Jason Cherkis of The Huffington Posts reports that, according to tax records, David Barton considers himself an expert on Black history:
David Barton, the Republican establishment’s favorite amateur historian, claims in tax records reviewed by HuffPost to be something of an expert on African-American history.
In filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Barton’s nonprofit, Wallbuilder Presentations, Inc., justified its tax-exempt status by highlighting among its “accomplishments” a video project “of the moral heritage and political history of African Americans.”
As luck would have it, we actually wrote an entire report about the very video that Barton produced a few years ago called “Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White” … and I am sure you will be surprised to learn that it was utterly and intentionally misleading:
Though the program is billed as an attempt to recognize “the forgotten heroes and untold stories from our rich African American political history,” it is, in reality, a 90-minute effort to portray the Democratic Party as responsible for every problem that has ever plagued the African American community in America and imply that the Republican Party is the antidote. Barton’s website proudly claims that he “is currently breaking ground in the African-American community with his presentations” based on this DVD.
Throughout the program, Barton presents a staggeringly slanted, openly partisan, and tellingly incomplete view of American history. Barton focuses on the Democratic Party’s historical support for slavery and Jim Crow, but completely ignores the transformation of American politics brought about by the civil rights movement. Barton, of course, never mentions that the rise of the modern Republican Party was built on a “southern strategy” of embracing and exploiting the resentments of racist southern Democrats who joined the Republican Party after Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson pushed and signed landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation.
We even took several clips from Barton’s program and included them in the report, and so I decided to edit a few of them together just to give you a sense of what sort of propaganda Barton is peddling in the DVD as he tries to link today’s Democratic Party to the Ku Klux Klan and asserts that Democrats supported slavery just as they support abortion today:
