Challenges to Black voting rooted in past
GOP legislatures’ tactics recall Reconstruction
After a turbulent election season, fueled by unfounded allegations of voter fraud, Republican lawmakers are laboring to rewrite voting laws in ways that would restrict access to the polls. Though House Democrats pushed through a voting rights bill Wednesday that would make voting more accessible, critics worry GOP tactics could suppress the vote in ways that hark back to Reconstruction.
“On one side, you have concerns about fraud prompting restrictions on voting, and on the other side, you have concerns about turnout prompting a focus on greater access to the polls,” said Rebecca Green, co-director of William and Mary Law School’s Election Law Program.
Since the beginning of the year, Republican-controlled legislatures have introduced a cascade of restrictive voting measures:
■ An Arizona legislator introduced a bill Feb. 2 that would mandate everyone vote in person who is physically able and severely reduce the number of voting centers in some counties.
■ A New Hampshire bill introduced Jan. 18 would permit election officials to remove voters from rolls based on data provided by other states, a practice federal courts ruled violates the National Voter Registration Act.
■ A Mississippi bill would purge voters from the rolls if they failed to respond to a notice within 30 days with proof of citizenship.
■ In Georgia, a longtime Republican stronghold that went blue in November’s presidential election, House representatives approved a sweeping measure Monday that would restrict the use of ballot drop boxes, make ID requirements for absentee voting more stringent and prohibit the distribution of food and water to people waiting in line to vote.
The bill, which heads to the state Senate, aims to limit early voting on weekends, which would stifle “Souls to the Polls,” a widespread voter mobilization campaign among the state’s Black churches.
State Rep. Barry Fleming, who sponsored the bill, said its purpose is to ensure that someone’s vote cannot be stolen. “It is our due diligence in this legislature to constantly update our laws to try to protect the sanctity of the vote,” the Republican said last month.
To critics, the barrage of legislation harks back to the post-Reconstruction era when white lawmakers, threatened by a shift in political power, tried to stymie the Black vote with new laws designed to restrict access to the polls.
“When you have a huge turnout, as we had in this last election, the question becomes how do you suppress that turnout,” said Marion Orr, a public policy professor at Brown University,
The language in these new voting laws does not openly target a specific group of people, but the laws’ implications disproportionately impact people of color, Orr said.
Voter suppression
After the Civil War, Black men emerged from slavery with an unprecedented amount of political freedom.
The passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which gave Black men the right to vote, ushered in a wave of Black politicians. Over the next two decades, roughly 20 Black men served in the U.S. Congress – all in Southern states.
White supremacy groups responded with violence and intimidation to keep Black people from the polls.
This newfound political participation and activism sparked a series of laws that stripped away African Americans’ ability to vote for decades to come.
“They saw all of these Black politicians and moved quickly to suppress this new voting force,” Orr said.
During his opening address at the 1890 Mississippi state convention, where restrictions to Black voting rights were first discussed, President Solomon S. Calhoun did not mince words about the gathering’s purpose.
“We came here to exclude the Negro,” he said. “Nothing short of this will answer.”
Mississippi passed laws that required a poll tax and mandated literacy tests. The state’s voter suppression strategy became the playbook for other Southern states. Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and others followed its lead.
Several states instituted a grandfather clause as a loophole for white men who could not afford the poll tax or pass a literacy test.
Under this clause, men whose fathers or grandfathers could vote before the Civil War were exempt from the stricter voting requirements. These new voting requirements made it nearly impossible for Black lawmakers to be elected, even in Southern states with dense African American populations.
Voter protection
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and provided federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50% of nonwhite people were registered to vote. The attack on voting rights protesters marching across Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge in Alabama on March 7, 1965, was a factor in passage of the act.
Election experts said a Supreme Court decision in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the act by freeing states and municipalities with a history of racial discrimination from being required to seek the federal government’s approval to change their voting laws.
The backlash from that decision was immediate and predictable, said Bobby Hoffman, the American Civil Liberties Union democracy division’s deputy director.
States quickly tightened voter identification requirements, curtailed early voting, purged voters from voting rolls and shuttered hundreds of polling locations.
Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas introduced stricter voter ID requirements. Florida and Virginia attempted to purge thousands of people from their voter rolls.
Within hours of the Shelby v. Holder decision, Greg Abbott, the state attorney general, announced stricter voting requirements.
Abbott’s actions and the surge of voting law proposals worry lawmakers such as Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus: “I think what we’re seeing is the most serious attempt across the country to restrict the rights of certain Americans to vote since the days of Jim Crow.”