The following speech, “The Ship and the Sea: ‘The Party of Lincoln’ and Civil Rights,” was presented to the Jackson County Republicans Lincoln Day Dinner (keynote address) (March 4, 2006). Professor Bean teaches History at Southern Illinois University; his web page is here

A member of that other political party, Harry S Truman, once said that"The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.”

My book-in-progress, Right on Race: Conservative Voices for Racial Freedom offers the “history we don’t know” about conservatives, the Republican Party, and race. My goal is simple and radical: To turn our concept of the civil rights movement upside down, and place the Republican Party and conservatives at the center of a 150 year movement for racial freedom.

We need this book more than ever. Since the 1960s, young Americans have been taught to equate the Democratic Party with civil rights, while being taught that the Republican Party was on the “wrong side” of history. The media and our schools have drummed this myth into our heads so that Republican politicians fear to even deal with civil rights because, as they say, “you can’t fight the race card.” This is bad history, betrays our proud party tradition, and offers no vision for the future. By looking backward at the Republican Party record on race, my book offers ammunition for those willing to “fight the race card” and promote colorblind justice.

For 150 years, the Republican Party held high the banner of civil rights. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party defended slavery, segregation and allied itself with the Ku Klux Klan to take the vote away from black and white Republicans and terrorize them into submission. Little wonder the Democratic Party was known as the “party of the Klan” well into the 20th century. When Democrats finally embraced the cause of racial freedom in the 1960s, they were the “Johnny come latelys” of the civil rights movement, simply undoing the damage their Party had inflicted on racial minorities during the prior 100 years. We, the Party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and Ward Connerly, have a far better claim to civil rights but we have forgotten our own history.

Here are a few of the forgotten voices I reclaim in my book:

Lewis Tappan took the lead in defending the slaves who mutinied on the Amistad – a court case made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film. Tappan was an evangelical Christian and conservative businessman. He used his network of antislavery men, including Abraham Lincoln, to create a credit reporting system–Dun & Bradstreet--that covered North America.

Another early Republican leader, Salmon P. Chase, earned the nickname “Attorney General of Fugitive Slaves” for defending runaway slaves.

The most famous runaway, Frederick Douglass, was the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the 19th century. Douglass said "The Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea."

Then there was Abraham Lincoln, who gave his name to “the Party of Lincoln.” He not only emancipated slaves, but spent his late political career calling slavery “a relic of barbarism” and advocating its “ultimate extinction.”

After the Civil War, a Republican Congress advanced a “Second American Revolution” by passing Civil Rights Acts and three constitutional amendments: abolishing slavery, guaranteeing equal protection of the law and securing voting rights. This Congress also asserted the individual right to bear arms as needed for blacks (and others) to protect themselves from the Ku Klux Klan.

Republicans were equally concerned with the rights of other racial minorities. For example, a conservative Republican Senator, Joseph Hawley, was the chief opponent of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred any Chinese from entering this country.

Republican civil rights advocates also used the courts to advance a colorblind vision of America. Thus, it was Republican Justice Harlan who dissented from the “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), declaring that “our Constitution is colorblind.” This became the rallying cry of the NAACP in its later battles to undo the segregation imposed on the South by the Democratic Party.

In fact, Republicans were also influential in the NAACP. The group’s first president, Moorefield Storey, denounced Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government and also won the first Supreme Court case ruling residential segregation unconstitutional – in 1917 (37 years before Brown v. Board).

During this same period, Republican businessmen used their philanthropy to improve the lives of African Americans in the South. Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears & Roebuck, was a staunch advocate of laissez-faire and a great philanthropist. One of the notable expressions of his “give while you live” charity was the creation of 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” in the South for poor black youth.

During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan arose again as a national force. Republican presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge denounced KKK violence and supported a federal anti-lynch law, which passed the Republican House before repeatedly dying in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Continuing through the 1930s and 1940s, when Franklin Roosevelt refused to have pictures taken with blacks, the Republican Party called for desegregation of the military, antilynching laws, and the right to vote. Furthermore, while FDR sent Japanese Americans to internment camps, a conservative newspaper chain denounced this violation of civil rights, as did the influential black conservative George Schuyler.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson passed the landmark Civil Rights Act only after Republicans introduced their own bill and overcame a Democratic filibuster. 89% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act–a far greater percentage than the Democrats, who mustered a bare majority.

Almost immediately, however, the Democratic Party returned to its tradition of racial discrimination by instituting racial preferences that judged people by the color of their skin. In this era, I include excerpts from George Schuyler, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Linda Chavez, Ward Connerly, and Jorge Mas Conosa.

To return to Truman: His supporters said “Give ‘em hell, Harry.” For all the Harrys of the Republican Party who are afraid to speak their mind on civil rights, afraid to fight the “race card” and the race hustlers of the Democratic Party, I say: Read my book and “Give ‘em hell.”

Deroy Murdock, “Grand Old Party” (National Review Online, 2005) – wonderful overview of Republican civil rights record, 1850s-present. Drawn from House Policy Committee document, “2005 Republican Freedom Calendar” http://policy.house.gov/2005_calendar/2005_calendar.pdf