Voting Rights and Wrongs
Hiram Revels was the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate, where he represented Mississippi. A Republican elected in the Reconstruction years, Revels was born in North Carolina and decamped to Illinois and Indiana to obtain the education unattainable to him in the segregation-stained Fayetteville of his youth. Already an ordained minister and educator, Revels spent just a year in the Senate — he was appointed to finish the term of a senator who vacated his seat at the start of the Civil War — but spent it advocating for the integration of schools and railroads after the defeat of the Confederacy augured, deceptively, a renewed era in race relations. Ironically, in an attempt to pursue a post-Civil War détente with his white Southern brethren, Revels argued on behalf of a bill that would have guaranteed the franchise — and the right to hold office — to the disenfranchised members of the Confederacy.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, following a bruising ratification fight, was adopted on March 30, 1870. The language reads:
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
While the amendment was ostensibly aimed at granting black men the right to vote, the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s saw the passage of several discriminatory measures clearly aimed at weakening the statute. By 1894, Congress had repealed much of the law’s power, and by 1896, when the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson found “separate but equal” to be constitutional, there was only Justice John Marshall Harlan’s eloquent dissent:
“The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution in color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful….”
The Voting Rights Act, among other things, enshrined into federal law the ambitions of the 15th Amendment’s prohibition on voting discrimination and literacy tests. But in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder against the part of the law — Section 5 — stipulating a special enforcement provision in which a legal eye was kept on mainly southern regions of the country where the likelihood of continued discrimination loomed largest. Under Section 5, certain states and local governments were mandated to obtain federal “preclearance” (from the U.S. Attorney General or the U.S. district court of D.C.) for any changes to local or state voting laws in order to prevent said alterations from having a discriminatory effect.
56 years after Alabama troopers attacked the first group of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (notably the late civil rights icon and Congressman, John Lewis,) assaulting them with billy-clubs, whips and tear gas, and as blood-soaked images were televised to a horrified nation, voting rights across the South and the prospect of a renewed Voting Rights Act remain gloomy, if entirely in peril.
Nearly three years before the Shelby ruling, many Republican-dominated state legislatures in the South initiated a host of measures to combat an apparition, known as “voter fraud,” that included new voter ID laws, fewer voting sites and reduced numbers of voting days. In the absence of a viable preclearance formula post-Shelby, many of the states that historically defended Jim Crow — including but not limited to Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas — moved to institute even tighter new rules for voting. The results are heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts, and states, mainly below the Mason-Dixon line, where large black populations are represented statewide by white lawmakers exclusively. Impoverished minority communities, in other words, have been disenfranchised by bureaucratic and unconstitutional requirements for access to the ballot box.
In December 2019, Congress sought to restore the Voting Rights Act to its full effect, passing the Democratic controlled House with nearly unanimous Republican opposition. What’s more, Mitch McConnell refused to take up the legislation in the senate. As the measure sailed through the House, John Lewis proudly banged the gavel to wild applause.
We honor John Lewis’ legacy not simply through flowery, gushy tributes, but by our actions. In ridding our republic of the vile pestilence that is Trumpism, we commit ourselves to ensuring that we all believe that everyone, no matter their color, creed, national origin, gender or sexuality, has the right to the franchise. That’s the America in which John Lewis risked his life. And that’s the America for which we should all be fighting, not just now, but always.
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