History of our Republican Roots

As many people know Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President. President Lincoln freed the slaves. But what all else do you know about the Republican History? Back in 2005 I attended the Mackinac Island Republican Leadership Conference. It is a bi-annual conference for elected officials, candidates and grassrooters in the state to get together and hear Republican speakers. It is held on Mackinac Island in Michigan and takes place on Friday through Sunday during the third weekend of September. This is also where Somewhere in Time was filmed. That was the movie starring Christopher Reed and Jane Seymour.
About a week or two before the conference started I got a flyer in the mail stating what the events would be. One of those events was a workshop about the Republican Party not forgetting our roots. The speaker was Micheal Zak. He is an historian, speaker and author.
I will be as quick as possible in explaining what his speech was about. Basically he said that for a hundred years the Republicans in Senate and Congress had been the ones trying to push through the "Civil Rights Bill" that Democrat President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1963. It was the Democrats who kept it from going through. He also stated that Women's Suffrage for women's voting rights was a Republican issue.
According to Mr. Zac, the Republican Party has allowed the Democrats to take over the Civil Rights issues. Lyndon Johnson's New Society is basically a new version of the plantation system.
Read his book, it is called "Back to Basics: For the Republican Party. Please check out his website Republican Basics. He also has a daily blog where he honors a person in Republican Civil Rights history. Go to Grand Old Partisan.
Until I heard him speak I thought civil rights was strictly a Democrat issue. I thought it was all about making a big deal of some one's race, ethnicity or gender. That is not the Republican view of Civil Rights. It is not what Abraham Lincoln, Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower or Martin Luther King (I realize MLK was not a Democrat or Republican) would want to see. They all believed in equality of everyone and no special rights for anyone. Unfortunately many young Republicans don't know this history and think that it is funny to have "Ghetto Parties", "Immigrant Parties" or "White Trash Parties." This is gross and disgusting. As a Republican I ask myself, WWALDO, meaning What Would Abraham Lincoln Do? Personally I don't think he would think such parties were funny.