Republican legislation 1871-civil-rights-act-passed-by-republicans

Vital facts about the Democratic Party of 1800 through the 1960s: •Seven Democrat presidents owned slaves between 1800 and 1861. •Between 1840 and 1860, there were six Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery. •From 1868-1948, there were 20 Democratic Party platforms that either openly supported segregation or were silent on the subject. •The infamously racist "Jim Crow laws" of the post-Civil War era -- mandating segregation in virtually all public settings throughout the South -- were passed enthusiastically by Democrats. •In the post-Civil War era, the Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan had a very close relationship. Columbia University historian Eric Foner writes that the Klan became "a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party." And according to University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease, the Klan served as the "terrorist arm of the Democratic Party." •Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The 13th banned slavery. The 14th effectively overturned the 1857 Dred Scott decision (made by Democratic pro-slavery Supreme Court justices) by guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves. And the 15th gave black Americans the right to vote. •Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was passed by a Republican Congress over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, who had been a Democrat before joining Abraham Lincoln's Republican ticket in 1864. The law gave blacks with the right to own private property, sign contracts, file lawsuits, and serve as witnesses in a legal proceeding. •Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Republican President Ulysses S. Grant. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public places and public accommodations. •The Democratic Party's 1904 platform used the term "Sectional and Racial Agitation" to condemn the Republican Party's protests against segregation and against the denial of voting rights to blacks. This "agitation," said the Democratic platform, sought to "revive the dead and hateful race and sectional animosities in any part of our common country," which in turn would bring "confusion, distraction of business, and the reopening of wounds now happily healed."