4,743 people were lynched — 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites — from 1882 to 1968, according to the Tuskegee Institute. When Democrats and their Klan terrorists weren’t lynching Republicans, they were thwarting GOP lawmakers’ decades-long effort to pass federal anti-lynching laws.

Rep. Hatton W. Sumners (D-TX), who served as the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from 1932 through 1946, rejected the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was first introduced in 1918 by Republican Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer (R-MO). Despite First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s vocal support for anti-lynching legislation, her husband, Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt, never seriously pursued the issue for “fear of alienating white Democratic voters in the south,” according to History.com.

After the NAACP convinced two Democrat senators — Robert Wagner and Edward Costigan — to co-sponsor an anti-lynching bill, FDR coldly said “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, [southern Democrats] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.”

What’s more? Former Democrat Senator and Georgia Gov. Richard Russell “filibustered a 1935 anti-lynching bill for six days in order to kill it.”

As History.com notes:

Instead, FDR never gave his support, and the anti-lynching bills introduced during his term were “filibustered to death,” Rauchway says. Senator Richard Russell, for whom one of the three Senate office buildings is still named, filibustered a 1935 anti-lynching bill for six days in order to kill it (three decades later, he also filibustered the 1964 civil rights bill). In 1937, Eleanor [Roosevelt] sat in the Senate Gallery for days as Senators filibustered another anti-lynching bill to death. Even in the early ‘40s, southern Democratic senators threatened not to support World War II bills unless their colleagues dropped anti-lynching legislation.

Fast forward to our present day virtue signaling hell. President Trump dared to call the Democrat-led impeachment drive against him “a lynching.” Heads exploded. But the president was only using language peddled for decades by his political opponents.

There was no shortage of Democrats who invoked lynching to defend Bill Clinton, a white guy who perjured himself when he lied under oath about receiving oral sex from an intern and who chose for his mentor a rabid segregationist in Senator J. William Fulbright; a man Bill Clinton later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom his first year in office.

And who could forget Cory Booker (D-NJ)? He called the fake hate crime orchestrated by actor Jussie Smollett “an attempted modern-day lynching.”

To be clear, Democrats and leftist pundits were promoting impeachment months before Trump won the Republican nomination. Dozens of Democrats joined Rep. Al Green’s effort to impeach over Trump’s criticism of the NFL national anthem protests. Russian collusion failed faster than obstruction of justice. There’s now a violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause concoction being cooked up.

More than three weeks into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s formal impeachment inquiry into the president, House Intelligence Committee Democrats are running what Minority Whip Steve Scalise called a “secret, closed-door star-chamber process of impeachment.” Democrats refuse to release transcripts of their depositions. Republicans have been barred from sitting in on the hearings. Democrats have leaked information to hurt Trump to their allies in the media.

The 800 pound noose in the room? Trump was right. This is worse than a witch hunt. It’s a partisan lynching.

Hannah Bleau contributed to this article. 

Jerome Hudson is Breitbart News Entertainment Editor and author of the bestselling book 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know. Order your copy today. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson.

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