It looks like the folks at the National Black Republican Association don’t aim to take any prisoners in the ideological wars against the Democrats. At least that’s the impression I got from their ad that ran last week.

Have you heard about it? Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele has. Steele didn’t care for the ad. And he IS a black Republican. Steele thought the ad was so over the top that he asked the NBRA folks to pull it off the radio.

So what did the ad say?

Oh, stuff like Martin Luther King Jr. being a Republican. In fact, the NBRA Web site has a page where viewers can go to order “Martin Luther King Jr. Was A Republican” gear, mainly T-shirts. Then there was the line about Democrats starting the Ku Klux Klan.

Maryland Democrats were not amused by the ad. Maryland Democrats have a lot of nerve.

This is the state where George Wallace got 43 percent of the vote in the 1964 presidential primary. Wallace actually WON Maryland’s Democratic primary in 1972. And this wasn’t the kinder, gentler Wallace of later years who changed his views about segregation. This was the old segregationist, block-the-schoolhouse-door-to-keep-nigras-out, “I will not be outniggered” Wallace who was governor of the “hang-‘em-high” state of Alabama.

Truth is that, for years, Democrats were the “hang-‘em-high” party. In a Baltimore Sun column several years ago, I said pretty much the same thing about Democrats that the NBRA ad said, only I wasn’t as nice.

“The (Democratic) Party,” I wrote, “ruled the South during the heyday of lynching, Jim Crow, chain gangs, prison farms, peonage, poll taxes, white primaries -- hey, Democrats, stop me anytime here, OK?”

And how did those white supremacist Democrats come to power in the first place? Anybody remember the “Mississippi Plan” of 1875?

Democrats in several Southern states -- Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina among them -- used intimidation, fraud, murder and massacres to gangster their way into power and kick biracial Republican governments out of power. Similar nasty business occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898.

So the NBRA was actually understating the matter when it accused Democrats of starting the KKK. But the folks at NBRA left out some important details about Republicans. Like it was our Republican allies who left us to the tender mercies of white supremacist Democrats when Republican President Grant refused to send federal troops to squash the “Mississippi Plan.” And it was Republican President Hayes who removed any remaining federal troops from the South in 1877.

Taylor Branch, author of a biographical trilogy of King, said that Republicans actually started their “Southern strategy” at the 1964 convention in San Francisco. Branch said that previously all-black or predominantly black Republican delegations were replaced with white ones.

So one party lynched us, and the other sold us out. Is it any wonder that Malcolm X warned black folks not to be in the hip pocket of either?

Most black Americans today are in the hip pocket of the Democrats. Is it their turn to sell us out? When it comes to education, they already have.

All-male classes and/or schools have been shown to help black boys struggling academically. What’s happened when they’ve been tried?

“In Detroit,” former Baltimore Sun education reporter Mike Bowler wrote in 1995, “a judge declared all-male academies unconstitutional after the National Organization for Women took the district to court. The federal Department of Education killed an experiment in Miami, saying it amounted to gender discrimination. And Philadelphia, school officials canceled a single-sex program that seemed to be paying off in higher school grades and improved attendance after the American Civil Liberties Union complained.”

Which party runs Detroit and Philadelphia and is almost always endorsed by NOW? Who was president in 1995 and responsible for the folks who ran the Department of Education?

And which party has an almost kneejerk negative reaction to the very idea of charter schools? Democrats. They’ll oppose them tooth and nail. In states where charter school legislation is passed, teachers’ unions weaken them. Teachers’ unions, like black folks, are loyal to the Democratic Party. The party chooses to take care of the teachers’ unions first. In the matter of all-male classes and/or schools, the party takes care of its feminist constituency first.

Frances Rice, the chairwoman of the NBRA, said on the group’s Web site that “education is the civil right of the 21st century. A key issue the NBRA will champion is school choice opportunity scholarships to give black parents educational options and access to a quality education.”

No wonder she’s a Republican.