Black Republican Group's Ad Implicates Democrats With The KKK

A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement denouncing Democrats for starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. The association‘s president, Frances Rice, did not return calls for comment. The group, founded a year ago, promotes the GOP to black voters. The spot begins with one woman telling another, "Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican."In the ad, the woman goes on to say, "Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan." Her companion replies, "The Klan? White hoods and sheets?" The first woman also says, "Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks." About the GOP, the ad says: "Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution." Race is a prominent theme in the Maryland race for the seat held by retiring Democrat Paul Sarbanes. Steele, the first black candidate elected statewide in Maryland, faces a white Democrat in a heavily Democratic state with the highest percentage of black residents — 29 percent — of any state outside the South.