No, this isn’t really Jim Crow

Requiring an ID for absentee voters is not really racist. It’s not “Jim Crow 2.0.” It’s not a modern form of voter repression or intimidation.

The original Jim Crow — in case you’ve forgotten or were never taught — was America’s 70-year regional “experiment” in apartheid. From about 1890 to 1965, the Democrats controlling 17 oneparty states below the Mason-Dixon Line created and perpetuated a separate, unequal and parallel black society.

The web site of the American Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee has a shocking list of the brutal tactics regularly used by the white people in charge of the “Old Jim Crow” to preserve their power and keep blacks (and poor whites) from voting.

Violence was common. Blacks who tried to vote or even register were threatened, beaten, and killed. Their families were also harmed and sometimes their homes were burned.

There were literacy tests, property tests, poll taxes and frequent purges of the voting rolls. Former prisoners — who were disproportionately black — were not allowed to vote.

Most important, blacks who were brave enough to risk voting couldn’t vote in all-white Democrat primaries — the only elections that really mattered in the South when there were so few Republican voters.

The “Old Jim Crow” era of legalized segregation is said to have ended in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed and blacks in the South could vote without fear.

The American Black Holocaust Museum does a good job of showing how unjust, unequal and demeaning every aspect of life was for blacks in the “Old Jim Crow.”

The museum thinks felons should be able to vote and complains that black and Latino voters are often still unfairly purged from voter rolls. But at least the American Black Holocaust Museum has the good sense not to claim that the “New Jim Crow” so many Democrats see in every corner of America today is anything close to the “Old Jim Crow” on steroids.