There is a great column in today's Baltimore Sun by C. Fraser Smith detailing the outlandish comments Maryland Republicans are making about inclusion. The opening and closing paragraphs follow:
Does anyone really think Republicans have a better modern record on civil rights than Democrats?
The question arises in light of the suggestion that black voters in Maryland should abandon the Democratic Party, whose leaders endorsed the 1960s civil rights legislation at the risk of the party's historic dominance in the politics of the South - and the nation.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, he predicted that the previously "solid" Southern Democrats would seek refuge in the GOP. He was right.
Republicans now assert - with the help of some black political figures - that Maryland Democrats must be punished for conspiring to keep talented black office-seekers on the sidelines. The charge doesn't hold water. It's reminiscent of the "Swift-boating" of presidential candidate John Kerry or the suggestion that triple-amputee Vietnam vet Max Cleland, former senator from Georgia, was unpatriotic.
It is worth observing that there is not a single black Republican in the General Assembly. It would be better if there were, but their absence in the GOP is not the fault of Democrats - save for the belief that more opportunity was available on the Democratic side.
Black candidates for public office would be more plentiful in both parties were it not for a deplorable history of discrimination in this society. More blacks would have thought they had a chance to succeed and would have taken the risks that public life sometimes demands. The nation will be some decades in clearing those hurdles.
But it's important to remember that when the barricades began to come down in the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats led the charge.
