the return of some old friends

It must be an election year. The National Black Republican Association have stuck their oars in again

The National Black Republican Association has paid for billboards showing an image of the civil rights leader and the words "Martin Luther King Jr. was REPUBLICAN." ...

Seven billboards have gone up in six Florida counties, and another in Orangeburg, S.C., said Frances Rice, the Republican group's chairwoman.

I'm going to turn this over to guest poster Steve Gilliard, who helpfully annotated their radio commercial the last time they tried this

Woman 1: Dr. King was a real man

Yes he was. As the FBI can prove

Woman 2: You know he was a Republican

Republicans bring this up, but don't mention that most black middle class voters were Republicans. However, since blacks couldn't vote in Georgia, they forget to mention that as well,

Woman 1: Dr. King a Republican? Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan. White hoods and sheets. Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860’s to the 1960’s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks. And the Dixiecrats remained Democrats and vowed to vote for a yellow dog before a Republican.

Until 1968 and the "Southern Strategy", which courted white voters as they were driven out of the Democratic Party. Black Republicans have to recall the past because they don't have any means to explain the present. The Democrats kicked them out, and the GOP took them.

Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution. Republicans founded the NAACP, affirmative action, and the HBCU’s.

No, 179,000 black soldiers freed us. Radical Republicans were very different than modern day Dixiecans. They supported black rights.

Woman 2: Sounds like Democrats have bamboozled blacks.

No, it sounds like you people are lying fucks abusing history for your masters

Hard to argue with that.

For a little background, meet the NBRA (a front group for Jeb Bush's Florida Republican Party founded by this guy) and their predecessor group, the African American Republican Leadership Council (an almost exclusively white group founded to defend Trent Lott's nostalgia for Strom Thurmond's battle for segregation)

I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how the whole Republican Martin Luther King thing works out for them in South Carolina, where they have reason to know a bit more about racist Democratic politicians in the fifties than Lt. Col Rice apparently does

Fifty years ago today, on August 29, 1957, Sen. Strom Thurmond [D-SC], the South’s champion of states’ rights and white supremacy, secured a place in the annals of congressional history when he finally yielded the floor after speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes straight [against the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act]. His speech set the record for a Senate filibuster.

Thurmond’s filibuster made for good political theater, but it never stood a chance of derailing the bill. …But outside the nation’s capital, many Southerners loved Thurmond’s performance. Georgia’s governor, Marvin Griffin, defiantly promised, “We’re not going to let a Federal judge tell us who can vote,” while South Carolina’s governor, George Bell Timmerman, Jr., proudly announced, “I don’t have any intention of cooperating.” Thurmond’s grandstand may have been legislatively ineffectual, but it almost certainly encouraged white Southerners in resisting federal law, as they had begun doing three years earlier after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

In its immediate goal, Thurmond’s stand proved unnecessary. Stripped of its teeth, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 proved an ineffective safeguard of black voting rights. It would take a much stronger measure, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to get the job done. It’s hard to say who won in the long run. In 1964 Thurmond, a Democrat, switched political affiliation again, this time for good, leading a massive exodus of white Southerners to the Republican party.

He never, that I noticed, looked back (or gave up his remarkably successful reliance on procedural maneuvers).

I guess those who fail to learn the lessons of history will never want for funding. Well played, Lt. Col. Rice.