It’s easy to forget now, but just a few generations ago African-Americans overwhelmingly identified themselves as Republicans. The story of how the Party of Lincoln lost its black support is long and sad, but understanding what happened will be critical as the Party looks to improve its standing in the black community.

You could start the story in the fall of 1895, when Atlanta put on one in a series of “International Expositions” designed to highlight its progress in recovering from the war. Racial tensions had been growing since Southerners, at the end of Reconstruction, began instituting Jim Crow laws to curtail black civil rights. Those laws were under challenge at the time and there were differences among blacks on the merits of direct resistance.

Florence Prag Kahn was the first Jewish American Woman to serve as a Congressman in The United States. Born on November 9th, 1866 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Florence Prag was the oldest child of Conrad Prag and Mary Goldsmith.

Conrad Prag, who was a Jewish Merchant from Warsaw, Poland, traveled to California in 1849 to participate in The GoldRush. He settled, for a period of time, in San Francisco where he helped to found The Congregation Sherith Israel in 1851 and met and married Mary Goldsmith. Mary Goldsmith moved to San Francisco with her parents from Poland when she was only five years old. Mary Prag was an educated woman who was raised in San Francisco’s Jewish Community. (Jewish Women’s Encyclopedia, “Florence Prag Kahn, p.1) She was a teacher at The Congregation Emanu-El and at a San Francisco High School.(p.1) Eventually, Mary Goldsmith Prag became a Vice-Principal at the high school where she was employed and was elected to The San Francisco Board of Education which she served on from 1921 until the time of her death at age eighty-nine in 1935. (p.1) Having two such role models in the home made quite an impression on young Florence who felt, consequently, compelled to achieve and to succeed. Florence Prag also had one brother named Jessie who died from Polio at the age of ten in 1879. Florence was three years older than Jessie.

Sandra Day O’Connor was born on March 26th, 1930. This means that this March 26th, 2010 she will be eighty years old. Sandra Day O’Connor faced many obstacles in her very long and brilliant career as a person and as an attorney. Although she was born in El Paso, Texas to an upper-middle class family comprised of her rancher father named Harry Day and her mother named Ida Mae Wilkey Day, the family took Sandra to the cattle ranch in South Eastern Arizona called “The Lazy B” soon after Sandra O’Connor was born. On the “Lazy B” Sandra Day O’Connor lived in isolation rarely seeing a face outside of her immediate family for months at a time. In addition to her parents, Sandra had a younger brother and a sister who were not born until after she had left the cattle ranch. (OYEZ, “Sandra Day O’Connor, p.1) This made Sandra feel like an only child.

A trial has recently concluded in a California Federal Court over the issue of same sex marriage. The plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger seek to overturn California’s gay marriage ban (Prop. 8th) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case is unique on many counts including the fact that the Judge conducted a full courtroom trial rather than a bare exchange of paper arguments. It is also unique in that the plaintiffs are represented by a well-known conservative attorney who has used the case to shape a fascinating conservative argument for same sex marriage.

Ted Olson is a conservative’s conservative. He was counsel to George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore and served as Bush’s Solicitor General. He defended Reagan in the Iran Contra scandal and assisted in the Paula Jones case against Bill Clinton. He is a founding member of the Federalist Society and a longtime critic of judicial activism. And he believes he has constructed a conservative case for gay marriage that can prevail before the current Supreme Court.

Don’t Ask Don ‘t Tell, challenges conservatives to come to terms with their idea of a strong military. Who should and should not serve? Should gays and lesbians in the military be allowed to speak out about their personal lives? Can they marry on base like straight soldiers? Currently, many gays have been discharged from service who were excellent soldiers and offered valuable skills such as weapons or language capabilities which should under ‘normal’ circumstance render them indispensable. Despite President Obama pledging to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the pink vote has noticed his annoying tendency to waffle as he has done with so many other campaign promises he made to liberals.”

For most Republicans the history of abortion extends back no further than the Supreme Court’s 1973 judgment in Roe v. Wade that struck down state laws banning the practice. A better sense of where we came from might help us understand where we are and why we have been unable to reach a legislative compromise on this issue.

Abortion has been practiced for millennia and we have literary evidence of it going back to ancient Egypt and India. Classical doctors and philosophers wrote about abortion and the early Christian Church wrestled with the practice. It has been variously banned, approved, encouraged and curbed at different times and among different cultures.

I don’t have a problem with a black American-specific holiday, but my main issue with Kwanzaa concerns authenticity. Kwanzaa isn’t rooted in black American culture and experience. While the official Kwanzaa website calls it a “celebration of family, community, and culture”, why is the holiday a mishmash of East African cultures when the overwhelming majority of black Americans are of West African origin? Nor is it even a holiday that resides with Africans. Kwanzaa thus contributes to the stereotype that Africa is just one big blob, with few if any inter-country differences. This viewpoint is ironically a strange bedfellow of many white attitudes towards Africa, as if one can switch African cultures in and out at will. Black Americans should certainly learn more about Africa. However, Kwanzaa – with its misinformation about our African heritage – falls short of this goal.

At a time when African-Americans were deserting The Republican Party in favor of The Democrats, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts remained with The Republican Party becoming the first Black Attorney General of his state from 1962 to 1966. In 1966, he became the first African-American elected to the Senate since the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the era of Jim Crow. He was also the first African-American elected to this position in the state of Massachusetts. While Senator Edward Brooke remained loyal to the Republican Party, however, he proved himself to be a renegade and highly individualistic in that the issues he supported were far more liberal than the stance which The Republican Party usually took on such issues including the laws in place which he needed to enforce as the Massachusett’s State Attorney General.

In Loving V. Virginia, Richard Loving who was Caucasian, and his wife, named Mildred loving who was of African and Native American Descent, sued the state of Virginia which had not only invalidated the Loving interracial union but had also forced the couple to leave the state of Virginia. The Loving couple won their case in 1967 with the Supreme Court saying that they could not tell Richard and Mildred whom to marry.

It is with great sadness, therefore, given the five hundred years of sexual racism which African Americans have been the primary victims of, that a Justice of the Peace named Keith Bardwell from Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana feels that it is his God-given right and even, his duty as a Christian to refuse to marry interracial couples when one party is Caucasian and the other Negroid.

Mr. Bardwell has broken the law four times so far to date in Tangipahoa Parish with his latest victims being 30 year old Beth Humphrey and 32 year old Terence Mckay. Unlike the Loving Couple in 1967, for instance, .Humphrey is Caucasian while Mckay is Black. According to Mary Foster of The Associated Press, the couple were told by Bardwell on October 6th, 2009 that he would not sign a marriage license for an interracial couple. The reason he cited for his refusal is because the children from such unions are not happy because they are usually not accepted by either The African-American Community nor by the Caucasian Community.

It is not easy to be a Black Republican and it’s damn near impossible to be a black, gay Republican.

James Farmer Jr. is, perhaps, most well-known as the founder of The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) whose tactics were the backbone of The Civil Rights Movement. Having been influenced by the passive, non-violent resistance techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi of India, Farmer imparted the principles of non-violent resistance to his disciples drilling into them the error of using aggression in The Civil Rights Movement

Johnson was an active Republican Party Member having served, beginning in 1904, as both The Treasurer and a year later The President of The Colored Republican Club. He strongly, therefore, identified with the self-help policies of Booker T. Washington.

I was shocked to learn about the history of the democrat party and how that party laid the foundation that has influenced race relations in America in the past. Those past political actions by the democrat party continue, to this day, to exploit the impoverished condition of black Americans, which were caused by the democrat party for the purpose of gaining political power.

As a physician of more than thirty years I get concerned when I see the emphasis put on race and economics as the sole cause of health care disparities. High cholesterol comes not just from diet, but lipid or fat disorders and also has a genetic component as deceased tennis great Arthur Ashe’s life demonstrated. Obesity correlates with diet, lack of exercise and sometimes genetics. Diabetes reflects obesity, diet, and genetics.

High blood pressure results from intrinsic poorly understood likely genetic etiologies in 90%+ of the cases; however, the influence of diet, diabetes, and obesity cannot be discounted. Lead exposure on an inner city street where polluting paint and fuel inefficient cars may travel hurt as much as the lack of trees for pollution filtration. Asthma reflects environmental exposures, smoking, and genetics. Lack of access to physicians is often the result of where you live, how much money you can pay for your care and your level of understanding about your health.

“You dont have to be a dopeboy to have money” ~T.I.             By Brandon Brice Rapper T.I.,whose real name is Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr., recently got busted for trying to buy illegal firearms and silencers for protection, but the Atlanta judge cut his sentence for a year if he did [...]