From slavery to the KKK, Jim Crow, affirmative action, and DEI, Democrats have promoted race-based policies for more than 150 years. Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago.

On a daily basis, Democrats refer to Republicans as racists, Nazis, and fascists. Meanwhile, they push for DEI, affirmative action, and race-based admissions, hiring, and promotions, which are objectively racist policies.

Republicans are characterized as racists because they want all laws to apply equally to everyone, with no preference given to any race, while Democrats not only have a long history of race-based policies but were also the founders of the KKK. The Republican Party, meanwhile, was formed largely by abolitionists, specifically to stop the expansion of slavery.

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, elected in 1860 as the candidate of a party founded in 1854 primarily in opposition to the extension of slavery into new territories. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, presided over the Union victory in the Civil War, and was assassinated in April 1865, days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Republican-controlled Congresses then passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, the 14th Amendment establishing citizenship and equal protection in 1868, and the 15th Amendment guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race in 1870.

The Democratic Party went in the opposite direction by restricting voting rights and attempting to disenfranchise Black people. That campaign ran from the 1890s through the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

After the Populist Party was defeated in the 1890s, Democrats amended state constitutions to include poll taxes and other disfranchising measures. Because payment of the tax was required to vote, impoverished Black people, and often poor whites who could not afford it, were denied the right to vote.

Democratic-controlled state legislatures across the South also imposed literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and whites-only primaries between 1895 and 1910 to exclude Black voters while exempting whites.

One tactic that has entered the historical memory of this era, and was later mentioned by Barack Obama at Congressman John Lewis’s funeral, was the so-called jelly bean test. Registrars asked Black applicants to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. Alabama voter Theresa Burroughs recounted being asked exactly this by the Hale County Board of Registrars in the late 1940s. According to NPR’s account, it was one of the tactics used to delay her voter registration by two years.

These laws, along with segregation statutes, were enacted by Democratic-controlled state legislatures throughout the Jim Crow era, which lasted from the 1870s until the mid-1960s.

Today, Democrats say that it is racist for Republicans to support voter ID requirements. They claim that minorities are incapable of obtaining a driver’s license or birth certificate, a claim that is quite insulting and racist. They also claim that voter ID is a poll tax, a nonsensical claim since no one is being charged to vote and adults need identification to function in everyday life. This is ironic, since it was the Democrats who established the poll tax.

The poll tax was finally ended by the 24th Amendment in 1964. The amendment was sponsored by Democratic Senator Spessard Holland and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It passed over the objection of Southern Democrats and with proportionally stronger Republican support in both chambers of Congress.

The House approved the amendment by a vote of 295-86. Republicans voted 132-15, while Democrats voted 163-71. The Senate approved it by a vote of 77-16. Republicans voted 30-1, while Democrats voted 47-15.

Proportionally, Republicans supported the amendment at a higher rate than Democrats, about 90 percent in the House and 97 percent in the Senate, compared with about 70 percent and 76 percent, respectively, among Democrats. Opposition came almost entirely from Southern Democrats.

The Klan emerged from Southern Democrats who violently opposed Black political rights and Republican Reconstruction governments in the years after emancipation. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first Grand Wizard, was elected a Memphis alderman as a Democrat in 1858. He was also a delegate to the 1868 Democratic National Convention in New York. Other prominent former Confederates attended that convention as well, including South Carolina’s Wade Hampton III.

Wade Hampton III was a Confederate lieutenant general and one of the wealthiest enslavers in the antebellum South, owning an estimated 900 to several thousand slaves. In South Carolina, he chaired the state Democratic Party’s central committee.

Hampton was not a documented member of the Ku Klux Klan. However, eight years later, in 1876, he led the Red Shirts, a paramilitary group that used intimidation and violence against Black voters and Republican officials on behalf of the Democratic Party during his gubernatorial campaign. In the Ellenton Riot alone, the group killed an estimated 30 Black militiamen and state legislator Simon P. Coker.

The Klan continued to participate in Democratic politics into the twentieth century. Hundreds of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan attended the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York as delegates, and a proposed platform plank condemning the Klan by name failed by a narrow vote.

Even after the Second World War, the connection between Democrats and the Klan, and between Democrats and the suppression of Black political rights, continued. Eugene “Bull” Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s, was infamous for his staunch segregationist policies and close ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

Connor was not an official Klan member, but he protected Klansmen who committed racial violence. In 1961, he ordered police away from the Birmingham Trailways bus station so Klansmen could attack the Freedom Riders without interference. He also directed violent police crackdowns on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, including children, using attack dogs and high-pressure fire hoses.

Connor was a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. He served as a delegate to four Democratic National Conventions, in 1948, 1956, 1964, and 1968. He also helped lead a walkout at the 1948 convention in protest of President Truman’s civil rights platform.

Although Jim Crow ended in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, ending  restrictions on voting, the pattern of Democratic race-based policies continued, though their stated purpose changed from exclusion to preference. President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 in 1961 first used the phrase “affirmative action.” President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 in 1965 expanded it by requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action toward proportional representation.

The Supreme Court upheld the limited use of race in university admissions in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978 and again in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003. That precedent was overturned in 2023 by Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

DEI programs, concentrated in universities, the federal government, and the private sector since roughly 2015, extend the same logic of using race as a factor in hiring, promotion, and admissions. With academia, the government, and the private sector all adopting these policies, DEI embedded race-based selection into almost every sphere of public life.

President Biden issued Executive Order 13985 on his first day in office in January 2021, directing federal agencies to advance racial equity. He followed it with Executive Order 14035 in June 2021, requiring every executive branch agency to develop a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility strategic plan and appoint a chief diversity officer.

President Trump reversed these policies during his first days back in office in January 2025. He issued Executive Order 14151 to end DEI programs across the federal government and Executive Order 14173 to eliminate DEI-related preferences government-wide. He also rescinded Johnson’s 1965 affirmative action order for federal contractors.

Contemporary Democratic officials and platforms generally support these race-conscious policies, while contemporary Republican officials and platforms generally oppose them in favor of colorblind, equal-treatment standards. Whether race-based exclusion and race-based preference are the same thing in principle is a matter of argument; that both use race as an operative legal category is a matter of record spanning more than a century and a half.

Birthright citizenship is another issue that Democrats have turned into a race issue. Republicans want to end birthright citizenship to discourage illegal immigration and end the anchor baby phenomenon. Democrats counter that doing so is racist because the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to freed slaves.

If Democrats had not owned slaves in the first place, that amendment would not have been necessary. But since the slaves freed by Republicans in 1865 have all since died, the Fourteenth Amendment has nothing to do with race today.

Ironically, Democrats argue that immigration enforcement is racist because more Latinos are arrested than members of other racial groups, while ignoring the fact that approximately 80 percent of illegal immigrants are Latino. If they want to argue that illegal immigration is not heavily skewed toward a single race, then they also should not claim that ending birthright citizenship is racist, since it would not affect one race more than another.

Ad block users: Some site features may not work correctly while an ad blocker is enabled, because they break scripts and content this website depends on. If you can't see comments below, for example, please disable your ad blocker.