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355 forty-two Reflecting on Republicans and Race I recognize the Republican Party as the sheet anchor of the colored man’s political hopes and the ark of his safety. —Frederick Douglass I have been a registered Republican for sixty-five years, and my father and his father before him were Republicans. Lovida’s father was a Republican in the best southern tradition.The Coleman and Hardin roots are firmly planted in the party of Lincoln. Indeed, I was born less than sixty years after Lincoln was elected president. So I tend to take a long view of the Republican Party. Being a registered Republican doesn’t mean I have to vote the straight party line. As a moderate on many issues, I am free to vote for the candidate who has the most integrity, intellect, and innovative skill to represent me effectively . Indeed, I campaigned and voted for Lyndon Johnson and Richardson Dilworth. Through the years, I have had many mentors, advisers, colleagues, and friends in both political parties who have opened doors and taught me wisely. Some of the Democrats included President Johnson, Justice Frankfurter, Judge Goodrich, Mayor Dilworth, Louis Weiss, Louis Pollak, and Vernon Jordan. A few of the Republicans were President Eisenhower, Chief Justice Warren, President Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, Senator Hugh Scott, Elliot Richardson and his uncle Henry Shattuck, Governor Scranton, and Senator Baker—and one who has switched back and forth, Senator Specter. In my work with elected leaders through the years, I have enjoyed constructive professional and personal relationships with presidents, senators, members of Congress, governors, and party leaders from both sides of the aisle.The vast majority of my civil rights compatriots have been Democrats.Thurgood Marshall , a registered independent, knew I was a Republican and encouraged me to remain a Republican. He recognized that it was important to have people of color in both political parties. If all people of color registered as Democrats, they soon would be taken for granted by the Democratic Party. This has too often been the case. According to recent exit polls, the overwhelming majority 06-0488-1 part6.indd 355 9/9/10 8:27 PM 356 / a washington lawyer of Americans of color feel more at home in the Democratic Party. This has not always been the case. I believe the Republican Party would greatly benefit by going back to our roots and building on a record of historical achievement. On the issue of race, for example, we can learn a lot from history. To bring more balance and perspective to the political debate, I would like to paint a different historical picture than most Americans of color are accustomed to viewing. Consider this more a brief than a balanced judicial opinion; there are plenty of briefs on the other side of this issue. The roots of the Democratic Party lie with Thomas Jefferson, whose decentralized , agrarian view of the nation’s destiny was all too compatible with the perpetuation of slavery.1 Some years later the first real Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, appointed Roger Taney, also a Democrat, as chief justice. He gave us the erroneous Dred Scott decision.The two dissenters in the Dred Scott decision were Justices Benjamin Curtis and John McLean, one a Republican before he was appointed and the other a Republican after his appointment. It was Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, however imperfect his views on race, who preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation in November 1862. His Republican attorney general issued an opinion rejecting the language of Dred Scott and declaring Negroes to be American citizens. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln invoked the phrase “All men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence, to proclaim the cause for which the Union was fighting in the Civil War.2 With the death of Chief Justice Taney in 1864, Lincoln appointed his secretary of the treasury and former rival, Salmon P. Chase, a Republican, as chief justice. Chase was a strong advocate of civil rights and a staunch defender of voting rights for Negroes. He appointed the first attorney of color, John Rock, to argue cases before the Supreme Court. After Lincoln’s assassination, the Republicans in Congress pursued with great vigor the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, the Civil Rights Acts, and the Reconstruction Acts, which brought about radical, albeit short-term, changes in the South. With the ascendancy to the presidency of Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from...

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