To the editor:

There is a movement orchestrated by our universities to eliminate any statue or name connected in any way in our history with slavery. Actions include renaming military bases, taking down Jefferson, Washington, Jackson and many other statues of men who were once connected in any way with slavery.

To be consistent, we then should change the name of the Democratic Party. It has a long pro-slavery history. The first Democratic president was Andrew Jackson. James Buchanan, another Democrat was the president before Lincoln. Buchanan supported the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, which denied a slave’s petition for freedom. He also joined with Southern leaders in attempting to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state. If Kansas became a non-slave state, the South would lose its ability to protect slavery in the Senate.

After the Civil War, Lincoln had intended to eliminate the stigma of slavery and make sure all men were treated equally but he was assassinated and a very weak and flawed President Andrew Johnson gave the South a free rein. The southern Democrats took the opportunity to create their own political monopoly. The South used the terror of the Ku Klux Klan to make it very difficult for Blacks to vote. They then passed laws making it impossible. The South was predominantly Democratic for over a century.

Many of the senators from the south even in the 1960s were Ku Klux Klan members. Sen. Robert Byrd from West Virginia was. He served in the senate for 51 years. He died in 2010 at 92 years. Byrd filibustered the Civil Rights Bill for 14 hours and 13 minutes in an unsuccessful attempt to block the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I met Robert Byrd in his office and yes, he made a (what today’s racism police would say) was a racist remark.

It was the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, 100 years after the Civil War that proved who the racists were. Without the Republicans vastly supporting the bill, it would not have passed. The southern Democrats were adamantly against it. Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Bill and also pushed the War on Poverty Bill which gave large sums of money (much of it out of our Social Security bank) to minority communities resulting in the breakup of families. However it turned many in those communities into Democrats.

Today, minority voters in some areas give the Democrats 90% of their votes, putting Democrats in charge of many big city governments, including school boards and the police. So it is ironic that the party that calls Trump and every other Republican “racist” provides a substandard education in predominantly Black neighborhoods that also suffer as a result of rampant crime.

With the police departments ruled by Democrats it is ludicrous for Mayor DeBlasio of NYC and Wheeler of Portland to support the mobs that are burning down their cities while condemning their own police departments. Now affected neighborhoods not only have substandard education but less protection from robbers, killers and criminals of all kinds. Why haven’t the Democratic governments trained and disciplined the police to treat all men equally? Why do they hold the police back while businesses that serve these communities are burned and robbed?

We should demand that the Democrats change their name. I suggest that the Democrats focus on helping and stop lying about Republicans being racists.

John Benedict

Cape Coral