“Who started the KKK? That was the Democrats. Who was the party of slavery? Who was the party of Jim Crow and segregation? Who opposed the civil rights movement? Who opposed voting rights? It was all the Democrats.”
—Dr. Ben Carson
Claim
The meme attributes the quotation above to Ben Carson and asserts that Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan, constituted the party associated with slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and opposed the civil-rights movement and voting rights.
The attribution is substantially grounded in things Carson actually said, but the meme does not appear to reproduce one documented statement verbatim. In an August 29, 2016, Fox News interview, Carson said the Klan “came from the Democratic Party,” identified the Democratic Party with slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, and said it resisted the civil-rights movement. In a separate September 3 CNN interview, he asked who “fought voting rights in the civil rights movement” and answered, “Democrats” (CNN, 2016; Fox News, 2016).
The meme appears to combine and streamline those remarks. Assistance from Claude AI.
Summary
The meme contains important historical truths about the pro-slavery antebellum Democratic Party and the central role of white Southern Democrats in Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, and opposition to civil rights.
But its sweeping conclusion—“it was all the Democrats”—erases major distinctions between eras and regions, inaccurately implies that the Democratic Party itself founded the KKK, and ignores the large numbers of Democrats who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the gradual twentieth-century racial realignment of the two parties.
Analysis: Accuracy, Sources, and Related Fact-Checks
Authenticity of the Quotation
Carson unquestionably made statements very close to those in the meme.
On Hannity on August 29, 2016, he said the KKK “came from the Democratic Party,” followed by references to slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and Democratic resistance to civil rights.
Five days later, in a CNN interview, he said Democrats had fought voting rights during the civil-rights era and again associated Democrats with the Klan (CNN, 2016; Fox News, 2016).
I did not locate a primary-source transcript in which Carson delivered the meme’s complete wording as one continuous quotation. It is therefore more accurate to describe the image as a composite paraphrase of documented Carson remarks, rather than a verified verbatim quotation.
“Who Started the KKK? That Was the Democrats.”
This is misleading if “the Democrats” means the Democratic Party as an organization.
Historians trace the first Ku Klux Klan to a small group of former Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, after the Civil War. There is no evidence that the Democratic Party formally established the organization.
Historians consulted by PolitiFact have repeatedly made that distinction: many white Southerners involved with the Klan were Democrats, and Klan violence often served the political interests of Reconstruction-era Southern Democrats, but that is different from saying the Democratic Party created the Klan (Gorman, 2013; PolitiFact, 2018).
The connection was nevertheless real. During Reconstruction, Southern white Democrats sought to restore political control, while the Klan terrorized Black voters and white Republicans. The U.S. House’s historical office describes Southern Democrats as coalescing around white supremacists and notes that violence and intimidation were used to disenfranchise Black Republican voters (U.S. House of Representatives, n.d.-a).
So the more precise historical formulation is:
The Democratic Party did not found the KKK, but the first Klan operated in a Southern political environment dominated by white Democrats and frequently advanced their political interests.
“Who Was the Party of Slavery?”
For the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, this characterization has a substantial historical basis, although it is still shorthand.
The Democratic Party’s 1856 national platform opposed federal interference with slavery, supported enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, and declared that the party would resist efforts to reopen the slavery question.
The 1860 Democratic platform reaffirmed the 1856 platform, although the party fractured that year largely over slavery and its expansion into the territories (Democratic Party, 1856, 1860).
The newly formed Republican Party, by contrast, organized in significant part around opposition to the expansion of slavery into western territories.
That does not mean every nineteenth-century Democrat supported slavery or that every Republican was an abolitionist; both parties contained factions and individual exceptions. But in the sectional crisis immediately preceding the Civil War, Southern Democrats were the principal national political defenders of slavery.
“Who Was the Party of Jim Crow and Segregation?”
Applied specifically to the post-Reconstruction South, this is substantially supported by the historical record.
After Reconstruction collapsed, white Southern Democrats regained state governments and constructed the segregation and disenfranchisement system later known as Jim Crow.
The Library of Congress notes that Jim Crow laws systematically imposed racial separation beginning in the 1890s, while congressional histories document Southern Democratic efforts to disenfranchise Black citizens and preserve white political control (Library of Congress, n.d.; U.S. House of Representatives, n.d.-a).
The same history included poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, and other devices aimed at suppressing Black voting.
During this period, the South was overwhelmingly Democratic at the state and local level. Thus, identifying Southern Democrats of the Jim Crow era with the maintenance of segregation is historically justified.
The problem arises when “the Democrats” is treated as a single, unchanging political constituency extending from the nineteenth century to the present.
“Who Opposed the Civil Rights Movement? … It Was All the Democrats.”
The word “all” is demonstrably inaccurate.
Southern Democrats formed the strongest congressional bloc opposing federal civil-rights legislation for much of the twentieth century. Congressional histories document how Southern Democratic committee chairmen obstructed civil-rights bills and how the Southern bloc resisted integration (U.S. House of Representatives, n.d.-b).
But other Democrats became major proponents of civil rights.
Democratic President Harry Truman pushed civil-rights reforms and desegregated the armed forces; northern Democratic politicians increasingly supported federal civil-rights measures; and Democratic Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson backed the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (U.S. House of Representatives, n.d.-b).
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted through a bipartisan coalition.
The Senate’s official history describes Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey and Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel organizing bipartisan support against the Southern filibuster. The Senate ultimately passed the legislation 73–27 (U.S. Senate, n.d.-a).
Republicans supported the 1964 legislation at a higher percentage than Democrats, an important part of the historical record. But large majorities of non-Southern Democrats also supported it.
Consequently, “Democrats opposed civil rights” accurately describes an important Southern Democratic faction, but “all the Democrats” does not accurately describe the national party or its members.
“Who Opposed Voting Rights? It Was All the Democrats.”
Here again, the statement merges two different historical periods.
During Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Southern Democrats were centrally involved in suppressing Black voting through violence, fraud, and later legal restrictions.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that white Southern Democrats used intimidation, violence, and electoral fraud against Black voters during Reconstruction (National Museum of African American History and Culture, n.d.).
But when Congress considered the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both Democrats and Republicans supported it.
The Senate passed the bill 77–19 after overcoming a filibuster, and the Senate’s official history specifically credits a bipartisan group with helping secure passage (U.S. Senate, n.d.-b).
President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965.
Therefore, Carson’s wording accurately identifies an important history of Southern Democratic resistance to Black suffrage, but it cannot accurately be generalized to Democrats as a whole.
The Omitted Context: Party and Voter Realignment
The largest omission in the meme is that Democratic and Republican racial coalitions did not remain frozen from the Civil War through the twenty-first century.
The change was neither a magical overnight “party switch” nor simply a mass exchange of politicians. It developed gradually over decades.
Black voters began moving toward the Democratic Party during the New Deal era, while northern Democrats became increasingly supportive of civil rights. Southern segregationists remained an influential Democratic faction for years, producing intense intraparty conflict. Over subsequent decades, white Southern conservatives increasingly moved toward the Republican electoral coalition (Schickler, 2016; U.S. House of Representatives, n.d.-c).
Political scientist Eric Schickler’s historical research describes this as a gradual racial realignment, with important changes in voters, activists, state parties, congressional coalitions, and national party positions occurring well before and after the 1960s rather than in one sudden swap (Schickler, 2016).
That distinction matters because the meme uses the continuity of the word “Democrat” to suggest continuity of the party’s racial coalition and ideology across roughly 160 years.
Historical scholarship does not support such a static interpretation.
Related Fact-Checks
PolitiFact has directly examined the recurring claim that Democrats or the Democratic Party “founded” the KKK.
Its 2013 examination consulted historians who agreed that the Klan arose among Confederate veterans rather than as an official Democratic Party organization.
A later PolitiFact review reached the same conclusion while acknowledging genuine historical links between early Klansmen and Southern Democrats (Gorman, 2013; PolitiFact, 2018).
Those fact-checks are consistent with the broader historical record: the claim contains a genuine history of Democratic complicity in slavery, Reconstruction-era white supremacy, and Jim Crow, but becomes inaccurate when that history is converted into claims that the party formally created the Klan or that Democrats universally opposed civil and voting rights.
Overgeneralization
The phrase “it was all the Democrats” is the central factual problem.
It collapses Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats, supporters and opponents of civil rights, and political coalitions separated by more than a century into one category.
It also turns statements that can be historically defensible when narrowly dated—such as the dominance of segregationist Southern Democrats under Jim Crow—into assertions about every Democrat or the Democratic Party across all periods.
Logical Fallacies
The meme employs a composition error: documented actions by powerful Democratic factions are attributed to “all” Democrats.
It also relies on an anachronistic continuity assumption. The party name remained “Democratic,” but its voters, regional base, policy coalitions, and position on civil rights changed substantially over time.
The same caution applies in reverse to attempts to treat the modern Republican Party as identical to the Reconstruction-era Republican Party. Historical party labels alone are insufficient to establish ideological continuity.
End Notes
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CNN. (2016, September 3). CNN Newsroom: Trump visits Detroit church to appeal to Black voters; interview with Ben Carson [Transcript]. CNN.
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2016-09-03/segment/04 -
Democratic Party. (1856, June 2). 1856 Democratic Party platform. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1856-democratic-party-platform -
Democratic Party. (1860, June 18). 1860 Democratic Party platform. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1860-democratic-party-platform -
Fox News. (2016, August 29). Kellyanne Conway: Trump brings message directly to voters; Trump counter-punches against Clinton’s racism accusations [Hannity transcript].
https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/kellyanne-conway-trump-brings-message-directly-to-voters-trump-counter-punches-against-clintons-racism-accusations -
Gorman, S. (2013, June 10). State Sen. Stephen Martin says Democratic Party created the Ku Klux Klan. PolitiFact Virginia.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/jun/10/stephen-martin/state-sen-stephen-martin-says-democratic-party-cre/ -
Library of Congress. (n.d.). The segregation era (1900–1939): The Civil Rights Act of 1964—A long struggle for freedom.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/segregation-era.html -
National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). 150 years and counting: Voting rights. Smithsonian Institution.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/reconstruction/voting-rights -
PolitiFact. (2018, October 24). No, the Democratic Party didn’t create the Ku Klux Klan.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/oct/24/blog-posting/no-democratic-party-didnt-create-klu-klux-klan/ -
Schickler, E. (2016). Racial realignment: The transformation of American liberalism, 1932–1965. Princeton University Press.
https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/20288 -
U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Historian. (n.d.-a). “The Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood,” 1870–1901.
https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Introduction/Temporary-Farewell/ -
U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Historian. (n.d.-b). The uphill battle for civil rights on Capitol Hill.
https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Keeping-the-Faith/Pre-Congressional/ -
U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Historian. (n.d.-c). The “fulfillment of White’s prophecy”: Black Americans and the Democratic Party.
https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Keeping-the-Faith/Introduction/ -
U.S. Senate Historical Office. (n.d.-a). The Civil Rights Act of 1964. United States Senate.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/civil_rights/civil_rights.htm -
U.S. Senate Historical Office. (n.d.-b). The Senate passes the Voting Rights Act. United States Senate.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_Passes_Voting_Rights_Act.htm