In his May 21 letter (“Reparations? Let the Democratic National Committee pony up!”), writer Norman Schell makes the mistake of equating slavery to the Democratic Party, alone. I believe he is confusing political parties with the divide between northern states and slave-owning southern states before and after the Civil War. Here’s some history.

Founded in 1828 from former factions of the Democratic-Republican Party (founded by Thomas Jefferson), the Democratic Party is the oldest active political party in the world. Once known as the party of the “common man,” the early Democratic Party stood for individual rights and state sovereignty, and opposed banks and high tariffs.

True, during the Antebellum Period most southerners were Democrats, but there were also many Democrats in the north who were against slavery. True, during that pre-Civil War time, the Democratic Party generally supported slavery or insisted the issue be left to the states, and after the war in 1865 and until the mid 1960s the party opposed civil rights reforms in order to retain the support of Southern white voters. All true. I’m sure you’ve heard the term “Southern Democrats” from around that time.

Founded in 1854, the Republican Party emerged from the ruins of the Whig Party and Free Soil Democrats to combat the expansion of slavery into western territories after the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The early Republican Party consisted of northern Protestants, factory workers, professionals, businessmen, prosperous farmers, and after the Civil War also of Black former slaves. The party had very little support from white Southerners at the time, who predominantly backed the Democratic Party in the South.

Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed the expansion of slavery, was elected president in 1860. This victory prompted several Southern states to secede, leading to the formation of the Confederacy and the outbreak of the Civil War. This did not end well for the South, and things simmered for the next 100 years.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Republican Party’s core base shifted. The civil rights movement caused enormous controversy in the white South with many attacking it as a violation of states’ rights (sound familiar?). When segregation was outlawed by court order and by the Civil Rights acts, a die-hard element resisted integration, led by George Wallace of Alabama. This populist governor appealed to a less-educated, blue-collar electorate that on economic grounds favored the Democratic Party and supported segregation.

When the federal courts at that time declared unconstitutional the practice of excluding African-American voters from the Democratic primaries, which had been the only elections that mattered in most of the South, the newly enfranchised Black voters supported Democratic candidates at the 85–90% level, a shift which further convinced many white segregationists that the Republicans were no longer “the black party,” and so they began to switch to it. This is also when we see the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Regarding that, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1877 to 1950, more than 4,000 Black men, women and children were lynched in cities and towns across the country, mostly in the South. During that period, Mississippi recorded 581, the highest number of lynchings recorded by any state. Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers there, according to court records and police reports. Mississippi has consistently voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1964, except for 1976 when they voted for Jimmy Carter. There are no recorded lynchings in Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin, all northern/western states.

What does all that mean? Slavery and racism is an issue that goes back well over 150 years in our country, and no one political party is solely responsible for all that has resulted. It is a regional thing, with individuals voting for the party that supports their personal interests, and the deaths before, during and after the Civil War were a result of southerners wanting to keep slavery.

As for reparations, if any are made, it should be paid by former “slave states,” who seceded from the union and started the Civil War war when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter. Interestingly, the vast majority of states that are talking about reparations these days are those which never had slavery in the first place, and fought as part of the Union ... run by Abraham Lincoln, who would likely run as a Democrat if he were alive today.

Mik Muller of Greenfield is not a member of any political party.