And, if we stand together and choose freedom, our future will be brighter. Freedom will bring back jobs and raise wages. Freedom will lift people out of dependency to the dignity of work.(APPLAUSE)We can do this. Forty-Seven years ago to this day, America put the very first man on the moon.(APPLAUSE)That was the power of freedom. Our party, the Republican party, was founded to defeat slavery.(APPLAUSE)Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president signed the Emancipation Proclamation.(APPLAUSE)Together we passed the Civil Rights Act, and together we fought to eliminate Jim Crow Laws.(APPLAUSE)That’s our collective legacy, although the media will never share it with you. Those were fights for freedom, and so is this.
I left the transcript (applause) to highlight this point. Yes, the Party of Lincoln freed the slaves. True, were it not for the Republican Party, the Civil Rights Act would not have become the law of the land. Because of those actions and many more, African Americans were proud Republicans. They were proud to stand with people who stood with and fought for them.
But there’s a reason Cruz’s partisan self-congratulation conspicuously stops at 1964. The party that loves to remind everyone that its onetime standard-bearer freed African Americans from servitude also loves to scapegoat their descendants for all of society’s ills. At least that’s the way we see it. And that’s why an overwhelming majority of the black vote goes to the Democratic Party.
After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to an aide, “We [Democrats] have lost the South for a generation.” That’s because the racists in the Democratic Party who were against equality for their fellow Americans flipped their allegiance to a welcoming GOP. And the party embraced them then with the same fervor it did when the tea party energized Republicans in opposition to President Obama in 2010 and when the base handed the presidential nomination six years later to a man who ran an openly racist, xenophobic and nativist campaign.
The Republican Party went from creating Affirmative Action as we know it today, thanks to the efforts of President Richard Nixon in 1969, a fact Cruz ignored in his history lesson, to Ronald Reagan whipping up racial resentment by going on about the mythical “welfare queen” in his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.
For African Americans, the Republican Party that gave them their freedom has become a hostile force determined to deny them their rights and dignity. That’s why Cruz linking freedom to his party’s past was a bit much to take.
“I appreciate Ted recounting that history. History is important,” Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me. “But the question African Americans are asking themselves today is ‘What have you done for me lately?’ ” Steele specifically pointed to the stalled efforts in the House and Senate to reinstitute the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. “So what does that say to the African American community?” Steele asked. As a result, he continued, “the history then continues to fade into history for a lot of us because you can’t answer ‘What have you done for me lately?’ ”
That the history of the Republican Party’s domestic freedom agenda stops at 1964 is as shameful as it is damning. That Republicans insist on flogging their ancient history is an embarrassment they seem to have no interest in correcting.
Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @Capehartj


