"Nevertheless, in the long run the GOP succeeded. Just as the Founders' constitutional principles eventually supplied the necessary foundation for America to realize the principle that "all men are created equal," so too the GOP-sponsored amendments of the 1860s supplied the indispensable basis for blacks in the 1950s and 1960s to overcome white supremacy and actually exercise their rights. Blacks today owe their basic rights of liberty, equality, and justice to the GOP--rights that Democrats withheld from them for almost a century."