Question: I'm from the Los Angeles office. In the period between the '40s and the '60s, when FDR catapulted the nation out of depression and war, African-Americans, in particular, that I associate with, give the argument that the revolution in policy-making, and infrastructure-building, that FDR headed, was ineffective and unchanging to our plight.

My question is, what will the renewing of these policies, and others, do to really elevate those who are at the bottom of the barrel, so to speak?

LaRouche: There's a fraud in that argument, by those sources, because they choose to interpret what they choose to interpret, and they ignore the facts.

The characteristic feature of the Roosevelt Administration, is that, except for a few people called Uncle Toms, African-Americans deserted the Republican Party, and joined the Democratic Party. Why did they do that? Because they understood the process in which they were engaged.

The African-Americans, so-called, or Americans of African descent, which is a more accurate term--I don't think there are, I don't believe in hyphenated Americans, I believe there are Americans of African descent, and mostly of partial African descent; it's also Cherokee descent, and so forth. This African-American thing is too much of a stereotype. But, persons of African descent, or designated as having African descent, or self-designated as having African descent--what difference does it make? They're all Americans. They all have rights. And discrimination against any of them, is the issue.

Now, the problem is this: The Democratic Party, with a few exceptions here and there, was the party of slavery and treason, from its inception with President Andrew Jackson, the guy who destroyed the Cherokee nation, until Roosevelt. And that was the basic issue. The party of slavery and treason, with a few exceptions here and there, and some. Roosevelt changed that. It was the American Whigs, typified by Lincoln, who freed the slaves--in the only way in which that could be done. It was the assassination of Lincoln, and some other problems, in New York, the New York Republicans, who allowed, in 1877, and so forth, allowed the reversal and, with the aid of Democrats such as the Woodrow Wilson, to bring in the Jim Crow. Grover Cleveland was a key part of Jim Crow, the Democrat from New York.

Teddy Roosevelt was a key part of the same process. Woodrow Wilson was the guy who reorganized, revived the Klan, from the White House. Coolidge was part of the same process. Roosevelt changed it.

Now, what you're dealing with is a process of revolutionary change. Revolutionary change back to the intent of the Constitution.

The development of the nation was the precondition for freeing people from the legacy of Jim Crow and slavery before that. And the problem is, that the people who make these criticisms, are people who will generally condemn Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass typifies the freed slave. The freed slave wanted the best of European culture; he demanded it as a right, and got it as a right. Frederick Douglass and his sons epitomized that, of the freed-slave movement.

The problem was that after Lincoln's assassination, people came in with this idea that: Don't educate freed slaves above their future station in life. Keep them poor and simple, and down on the farm. Don't give them funny ideas about actual equality. So the education of the so-called African-American, after freedom, in the United States, was more and more patronizing degeneracy. We had to change the policy.

The policy is not some reform. The policy is a commitment to the principle of humanity, and the principle of humanity means the development of the human quality of the individual, the mind, above all. The freedom to express that. The ability to live a longer time. And the changes that were made, and the conditions that led to the Civil Rights movement, the Brown v. Board [of Education], and similar kinds of things, the basis for this was laid in the Roosevelt Administration, during the 1930s and 1940s.

The impetus for this came out of the war. The returning soldier, of African descent, returned to the United States, after the end of the Second World War, as too significantly after the First World War, where he had a similar phenomenon on a smaller scale--this person of African descent was not going to take the crap that the earlier generation had taken. So, you had this movement, which was betrayed. And the betrayal of Martin Luther King, happened early. It happened in the early '60s, before his assassination. It happened with people like Stokely Carmichael, with a lot of so-called black nationalist movements, which were used to divide the struggle, which was led by Martin Luther King by that time. And to say, “No, we don't want to mix with ‘whitey.' We want our own separate nation.” And that is what destroyed, or contributed greatly, to destroying all the achievements of civil rights.

You have--even the leaders of the so-called African-descent movements today, who made no protest against the Democratic Party's overthrow, with the consent of the Supreme Court, overthrow of the Voting Rights Act of 1964.

So, these are the problems, with dealing with these guys. They're faking it. Somebody tells them something. They go out and they say a lie. They probably got it from Moonies. Like this reparations language the Moonies brought. When Satan brings you something, boy, be careful, be careful about accepting it. The Moonie says, “Well, Moon may be Satan, but his money's good.” That is when “Old Scratch” comes in and takes over.

So, that's the problem. The point is the people who make the argument themselves, are corrupt. Because they don't tell the truth. They don't even try to find out what the truth is, which is sometimes worse than telling a lie.

The truth is, that the process that began with Roosevelt, is what led to the possibility of what was achieved in the civil rights movement in the postwar period. And that effort was already in progress, during the 1930s, under Roosevelt. And, the public works project was one of the major steps in liberating people of African descent, from the kinds of problems which had existed under Wilson, Coolidge, and so forth.

Jobs! Eating! Agriculture! All these improvements benefitted everybody, and the idea of getting these improvements, and the war experience, gave courage to those who supported the Civil Rights cause in the postwar period.

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