Hello All:
I don't need to say much - you know T-rump and the repuglycons are trying to keep us from registering and voting - this is a battle for our souls and control - and we have to win!!
Trump Reveals the Truth About Voter Suppression
The president is the latest in a long line of conservative politicians to see minority voters as a threat.
By
Dr. Blight is the author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”
On
March 30, the Republican id burst forth when President Trump said that
the latest congressional stimulus bill “had things — levels of voting
that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in
this country again.” Two days later, the Republican House speaker in
Georgia, David Ralston, admitted that an expansion of absentee voting
would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in
Georgia.”
And on April 6, the U.S.
Supreme Court refused, in a 5-to-4 ruling, to allow additional days for
absentee voting in the Wisconsin primary. For years, Wisconsin
Republicans have demonstrated that they will do anything to gerrymander
and restrict access to voting to stay in power, including now asking
citizens to risk their health to vote. Someone should ask Mr. Ralston
and the conservative legislators and judges in Wisconsin what they are
conserving.
Petitions are now flying
around the internet, calling for mail-in voting as has long been
practiced in Oregon and other states. Democrats are using Mr. Trump’s
stumble into truth-telling as a fund-raiser. Republicans are trying to
avoid the subject entirely or repeating worn-out claims of voter
“fraud.”
This eruption has immediate
consequences: Americans are about to see how fragile our right to vote
really is. Among our many fears is the widespread concern over whether
we will have an open and legitimate general election in November. If we
are still stuck at home, will we be able to vote? Or will we have to
risk our lives by venturing to our local school gym?
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With
customary ignorance, Mr. Trump has also stumbled unknowingly into
history, our long tale of trickery, laws, Orwellian propaganda and
violence as ways of keeping the mass of voters from casting ballots.
Since the beginning of our Republic, and especially since Emancipation
and the stirrings of black suffrage established in the 14th and 15th
Amendments, restricting the franchise has been a frighteningly effective
tool of conservatism and entrenched interests.
America
has a long history of attempts to restrict the right to vote to people
with property, with sufficient formal education and, too often, those
privileged by gender or race. Political minorities — today’s Republican
Party, antebellum slaveholders, Gilded Age oligarchs or rural states
empowered disproportionately by the Electoral College — have always
feared and suppressed the expansion of both the right and the access to
the right to vote. There is no Republican majority in America, except on
Election Days
Mr.
Trump’s rhetorical stumble into truth joins a litany of similar
expressions in American history. The creation of black male suffrage was
the most contested of all the problems of the early new state
governments formed during Reconstruction. Most white Southerners were
hellbent on trying to restore white supremacy, especially in voting.
Appointed by President Andrew Johnson as South Carolina’s governor in
1865, Benjamin F. Perry believed that black suffrage would give
political power over to “ignorant, stupid, demi-savage paupers.” In
North Carolina, the politician William A. Graham believed enfranchising
blacks would “roll back the tide of civilization two centuries at
least.”
In Southern history, when the
law wasn’t on the side of voter suppression, intimidation, fraud and
murderous violence served as ready alternatives. As the historian Carol
Anderson writes in her brilliant book “One Person, No Vote,” the
techniques of voter suppression in the 19th century were conducted with
“warped brilliance” and were “simultaneously mundane and pernicious,”
whether by requiring voters to interpret bizarrely complex written
passages to prove literacy, in fail-safe grandfather clauses or through
allegedly race-neutral poll taxes. Today’s vote suppressors are no less
pernicious, sporting earnest outrage at the fraud they cannot find.
As
many Americans broadly came to embrace the defeat of Reconstruction in
the South, viewing it as a futile, even unnatural, racial experiment,
historians at the turn of the 20th century declared black suffrage the
great demon of a “tragic era.” Writing in 1901 in The Atlantic,
the historian William A. Dunning, whose work helped define a
generation’s interpretation of the post-Civil War era, wrote of “The Undoing of Reconstruction.”
In
Dunning’s polite brand of white supremacy, black voting during
Reconstruction — which for a while brought political revolution and
hundreds of black elected officials to the South — was a curse and a
historical blunder. The “political equality of the negroes,” he
maintained, went too far and necessitated a counterrevolution to roll it
back.
Dunning never used our modern
term, suppression. He called it “pressure applied by all these various
methods” to reduce the black vote. Indeed, the “undoing” of
Reconstruction could be measured, as Dunning celebrated, in the large
reductions of black voter turnout in Southern states. Votes were not
suppressed; they simply “disappeared,” he said, like bad weather.
In
the 1884 presidential election compared with that of 1876, the black
vote declined from 182,000 to 91,000 in South Carolina, 164,000 to
120,000 in Mississippi and 160,000 to 108,000 in Louisiana. As the Jim
Crow system descended on Southern life, black voters became increasingly
“extinct,” Dunning wrote. Dr. Anderson documents this “voter mortality
rate” by the early 20th century: Between 1896 and 1904, registered black
voters in Louisiana plummeted from 130,000 to 1,342, and in Alabama
from 180,000 to 3,000. Today’s Republicans can only dream of such
numbers, but they need only fractions of those counts to succeed. Their
trickery matches their challenge. We should not mince words: Voter
mortality is their goal.
Fueling
Dunning’s confidence about Jim Crow’s control over voting was the coup
and bloody massacre committed by white Democrats in Wilmington, N.C., in
the election of 1898. The largest city in the state, Wilmington had
forged a black majority and a successful black economic and political
leadership. White Democrats found black rule and economic success
unbearable. In a vicious white-supremacist campaign led by a Confederate
veteran and congressman, Alfred Waddell, whites used lies,
intimidation, cartoon journalism and racial terrorism to take back
control first of the city and then of the entire state. Organized mobs,
energized by grievance and racial hatred, violently overthrew the
election.
In rousing speeches, Waddell
made their “duty” clear to the mobs of Wilmington. “This city, county
and state shall be rid of Negro domination, once and forever,” he
shouted at an election-eve rally. “Go to the polls tomorrow and if you
find a Negro voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses,
kill him! Shoot him down in his tracks!” The mob roared and raised their
rifles in the air. On and after Election Day, 15 to 20 people were
murdered in the immediate uprising, while hundreds of black women and
children fled into nearby swamps. About 1,400 fled the city during the
next 30 days.
Generations later, the
right to vote never seemed so important and newly triumphant as on the
day President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The
violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in the early
spring, and the heroic march that it inspired; a brave and persistent
civil rights movement; liberal Democrats joined by a key cadre of
moderate Northern Republicans in Congress; and a converted, dedicated
former segregationist in Johnson, who embraced his most important
historic moment — all of this made the act possible. But it became law
against the same resistance and rhetoric left over from the past.
W.B.
Hicks, the leader of the white-supremacist Liberty Lobby, told
Congress: “If the president’s law is passed, the South will disappear
from the civilized world just as surely and certainly as Haiti did in
1804.” Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina trotted out numerous
notorious segregationists to testify before his Senate Judiciary
Committee. Leander Perez, the Democratic leader of a Louisiana parish,
invoked the Dunning school vision of Reconstruction. The bill “was worse
than the Thaddeus Stevens legislation during Reconstruction,” he said.
“It is inconceivable that Americans would do that to Americans.” The new
power of the Voting Rights Act empowered the Justice Department to
scrutinize any changes to voting laws and practices (so-called
preclearance) in seven states and other regions of the country with
especially notorious records of denying the franchise.
As
Ari Berman shows in his excellent book on the modern history of voter
suppression, “Give Us the Ballot,” the Voting Rights Act has enjoyed
many bipartisan renewals since the 1960s. Even the George W. Bush
administration, in 2006, after long trying with its Justice Department
to engineer new ways to restrict voting in the guise of protecting the
“integrity” of the ballot and firing U.S. attorneys who would not pursue
voter “fraud” cases that did not exist, buckled under huge public
pressure and supported the renewal of the act.
But
since Shelby v. Holder in 2013, in which the Supreme Court struck down
the crucial preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, and even
before that in other court challenges, a new era of Republican schemes
of voter suppression has emerged. The party, increasingly dominated by
conservative whites, has demonstrated not only its id but also its
deepest fear: the loss of power in the face of demographic change it
cannot control.
Mr. Trump’s newfound
opposition to mail-in voting (having voted by mail himself in the past),
claiming it is an invitation to fraud, is just one more example of the
latest turn in the Republican obfuscation of reality. An “epidemic of
fraud” stalked the Texas election system, claimed its attorney general
(now governor) Greg Abbott, in 2005. In 2011 and 2012 alone, before the
Shelby decision, 180 new voter
restrictions were created in 41 states, and 27 specific laws were
enacted in 19 states, nearly all controlled by Republicans.
Mr.
Berman called this process “Old Poison, New Bottles.” And he’s right:
Conservative voter suppression has always emerged in perceived crises
and necessitated new variations on old lies about the threats of blacks
or other marginalized groups to “civilization” or social “order,” or the
“liberty” of the powerful. After the 2008 election, the Republicans
paid lip service to a new inclusivity; the Obama coalition scared them.
But the Tea Party, financial conservatives and Trumpian white
nationalism have driven them instead into a spiral of moral panic and
voter suppression.
When Trump stumbled
into this history, he linked the crisis of his profound failure to
manage a pandemic with the recurring challenge of how to conduct fair
elections with the ballot truly free. We have many diseases to conquer.
Lies and cunning sustain voter suppression in its many forms. Only truth
and fierce political action can reveal and defeat it.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author, most recently, of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for history.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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NOW THAT YOU KNOW
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
REGISTER - VOTE - REGISTER - VOTE - REGISTER OTHERS - MAKE SURE THEY VOTE
Stay Blessed &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
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