Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
As we celebrate Juneteenth, we must fight voter suppression
Shortly after Juneteenth was signed into law as a federal holiday in June 2021, I pulled out a copy of my 1993 Fort Worth Star-Telegram Juneteenth opinion column. A group of 100 of Tarrant County’s Black women leaders (of which I was a part) was going to honor Opal Lee on July 18, and I decided to have the piece enlarged and framed to present to Opal that day.
I’d learned only a few years earlier that, as part of her Juneteenth advocacy, Opal had been handing out a copy of that piece to just about everyone she’d come across. A copy that one person showed me was virtually impossible to read, it being a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy … you get the idea.
Suffice to say, I was moved that Opal thought that much of my piece, the date error notwithstanding (it should have read 1865 instead of 1867 as the day that slaves in Texas learned they were free). I was proud to be able to present to Fort Worth’s own soldier of freedom — who, year after year, decade after decade, had pushed for Juneteenth to be made a national holiday — my small token of appreciation for her persistence and faith, when most of us thought the goal admirable but unattainable.
I thought about that as I watched the news coverage of President Joe Biden signing the Juneteenth legislation into law last year with Opal at his side beaming. Juneteenth is now this nation’s formal recognition that its slaves were freed from lawful bondage, and that is a really big deal.
But in the year since Juneteenth became a federal holiday, a lot has happened that is antithetical to the freedom that Juneteenth signifies. The most significant are the voter suppression (obstacles to voting) and voter subversion (disregarding votes cast) laws enacted by state legislatures.
I am disheartened by efforts to strip certain Americans of our right to have a say in who governs. These laws hark back to the 1890s, when newly freed Black American men were stripped of their freshly granted right to vote, ensured by the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1870.
The possible difference today, versus the 1890s? The talking point is “voting integrity,” coupled with the incarceration of Black voters. Back then it was “voter competency,” coupled with the lynching of Black Americans who dared to vote.
A close second to these voting suppression/subversion tactics is the Supreme Court’s impending reversal of Roe v. Wade — based on Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion leaked in May — that will strip women of the federally protected right to abortion and sanction state laws that, again, criminalize abortion.
Voting suppression/subversion laws, coupled with the reversal of Roe, will open the door to returning this country to a time when our laws — statutory and case law — sanctioned that Black Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Asian Americans and women of all hues had no rights to be respected.
The architects of this anti-freedom path are counting on supporters of freedom to be asleep at the wheel; to view each anti-freedom strategy in isolation; to try to rationalize each as something other than what it is; and to give its architects the benefit of the doubt.
This anti-freedom playbook also includes the old divide-and-conquer, aka “us-versus-them” tactics from the 1890s, used to dismantle the voting and economic coalitions southern Blacks and poor whites had formed.
Federal- and state-sanctioned Jim Crow segregation followed, remaining the laws of the land until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were signed into law. Here we are some 55 years hence, and it’s “deja vu all over again.”
To those who say I am histrionic, I say: Those who are uninformed or ill-informed about the past or blind to it are bound to repeat it.
So, as we observe and hopefully celebrate the second anniversary of this country’s Juneteenth holiday, an army of Opal Lees is needed. People who, like Opal, are clear-eyed about what is at stake. Persons who understand that all people of goodwill and conscience, regardless of race and gender, need to vote in November and make choices mindful that our freedom depends on it. Because it literally does.
At stake is democracy (having a say in who governs and the policies they enact, or not, into law) versus autocracy (where voting is a prop because it does not affect who remains in power).
I pray, literally, that we rise to the occasion and pay fitting tribute to the decades that Opal Lee (and others) advocated for honoring freedom. That we do so, in significant part, by taking time today to remind ourselves that freedom isn’t free and that we must pay for it in many ways — foremost with our responsible vote.
I pray especially that each of us recommits to the principle that freedom means equality and justice for all.
And for my shoutout to Opal Lee, our Grandmother of Juneteenth: Hats off for keeping alive the passion for Juneteenth that the entire United States of America now observes.