It doesn't matter now what party Martin Luther King, Jr. was in 50 years ago.

There is a billboard in the South, Alabama I believe, that proclaims that since Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican, blacks should vote for today's GOP candidates. Now, I don't know what party he was affiliated with in 1963, but really,which ever one it was, that doesn't even matter in today's political scene.

Back 50 years ago, most blacks in the south did vote Republican, since it was an original Republican, President Lincoln, that freed the slaves. Southern Democrats were called Dixiecrats, and didn't believe in equal rights for blacks. Now, this wasn't true for all Democrats, as Northern Democrats and those in the Midwest, like President Truman from Missouri who desegregated the military, believed in equal rights for all. But then, after President Kennedy forced the University of Alabama to accept black students, and a couple years later when President Johnson got the Civil Right Act and Voting Rights Act laws passed, all the Dixiecrats in the south changed parties and become Republicans. Now, this caused a schism in the GOP, and slowly but surely, what the GOP became what it is today, the anti-gay, anti-women, anti-black, anti-poor, and anti-immigration party that it is today. It is nothing like the Republican Party that was alive and well even a generation ago, and in a lot of ways, is simply the far right fringe of that GOP, and that's why I now call the GOP The Tea Party. Now, it may not be that way 50 years from now, but that's exactly what it is now.

I don't know what political party Martin Luther King, Jr. belonged to 50 years ago, and really, it doesn't matter what party he was in then. But I'm fairly sure that he would be a Democrat today, and that's what's really important.