It's hard to believe that high school students in South Dakota do not study the framing of the Constitution, the events preceding the Revolutionary War or anything of substance about the early days of the Civil War.
But that's true, and it could continue that way since the state Board of Education declined to require the study of early American history in its newly adopted history standards. In this rewriting of 2006 standards, schools only are required to cover recent American history – events from the Civil War and beyond. Teachers are allowed to add lessons in early-American history, but they don't have to.
We urge the board to step back and take another look at this.
Currently, early American history is being taught in middle school classes. But we agree with a coalition of college professors who say an eighth grade history lesson doesn't prepare a student for college-level course work.
The group of 18 college and university history professors from South Dakota schools lobbied the board to broaden the history requirement during nearly a year-long series of hearings on the proposed new standards.
They wrote a letter to the board of education detailing their concerns, beginning with the fact that students are not prepared for college level work in U.S. history courses and are challenged when asked to think historically.
Ben Jones, dean and associate professor of history at Dakota State University, has said he and his colleagues are "astounded by the level of ignorance" of U.S. history that they see in freshmen.
But there are other important reasons to teach high school students about our nation's early history.
Constitutional topics are common in today's political debate and students without a solid understanding and who do not have the appropriate level of context for these discussions are at a disadvantage. As citizens, we need to understand our rights and duties as well as appreciate how they came to be.
The Constitution is referenced in nearly every important election campaign. The separation of church and state, religious and press freedoms, the 2nd Amendment and gun rights are all popular political topics of our time. But without an understanding and appreciation of the early debates on these matters, young citizens are not able to accurately assess Constitutional protections and threats. Rhetoric and misinformation can easily fill the void.
Board of Education President Don Kirkegaard said last month that the decision not to require the early history instruction was a compromise that allows local school administrators and teachers to make the decision on what to include in history instruction.
But no compromise was needed here. History should be taught comprehensively, not fragmented by eras.
Recently, there was a national push to give every high school student the U.S. citizenship test to pass in order to graduate. The effort was championed by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
South Dakota lawmakers embraced the notion but fell short of requiring the exam. They said students needed to learn the material before graduation but didn't have to take the test.
We should require more of our young people.
We think the college professors summarized it well, in urging the board to add early American history instruction to the first half of the 11th grade year, in addition to the 8th grade history lesson. They said the state should re-engage "the more mature student with increasingly complex material that builds upon their existing knowledge. By doing so, we hope that students will have greater success understanding their history and ultimately employing it as a citizen."
TPATH~ The root causes of our approaching national demise may be many but most could have been averted had any branch of government honored their oaths of office to preserve and protect our Constitution. While classrooms across America teach that the Constitution is archaic and no longer adequate for a modern people, its preamble sets the stage for an equality between "We the People" and those in government. That was unique when it was first penned and remains unique to this very day. The concept of those that govern do so by the consent of the governed and is expressed in our Constitution as first set forth in our Declaration of Independence. It states: "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." This principle of equality is also set forth in the New Testament (Romans 2:11 and Acts 10:34) that tell us God is not a respecter of persons. It is this very principle of establishing true equality among our citizens that was designed to curtail the emergence of a ruling class in our Constitutional Republic. And - it is this principle of equality that is under assault and has unleashed a pandemic of elitists' attitudes cloaked in anesthetizing speeches that sound good to the ear but mean nothing when analyzed by the brain.
If it can be argued that America has undergone a soft coup de tat that empowered a ruling class of global cabalists, it can also be argued that the popularity of the GOPs non-establishment presidential candidates represents the beginnings of a soft counter-coup. Whether or not this soft counter-coup will prevail rests upon the ability of We the People to resist the propaganda that will most certainly bombard the airwaves over the 2016 election cycle. And the people's resistance will in turn rest on their ability to stay informed of the facts and not be swayed by some of the most effective spinmeisters the world has ever known. Once again, there are several Bible verses that tell us we are to be informed, and not being informed will result in our demise (Hosea 4:6; Job 36:12; Prov. 5:23 and 10:21). This ability to separate fact from the fictional spin will be especially challenged by the $100,000,000 Jeb Bush has raised to date, the deep pockets of the Clinton Foundation, and wealthy, power-crazed men like George Soros. In this war between the establishment cabalists and the patriots, the battle strategies will not be designed around tanks or nuclear warheads. They will be cloaked in political speak and cunning phrases that can fool even the most ardent constitutionalist – if possible.
But how does America decode the disingenuous speak of the career politician from the true American patriot? They look for the facts and identify the double standards. For example, politicians who hold the citizenry to one standard but exempt themselves from the same standard, i.e.:
The swift investigation and sentencing of General Petraeus for compromising classified information with his biographer and girlfriend, resulting in a $100,000 fine, two years of probation, and forcing the General to retire. Compare this to Hillary Clinton's email scandals, currently revealing over 300 security issues in just a small sampling of her recovered emails. Perhaps General Petraeus should have considered running for the presidency instead of resigning.
On the subject of emails, elite NY firefighter and U.S. Marine Corp. Forces Reserve Major Jason Brezler is facing a less than honorable discharge for emailing a single classified report in a desperate effort to save the lives of three marines who were in danger. Brezler is being prosecuted (or should I say persecuted?) for breaking security protocol by sending classified information over an insecure line. Once again, compare this to the situation with Hillary Clinton, who conducted all national security communications over an insecure line.
Of course there is Attorney General Eric Holder's refusal to produce documents requested during a congressional investigation regarding the "Fast and Furious" scandal and claiming "executive privilege", which is the administration's way of saying they are above the law. Can you imagine what would happen to you if you so defied a congressional investigation?
Let's not forget that Congress is not bound by the Security and Exchange Commission's regulations and laws regarding insider trading. Martha Stewart certainly wasn't able to claim an exemption for something far more trivial.
While on the subject of Congress, consider ObamaCare – a health care debacle that was seriously opposed by the American people and passed by Congress without so much as these elitists having the decency to even bother reading it. Then, after it is passed, what do they do? They exempt themselves and their staffs from living under the same laws they have pressed upon us.
What about all the Second Amendment infringements that state legislators and governors have passed, arguing that guns are the fault of the rise in violent crimes around the country? How many of these legislators pack heat to protect their families and themselves but deny us the same protection?
Or what about the re-election of John Boehner as Speaker of the House after a reported 60 percent of Republican voters urged their representatives to vote against Boehner? With the exception of 25 congressmen who listened to the wishes of their constituents, is it reasonable to ask if the other members of the House of Representatives really "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed?
Of course I could probably fill a library with books written to document the unfulfilled campaign promises by elected politicians – like the revocation of ObamaCare and the securing of our borders. But I could fill even more libraries with books documenting the unconstitutional decisions rendered by our judges. In my home state of New Jersey alone, decisions that boldly proclaim that the judges understand that their decision is unconstitutional but will rule adversely anyway are mind-boggling.
The list of double-standards could go on and on but most reading this will already be aware of many additional items that qualify. The point is that America has enabled the emergence of these elitists. However, there is good news. America seems to be waking up. The double-talk of Jeb Bush regarding his stance on Common Core didn't score him any polling points with the public. Although his answer was well-rehearsed and well-crafted, its disingenuousness did not escape the eyes of the now alert public. The identifiable pattern continues with the full-of- himself Governor Chris Christie, who in the past has redefined sin, explains away NJ's troubles as resting on the shoulders of a Democratic legislature, and defends his record of violating the Fourth Amendment, as he sees fit of course. This behavior is to be expected from the ruling class elitists whose actions prove that they believe they are above the law and the public is too stupid to look beyond their talking points. (Many thanks to Donald Trump for restoring the word "stupid" to our vernacular.)
The so-called phenomenon of Donald Trump, Dr. Carson, and Carly Fiorina may not be a phenomenon at all. It may just be the longed-for evidence that the sleeping giant once known as the silent majority is no longer swallowing the sweet-talking lies of career politicians. But the battle for the heart and soul of America is far from over. And if my analysis is correct, we can expect a smear campaign launched against all of the would-be citizen representatives - the likes of which we have never seen before. In this case, skeletons will not just emerge from the candidates' closets, they will be conjured up and paid for by the once all-powerful ruling class. So my advice, America: don't fall for it. It's time to rally the troops and circle the wagons. The elitist cabal will not go down without a fight. Are you up to the challenge?
The House redistricting process, as set by the Constitution, is supposed to happen once every ten years. Ambiguous federal statutes and federal judges armed with Periclean fantasies means a few states are often forced to “redo” their Congressional maps.
Before the 2016 elections, some voters in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina will likely find themselves moved into new Congressional districts.
It should come as no surprise that the lawsuits challenging the maps in the three states were brought by the National Democrat Redistricting Trust. The organization is run by former staff members of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. It is a blatant attempt to litigate what was lost at the ballot box.
In Virginia, a federal judge has ordered the legislature to redraw the 3rd Congressional District, which has been represented by Rep. Bobby Scott since 1993. The district has been a majority-black district since 1991. In the last redistricting, the GOP controlled legislature changed the make-up of the district from 53 percent black to 56 percent black. That small change apparently offended the sensibilities of a Federal judge. The legislature has been ordered to make the district slightly less majority-black.
In Florida, the Democrats claim that “politics” guided the state legislators in drawing the new districts. The plaintiffs, who, again, are national Democrats, point to the use of “mapping principles” to protect DNC Chair
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)
4%
and increase the number of “safe” Democrat seats. Among the witnesses is the Executive Director of the Florida Democrat Party, who said he tried to influence the political make-up of the districts.
So, the Democrats are using the fact that they themselves tried to politically influence the make-up of the Republican-drawn districts to argue that the districts should be tossed. Unsurprisingly, a Federal judge agreed. At the heart of the issue are four House seats, two held by each party, that must be redrawn.
The state Legislatures in Virginia and Florida are currently in special session to redraw the districts. In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments in a similar case. It is likely that state will also have to redraw some of its districts.
In Washington, DC, where every political story is viewed through the prism of Capitol Hill politics, some pundits are conjecturing that the remapping process in these states will eliminate three GOP members who are thorns in the side of House GOP leadership.
In Florida, one of the seats that must be redrawn is occupied by
Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL)
63%
, a Republican who challenged Boehner in the Speaker’s race. Republican
Rep. David Jolly (R-FL)
45%
, a key Boehner ally, who occupies another seat set to be redrawn has already announced his intention to run for U.S. Senate.
In Virginia,
Rep. David Brat (R-VA)
100%
t, who unseated Rep. Eric Cantor in a primary last year, occupies the House seat neighboring Rep. Scott’s district.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC)
96%
, who recently filed a petition to vacate the election of
Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)
35%
as Speaker, could potentially have his district redrawn in North Carolina, if the state Supreme Court scraps the existing map.
“These conservative members should definitely assume that they are enemy No. 1 on the list,” Daniel Horowitz, senior editor of the Conservative Review told National Journal. “If you’re going to redraw the maps, who’s going to be your first priority? … If the establishment could kill two birds with one stone—comply with the courts and pick off a conservative—they would absolutely take that opportunity.”
I think Horowitz sees the world too much through DC’s glasses. Having worked on redistricting, decisions have far more to do with state politics, and the ambitions of state legislators, than the drama within the federal House caucus.
The Congressional districts surrounding Rep. Scott’s district in Virginia, for example, are so Republican that tweaks to the lines are very unlikely to jeopardize Rep. Bratt or
Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA)
60%
, who also borders Scott’s district. It is hard to envision any changes to the district lines that would make either Bratt or Forbes vulnerable in a primary, never mind a general election.
It is possible that Rep. Webster in Florida and Rep. Meadows in North Carolina face existential changes to their districts. If they do, it is likely to have very little to do with their standing in the U.S. House GOP caucus. Their political futures lay in the hands of legislators in the state capitols, not Washington.
The larger story here isn’t really about the GOP leadership in Washington. It is yet another example of how far Democrats will go to overturn the results of elections. That federal judges are even involved is testament to how freely that party feels it can ignore even plain Constitutional text.
I know. I was shocked, too. Via Mollie Hemmingway at The Federalist (if you don’t have a fainting couch, you may need to invest in one before reading this):
A federal judge late Friday granted a temporary restraining order against the release of recordings made at an annual meeting of abortion providers. The injunction is against the Center for Medical Progress, the group that has unveiled Planned Parenthood’s participation in the sale of organs harvested from aborted children.
Orrick was nominated to his position by hardline abortion supporter President Barack Obama. He was also a major donor to and bundler for President Obama’s presidential campaign. He raised at least $200,000 for Obama and donated $30,800 to committees supporting him, according to Public Citizen.
I know, gang. I know. Take a moment to recover from the news that a California liberal judge who not only was appointed by Obama, but was a campaign bundler, might be making rulings based on political ideology. I can wait.
Feel better? Let’s go.
This should really not be surprising to anyone, considering this is politics as usual in the United States of America. As my colleague and intellectual superior, Leon Wolf, pointed out yesterday, the rule of law has been replaced by a system built entirely on prosecuting the hell out of people, and it has been heavily peppered with judges who act solely on political ideology and allegiance rather than the Constitution and the law.
So, while people and organizations can run to friendly judges appointed by their political allies, what used to be a system of laws is now a system of feels. If we feel you’re harming our cause, we’ll find something to bring you down. If we don’t like you, we can (at least until someone notices we’re engaging in prior restraint or the like) silence you. You don’t have freedom of speech so law as we have political activism in lieu of an actual judicial system.
n the morning of his wedding, in 1956, Henry Frye realized that he had a few hours to spare before the afternoon ceremony. He was staying at his parents’ house in Ellerbe, N.C.; the ceremony would take place 75 miles away, in Greensboro, the hometown of his fiancée; and the drive wouldn’t take long. Frye, who had always been practical, had a practical thought: Now might be a good time to finally register to vote. He was 24 and had just returned from Korea, where he served as an Air Force officer, but he was also a black man in the American South, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when his efforts at the registrar’s office were blocked.
Adopting a tactic common in the Jim Crow South, the registrar subjected Frye to what election officials called a literacy test. In 1900, North Carolina voters amended the state’s Constitution to require that all new voters “be able to read and write any section of the Constitution in the English language,” but for decades some registrars had been applying that already broad mandate even more aggressively, targeting perfectly literate black registrants with arbitrary and obscure queries, like which president served when or who had the ultimate power to adjourn Congress. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know why are you asking me all of these questions,’ ” Frye, now 83, recalled. “We went around and around, and he said, ‘Are you going to answer these questions?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not going to try.’ And he said, ‘Well, then, you’re not going to register today.’ ”
This article is the first in a series examining the ongoing effort to roll back the protections of the Voting Rights Act.
Sitting with me on the enclosed porch of his red-brick ranch house in Greensboro, drinking his wife’s sweet tea, Frye could joke about the exchange now, but at the time it left him upset and determined. When he met Shirley at the altar, the first thing he said was: “You know they wouldn’t let me register?”
“Can we talk about this later?” she replied.
After a few weeks, Frye drove over to the Board of Elections in Rockingham, the county seat, to complain. An official told him to go back and try again. This time a different registrar, after asking if he was the fellow who had gone over to the election board, handed him a paragraph to copy from the Constitution. He copied it, and with that, he became a voter.
But in the American South in 1956, not every would-be black voter was an Air Force officer with the wherewithal to call on the local election board; for decades, most had found it effectively impossible to attain the most elemental rights of citizenship. Only about one-quarter of eligible black voters in the South were registered that year, according to the limited records available. By 1959, when Frye went on to become one of the first black graduates of the University of North Carolina law school, that number had changed little. When Frye became a legal adviser to the students running the antisegregation sit-ins at the Greensboro Woolworth’s in 1960, the number remained roughly the same. And when Frye became a deputy United States attorney in the Kennedy administration, it had grown only slightly. By law, the franchise extended to black voters; in practice, it often did not.
What changed this state of affairs was the passage, 50 years ago this month, of the Voting Rights Act. Signed on Aug. 6, 1965, it was meant to correct “a clear and simple wrong,” as Lyndon Johnson said. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.” It eliminated literacy tests and other Jim Crow tactics, and — in a key provision called Section 5 — required North Carolina and six other states with histories of black disenfranchisement to submit any future change in statewide voting law, no matter how small, for approval by federal authorities in Washington. No longer would the states be able to invent clever new ways to suppress the vote. Johnson called the legislation “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom,” and not without justification. By 1968, just three years after the Voting Rights Act became law, black registration had increased substantially across the South, to 62 percent. Frye himself became a beneficiary of the act that same year when, after a close election, he became the first black state representative to serve in the North Carolina General Assembly since Reconstruction.
Photo
Henry Frye | The first black chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Frye, 83, was prevented by a Jim Crow literacy test from registering to vote on his wedding day in 1956.
In the decades that followed, Frye and hundreds of other new black legislators built on the promise of the Voting Rights Act, not just easing access to the ballot but finding ways to actively encourage voting, with new state laws allowing people to register at the Department of Motor Vehicles and public-assistance offices; to register and vote on the same day; to have ballots count even when filed in the wrong precinct; to vote by mail; and, perhaps most significant, to vote weeks before Election Day. All of those advances were protected by the Voting Rights Act, and they helped black registration increase steadily. In 2008, for the first time, black turnout was nearly equal to white turnout, and Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president.
Since then, however, the legal trend has abruptly reversed. In 2010, Republicans flipped control of 11 state legislatures and, raising the specter of voter fraud, began undoing much of the work of Frye and subsequent generations of state legislators. They rolled back early voting, eliminated same-day registration, disqualified ballots filed outside home precincts and created new demands for photo ID at polling places. In 2013, the Supreme Court, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, directly countermanded the Section 5 authority of the Justice Department to dispute any of these changes in the states Section 5 covered. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, declared that the Voting Rights Act had done its job, and it was time to move on. Republican state legislators proceeded with a new round of even more restrictive voting laws.
All of these seemingly sudden changes were a result of a little-known part of the American civil rights story. It involves a largely Republican countermovement of ideologues and partisan operatives who, from the moment the Voting Rights Act became law, methodically set out to undercut or dismantle its most important requirements. The story of that decades-long battle over the iconic law’s tenets and effects has rarely been told, but in July many of its veteran warriors met in a North Carolina courthouse to argue the legality of a new state voting law that the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School has called one of the “most restrictive since the Jim Crow era.” The decision, which is expected later this year, could determine whether the civil rights movement’s signature achievement is still justified 50 years after its signing, or if the movement itself is finished.
The fundamental promise of American democracy is that every citizen gets a vote, but delivering the franchise from on high and in the face of violent local opposition has always been a complicated legal proposition. The 13th Amendment freed the slaves, and the 14th Amendment gave them citizenship. But the key to Reconstruction was the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which did something far more radical, not just guaranteeing (male) former slaves the right to vote but giving Congress the authority to enforce that right state by state, an authority that to this day many legislators see as a drastic intrusion into local affairs.
The new laws immediately enfranchised more than 700,000 black Southerners. Although blacks made up just 13 percent of the overall United States population, they made up 36 percent of the South’s population and a much higher percentage in some states, including a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina. Their enfranchisement was a shock to the political system that almost exclusively benefited Republicans, the party of Lincoln.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BLACK VOTE (UP TO THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT)
1870
As part of the Republican-led Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th Amendment bars states from denying the franchise based on race.
1870
Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican, begins his first term as United States senator from Mississippi, which was then majority black, becoming the first black man to serve in Congress.
1877
President Rutherford B. Hayes recalls United States troops from the former Confederate states, ending Reconstruction.
1900
North Carolina amends its Constitution to require a literacy test and a poll tax.
1965
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leads the last of three marches for voting rights from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery.
1965
The Voting Rights Act is signed into law by Lyndon Johnson.
Like its former Confederate neighbors, North Carolina sent several black Republicans to Congress. In the state’s General Assembly, legislators with the support of black Republicans wrote a new state Constitution in 1868 that created state-supported public schools; apportioned state representation based on population rather than wealth — a setback for the 1 percent of that era, the plantation owners; and, eventually, instituted a property tax.
Democrats throughout the South responded to the growing influence of black legislators with a brutal effort to suppress the black vote, enforced by the Ku Klux Klan and its many paramilitary imitators, who kept blacks from election polls at gunpoint and whipped or lynched many who resisted. The Southern Democrats ran on an open message of white supremacy and quickly retook statehouses, city halls and courthouses throughout the South. Within 15 years of the Civil War’s end, Reconstruction was just a memory. What followed was deconstruction: the era of Jim Crow, the poll tax, the literacy test, double primaries and a host of other mechanisms that blocked the black vote. For decades, most black citizens in the South had no practical right to vote.
Beginning in the 1950s, propelled by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate schools, by modern media portrayals of anti-black violence and by the growing nonviolent resistance movement led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Congress began to assert its electoral authority with a series of legislative fixes. With the bipartisan Civil Rights Act of 1957, it created a separate Department of Justice civil rights division and the United States Commission on Civil Rights to monitor and investigate civil rights abuses. The fight over the law’s passage was bitter. In a party split, Southern Democrats attacked it relentlessly as a violation of “states’ rights,” a justification their predecessors used to resist abolition. The law survived the longest filibuster in Senate history, by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, but it was considerably weakened in the process.
Congress tried again with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a more powerful bill that ended legal segregation. But again, the segregationist Democrats who had for many years controlled the South watered down its voting provisions, leaving the poll tax and the literacy test in place. Thurmond, in a sign of things to come, left the Democratic Party entirely, switching his allegiance to the Republicans.
It took the Voting Rights Act, with its considerably stronger protections, to finally deliver the black franchise, 100 years after it was first promised. Its most extraordinary measure, the one that rankled Southern politicians the most, was Section 5. By naming specific states as bad actors that fell under special federal scrutiny, it was the ultimate affront to states’ rights. But under intense pressure, Lyndon Johnson was able to shepherd the bill into law. Its tough approach to knocking down barriers to voting, combined with a phasing in overseen by federal registrars who signed up voters throughout the South, brought about a sudden and significant increase in black voter registration — in Mississippi, black registration increased to 54 percent from 7 percent within three years. This second Reconstruction, with its second surge of Southern black voters, precipitated a second realignment of the parties, and with it an even more complex legal effort to undermine and ultimately undo the most powerful provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
2. “EVIDENCE OF NATURAL RACIAL DISTINCTIONS”
“It all goes back to winning elections,” Carter Wrenn, a longtime North Carolina Republican strategist, told me in June. Wrenn fits the prototype of the Southern Political Strategist: He’s 63, round-faced, round-waisted and always seems to be on the verge of telling another too-good story from the bygone days of American politics. Sitting behind the wide desk in his Raleigh office, wearing sweats and puffing on a cigar, Wrenn explained the existential dilemma that confronted Southern Democrats back in the ’70s, when Wrenn started working in the mighty North Carolina political operation of Senator Jesse Helms.
After Reconstruction, Wrenn explained, the South reverted to complete Democratic control. Elections were decided in the Democratic primaries, which were often fought between the conservative wing and a more moderate wing. The passage of the Voting Rights Act upset that status quo. “What the Voting Rights Act did was brought very quickly a group of African-American voters into those primaries, and it tilted the balance to the progressives,” Wrenn said. “It tilted the playing field so much that by the ’70s, it was very unlikely a conservative was going to win a Democratic primary.”
Helms, a former Raleigh city councilman, had seen it coming. After the Democratic candidate he was supporting for governor lost the primary to a pro-integration opponent in 1960, he moved full-time into a new political realm — television punditry. Owl-eyed, balding and fiery, Helms became a popular on-air commentator for WRAL-TV, where he inveighed against a civil rights movement that was infested with “moral degenerates” and willfully blind to what he called “the purely scientific, statistical evidence of natural racial distinctions in group intellect.” In 1971, he registered as a Republican. Tom Ellis, a lawyer and close political adviser, suggested that he run for the United States Senate.
The electoral path for Southern Republicans was not at all clear back then. In 1966, 18 percent of North Carolina voters were registered Republicans. In 1972, the number was still just 22 percent. At the same time, Democrat registrations were hanging in at around 75 percent. To win, Helms would need to reach and convert a lot of unhappy Democrats.
But that's true, and it could continue that way since the state Board of Education declined to require the study of early American history in its newly adopted history standards. In this rewriting of 2006 standards, schools only are required to cover recent American history – events from the Civil War and beyond. Teachers are allowed to add lessons in early-American history, but they don't have to.
