Chicago Communicator Writer Snubbed by Congressional Black Caucus Executive Director

On Tuesday, September 14th, this writer faxed a copy of a letter authored by Rev. Wayne Perryman of Seattle, Washington to the Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Congressman Elijah E. Cummings. When I called the CBC office to confirm receipt of the letter, Paul Brathwaite, Executive Director of the CBC, said that this letter was a “distraction.” This is the entire text of Perryman’s letter, originally addressed to Terry McAuliffe, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC):

From the office of Rev. Wayne Perryman
P.O. Box 256 Mercer Island, WA 98040 (206) 232-5575 Doublebro@aol.com

April 5, 2004

Democratic National Committee
Mr. Terry McAuliffe, Chairman
430 S. Capital St. SE
Washington D.C. 20003

Dear Chairman McAuliffe:

My name is Rev. Wayne Perryman. I am an African American inner-city minister in the Seattle area and the author of the enclosed book, Unfounded Loyalty. All of my life I have voted Democrat. In the past, I worked with several Democratic candidates and served on the committee of the Washington State Black Clergy to Re-elect President Clinton in 1996. As you know, during the past 70 years African Americans have consistently supported the Democratic Party and put five Democratic presidents in the White House.

The purpose of this letter is to humbly and respectfully request that the DNC offer a formal apology to African Americans for the party’s past racist policies and practices toward African Americans, and further request that this apology be issued during the upcoming 2004 convention.

According to the renowned African American history professor, John Hope Franklin, the atrocities committed against African Americans in regions controlled by Democrats and their Klan supporters, “were so varied and so numerous as to defy classification or enumeration.”

One news reporter documented one of these acts against a Mr. Sam Hose, a black man who was falsely accused of killing his white employer and raping his employer’s wife. The reporter wrote:

“After stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree, the self-appointed executioners stacked kerosene-soaked wood high around him. Before saturating Hose with oil and applying the torch, they cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, and skinned his face. While some in the crowd plunged knives into the victims flesh, others watched with un-feigning satisfaction, the contortions of Sam Hose’s body as flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out of their sockets and rupturing his veins. The only sounds that came from the victim’s lips, even as his blood sizzled in the fire. were, Oh my God! Oh, Jesus.” Before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs. Shortly after the lynching, one of the participants reportedly left for the state capitol, hoping to deliver a slice of Sam Hose’s heart to the Democratic governor of Georgia, who would call Sam Hose’s deeds, “the most diabolical in the annals of crime.”

Another historian reported what the Democratic terrorist did to Mary Turner, a pregnant black woman. Mary was nine month pregnant at the time. She had reported that she was going to file charges against those who lynched her husband. This is what historians from the PBS special: The Rise & Fall of Jim Crow, had to say about her sadistic murder:

“After tying her ankles together, they hung her from a tree, head downward. Dousing her clothes with gasoline, and burned them [the clothes] from her body. While she was still alive, someone used a knife ordinarily reserved from splitting hogs to cut open the woman’s abdomen. The baby fell from her womb to the ground and cried briefly, whereupon a member of the [terrorist] mob crushed the baby’s head beneath his heel. Hundreds of bullets were then fired into Mary Turner’s body….”

Other noted history professors also wrote about these atrocities as well, including:

a. Professor James McPherson of Princeton University
b. Professor David Herbert Donald of Harvard University
c. Professor Allen W. Trelease of North Carolina University
d. Professor Howard O. Lindsey of DePaul University.

Both the chronicles of history and Congressional Records show that from 1792 up to the 1960’s the Democratic Party and their members engaged in the following racist practices:

a. On the issue of slavery, Democrats fought for and gave their lives to expand it while Republicans fought and gave their lives to ban it. Some called it the Civil War, others called it the War Between the States. But to African Americans and President Lincoln it was the war between the Democrats and Republicans concerning the State’s Rights to maintain the institution of slavery. On March 4, 1865 during his second Inaugural Address, Lincoln said, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, the other would accept war rather than let it perish….”
b. Democrats opposed the Freedman’s Bureau and other social programs to help the newly freed slaves.
c. Democrats passed Fugitive Slave Laws, Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive pieces of legislation to deny Blacks their rights as citizens. Democratic Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina said, “We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank, and only one plank, namely that this is a white man’s country and white men must govern it.”
d. Democrats used every means possible to destroy Reconstruction including lynching, whippings, murder, intimidation, assassinations and mutilations. Professor Allen W. Trelease of the University of North Carolina said, “Democrats, by a kind of tortured reasoning, sometimes accused Negroes and Republicans of attacking each other so that the crimes would (not) be blamed on the Democrats; investigations revealed that Democrats had committed the acts themselves.”
e. Democrats murdered Blacks who attempted to vote Republican and banned many from participating in primaries.
f. Democrats established rigid testing requirements in southern communities to discourage, disqualify and disfranchise black voters.
g. In 1866, Democrats murdered 40 Blacks in the process of driving out every Black elected official in Louisiana’s State Legislature.
h. Democrats fought for the Dred Scott Decision and celebrated after the court issued its ruling that Blacks would be classified as property.
i. Democrats formed several terrorist organizations including the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Blacks. During the Congressional debates on the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, it was revealed that the Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.
j. Democrats praised the court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson which legally established segregation.
k. Democrats opposed and fought against anti-lynching laws.
l. Democrats sued and fought to have the 1875 Civil Rights Act declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.
m. When Democrats regained control of Congress in 1892, they passed the Repeal Act of 1894 to repeal portions of laws that were designed to help African Americans.
n. Democrats debated and voted against the following:
1. Thirteenth Amendment
2. Fourteenth Amendment
3. Fifteenth Amendment
4. The Civil Rights Act of 1866
5. Reconstruction Act of 1867
6. Enforcement Act of 1870
7. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871
8. The 1875 Civil Rights Act (which later became the 1964 Civil Rights Act)
9. The Civil Rights Act of 1957
10. The Civil Rights Act of 1960

o. Southern Democrats debated against and voted against the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Political experts agree that had the Democrats attempted to pass these same types of laws in 1864 (that certain members of their party decided to support in 1964), the laws of 1964 would not have been necessary. Instead (prior to 1964), they chose to pass Jim Crow Laws and other repressive legislation to deny Blacks their rights as citizens.
p. Entire black communities were destroyed in democratically controlled states including Wilmington, North Carolina, Rosewood, Florida, and the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to name a few.
q. Under Democratic rule, an estimated 200 Black farmers were massacred in Elaine, Arkansas (1919).
r. In regions controlled by Democrats, hundred of thousands of African Americans were used as free labor by placing them in inhumane prison labor camps. Some called this the new form of slavery.
s. Under the New Deal, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to assist Black sharecroppers who had difficulty in obtaining relief benefits through the Department of Agriculture and refused to assist Blacks that had problems getting loans to purchase land and build homes. Black newspapers were banned from the military, and lynchings and other forms of racial violence continued during his Administration.
t. Democrats fought against quality education for African Americans in the 1954 case of Brown v The Board of Education, and prior to this case they had a history of murdering our teachers and burning down Black schools and churches
u. Under Democratic rule (according to Associated Press in 2001) African American land ownership in the south decreased from 15 million acres in 1910 to less than two million today. AP reported that the land was lost through fraud, murder and the deliberate destruction of court records.
v. In 1995, while the Clinton Administration proudly supported a group of White janitors in their “reverse discrimination” lawsuit against Illinois State University, his Administration refused to support a group of Black, Hispanic and female Longshore Workers in their discrimination lawsuit against 100 shipping companies and their unions. The workers won their lawsuits without the support of the Clinton Administration and collectively walked away with several million dollars.
w. From 1792 to 2004, the Democratic Party (the oldest political Party in America) has never elected a Black man to the United States Senate.

Many African Americans agree with those psychologists who believe that the horrors of institutional racism established in part by the racist legislation of the Democrats, still haunt African Americans today. Despite these factual truths, the Democratic Party has never issued or offered an apology to African Americans in its 212-year history.

Some have argued that the Republicans also owe African Americans an apology for abandoning them when they reached a compromise (with the Democrats) to remove federal troops from the South, in exchange for giving Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency. History notes that the compromise did indeed take place and troops were removed from the South. However experts say that like the problems facing today’s American troops in the Reconstruction of Iraq, it was impossible to have enough federal troops to cover the entire region (13 states) during the Reconstruction of the South. History reveals that from 1866 to 1877 Democrats and their Klan supporters launched a multitude of terrorist attacks against African Americans while federal troops were stationed in the region. Professor David Donald of Harvard writes: “Congress could require federal troops to supervise the registration of voters, but Negroes were waylaid and butchered on the roads to the registration office….” The troop’s presence had little affect on the reign of terror initiated by Democrats and their Klan supporters.

When it comes to offering apologies, the one factor that may excuse Republicans is the fact that unlike the Democrats, Republicans have always had abolitionists and “Radical” members like Senator Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens to consistently and effectively challenge racist individuals within their party (racist Republicans like President Abraham Lincoln). Professor James McPherson of Princeton said, “The abolitionists became the respected spokesmen of the radical wing of the Republican Party.” From 1792 to 1960, the “radicals” in the Democratic Party weren’t spokespersons for African Americans they were the assassins that brought terror and death to African Americans.

After giving the Democratic Party support for the past 40 years, many African Americans believe that an apology for the role that the Democratic Party played in establishing the institution of racism during the past 168 years is the least that the party can do. The apology should be issued for:

Fraud
Murder
The Formation of Terrorist Organizations
Economic Deprivation
Racist Legislation
Negative Communications
Promoting Substandard Education
Terrorist Intimidation
Landmark Litigation
Brutal Assassinations
Racially Flawed Adjudication
I pray that you will earnestly and sincerely consider my request. An apology is one of the only ways that modern day Democrats can distant themselves from the party’s racist past while bringing some closure to the African American community. On May 16, 1997, President Clinton issued a formal apology to African Americans and to those who were victimized by the Tuskegee Experiment; a government sponsored program that allowed Blacks to die from syphilis. Clinton’s apology came after the 25,000 Black members of the National Medical Association requested such. I pray that the DNC will do the same. If not for the living, the Party should do it for the millions of Blacks that lost their lives during this horrible period of history. I’m looking forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Rev. Wayne Perryman

PS: The enclosed book and attached materials supports the factual claims made in this letter. The book Unfounded Loyalty, is a fact-finding investigation covering a period from 1832 to 2002, highlighting the relationship of Blacks with each political party. The book has received rave reviews and a consistent five star rating on Amazon.com.

cc. Associated Press
National Association of Black Journalists
National Association of Black Student Unions
National Bar Association
National Newspaper Publishers Association
National Medical Association


My purpose in faxing this letter to Congressman Cummings was to solicit his influence, as CBC Chairman, to get a definite response from the DNC to address this issue publicly. The facts are historically true, and the Democratic Party has never in its history apologized for its role in slavery, segregation, racial violence, resistance to civil rights, etc. M.D. Currington, former Assistant Executive Director of the California Democratic Party, believes that the Democratic Party should not only apologize, but also be responsible for paying reparations to African Americans for its support of slavery and segregation. He also claims there is evidence that slaves were employed at the Democratic National Conventions in the 1800’s. He believes this evidence would be the basis for a reparations lawsuit against the DNC as it benefited from slave labor.

Mr. Brathwaite implied to me that he would not pass on this letter to Congressman Cummings if he felt that the material would be distracting from other issues in this election season. He said, “There are many more important issues. The Assault Weapons Ban expired last night. Two children were killed….” I replied, "I know about all that. I'm from Chicago." He also asked me why was not the late Ron Brown, a Chairman of the DNC, asked to apologize on behalf of the Democratic Party. I replied, “He’s dead.”

My "No-I-Will-Not-Shut-Up" stand (reminiscent of Black journalist Barbara A. Reynolds) dispels carefully-woven myths to distract African Americans from learning the real truth of the bloody, pro-slavery, pro-segregation, anti-civil-rights history of the Democratic Party and the anti-slavery, anti-segregation, pro-civil rights history Republican Party. The truth is always an issue.

Inaccurate perceptions of the past affect the perceptions of the present and the future. There are Blacks who believe that the Republicans were the slavemasters. They told me that. Many believe also that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. Therefore, there is a myth pervading that the African Americans community nationwide that Democratic Party is the party of Civil Rights and the Republican Party is the party of slavery. Dr. Conrad Worrill, National Chairman of the National Black United Front, in his recent article “Crimes Against Humanity and Reparations” wrote, “in 1860, the Republican Party National Platform resolved that slavery and the slave trade were crimes against humanity.” There are those who would say that since all that was the past Democratic history it does not matter today. We should just forget it and move on. I would reply, "Should we say the same for reparations?"

I ask the readers: "If you were powerful leaders of the Democratic Party, would you want African Americans nationwide to know the real truth about your history of supporting slavery and segregation?" As African American voters I ask you, don't you deserve the real truth from the Democrats before giving them your vote again?

Since the Democratic Party has never apologized to African Americans nor has offered reparations for their support of slavery, what has the Democratic Party done to earn the Black vote? As for an apology, just as in the words of reparations advocates, "They Owe Us!"


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