The party of civil rights

As an undergraduate majoring in history, I wrote my senior thesis on the Reconstruction period. The so-called radical Republicans pushed through the first legislation to grant equal rights to black Americans. Unfortunately the experiment lasted just over a decade, finally ending in 1877 when Rutherford Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the south in order to get enough electoral votes to win. Over the next century black people experienced racism throughout the country but especially in the south, with Jim Crow laws enforced by the law and by the Klan. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with important Supreme Court decisions, finally restored these rights. By this time, the issue of civil rights was no longer an issue that divided parties, but an issue that divided liberals from conservatives and north from south. Some conservatives of today ignore how both parties have changed and pretend that the Republican party has been the party of civil rights and the Democratic party the party of slavery and segregation. Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and William Buckley all opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But I am here to help restore the GOP to its former glory, as an Old Fashioned Republican.