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Amid political controversy engendered by the protests of National Football League athletes who refused to stand during pre-game renditions of the national anthem in late September 2017 to display solidarity with black victims of police violence — a gesture supported by many Democrats but condemned by President Trump and conservative Republicans — a meme was circulated via social media making the point that the Democratic Party was not always a standard bearer for racial equality. This is an example from Twitter: The centerpiece of the post is a reproduction of an illustration typically captioned Democratic Party Logo until 1966, featuring a drawing of a crowing rooster and the slogan White Supremacy, For the Right. And although the description is somewhat misleading (White Supremacy was never a slogan of the national Democratic Party, for example, nor have we seen evidence that the image was purged from the Internet), this was, in fact, the emblem of the Alabama Democratic Party between 1904 and 1966. First, regarding the rooster, it's often mistakenly assumed that the donkey was always the symbol of the Democratic Party, when in fact the party began using a crowing rooster as its mascot around 1840. This version of how that came to pass is from a biographical sketch of Indianapolis lawyer and Whig politician Thomas D. Walpole published in 1876: Other sources grant full credit to Joseph Chapman for dreaming up the rooster symbol, but in any case, although it was never officially adopted as the emblem of the national Democratic Party, it very quickly became an unofficial one and remained so until cartoonist Thomas Nast's depictions of Republicans as elephants and Democrats as donkeys captured the public imagination in the late nineteenth century (to date, the national Democratic Party has never officially adopted any animal as its symbol). The forerunner of today's Democratic Party was born during the 1820s and '30s, coalescing around the populist presidential candidacy of national war hero and southern slaveholder Andrew Jackson. Although egalitarianism and freedom of the individual were much-touted ideals of Jacksonian Democracy, in reality the Democratic Party of the time took white supremacy for granted and had little to no interest in defending the freedom and equality of African Americans, native Americans, or any other racial minorities. Still, the party was conflicted over the expansion of slavery and split in two during the 1860 elections, with the Northern Democrats opposing expansion and Southern Democrats favoring it. The Democratic Party remained dominant in the South after the Civil War, opposing Reconstruction and enacting laws to suppress black voters and enforce racial segregation. The Alabama Democratic Party went further than most, calling for the adoption of a new state constitution in 1901 that explicitly disenfranchised black voters, and celebrating its success in that effort by officially embracing the slogan White Supremacy three years later. The Monroe Journal of Claiborne, Alabama reported on 2 June 1904: To be sure, there were a few Alabama Democrats who objected to the emblem after its adoption, though not for the reasons you might suppose. For example, Democratic Congressman J. Thomas Heflin was perfectly fine with the racist slogan, but felt the image of the rooster was undignified: Dignified or not, that emblem would appear at the top of every Alabama state ballot for many decades to come, as noted, for example, in this November 1940 report by the Chicago Tribune: By the early 1950s, however, the Alabama Democratic Party's proud embrace of white supremacy was becoming a liability for the national party. In 1952, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, a Republican campaigning on behalf of Dwight D. Eisenhower, gave a speech laying the racist logo at the doorstep of Eisenhower's Democratic rival Adlai Stevenson (from the Dixon Evening Telegraph, 9 October 1952): Though the Democrats lost that election, the emblem would remain intact on the ballot for another 14 years, until leaders of the Alabama Democratic Party finally modified the slogan in 1966 for purely pragmatic reasons: The party needed Negro voters. The Montgomery Advertiser reported: Ironically (though the irony may well have been lost on McKay), it was only because the voter suppression measures instituted decades earlier by his own state party had been knocked down by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that many of those potential new black voters would even have access to the polls. As to the Alabama Democratic Party rooster, it, too, was finally sent into forced retirement, but not till 1996 (30 years later), when it was replaced with the image of a donkey.
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