If unfortunately someone gets sick, but then recovers, they will remember the disease and the cure. It is much the same way in history. We recall the Persians and Salamis, the Turks and Lepanto, and the Nazis and Omaha Beach.

As Americans we recall the South and Gettysburg and what it meant for black Americans under slavery that 300,000 Union soldiers died to make them free. But in that battle and that war, just as with the Klan, Jim Crow, 1950s/60s era vicious resistance to civil rights, and the Great Society, there is one malevolent force that strings them all together: Southern Democrats.

So when we remember Black History Month we must not forget how Southern Democrats played a part, a twisted cruel part, in the oppression of black Americans. It was Southerners, whose descendants were to become Democrats, who were too shiftless to get up and work. So they had to kidnap innocent people from across an ocean to labor in their fields. It was they who wielded the whip that drew blood from those they had made into slaves. It was Southern Democrats who drove America to Civil War by seeking to hold on to and expand their ignorant and horrible social system.

After they were beaten in battle, it was Southern Democrats who continued to oppress black Americans in every way possible. It was these Democrats who founded and manned the Klu Klux Klan. Well into the 20th century it was Southern Democrats who still held on to Jim Crow and who led opposition to civil rights legislation.

And it was a Southern Democrat president, Lyndon Johnson, who launched the programs known as The Great Society. Those measures, that Johnson said would keep blacks Democrat for 200 years (though, he didn’t use the word “blacks”), ushered into large parts of black society a destruction of the family unit, multigenerational poverty, rampant crime, and an illegitimate birth rate in the 70 percentiles that is the case today. That was, and is, indeed a societal disease and Southern Democrats were the bacillus that spread it and kept the American body politic in its feverish grasp.

All that was courtesy of the gullible naivete of some Northern Democrats and the cynical political calculations of Lyndon Johnson, the last Southern Democrat president of that kind. Sure, Jimmy Carter came after Johnson, as did Bill Clinton. Carter, and Clinton to a lesser extent, were messes in their own right. But they weren’t racists, as were the vast majority of past Southern Democrats.

Per the cure, one word: Republicans. In the late 60s and forward the South turned away from the Democrats and started to vote Republican. Since then a new South has risen. Statewide Southern Democrats are a vanishing species. Ironically this is not true in black congressional districts and city halls, in what can only be seen as a political Stockholm Syndrome.

So when you hear academics and media types, mostly Democrats, pontificate on Black History Month, remember the blood of an innocent people that is on the hands of Southern Democrats and Democrats in general. Don’t let them wash it off.