It’s time to think the unthinkable

By Bruce Dixon, BC Editor

"Don’t put that out there" is the admonition delivered to
folks impolite enough to talk about bad things which might
happen but have not yet come to pass, as if mere discussion or
consideration of some awful possibility makes it more likely.
We at BC understand politeness. But failing to recognize, to
examine and to understand unpleasant possibilities before they
become devastating realities is worse than impolite. It’s
foolish.

The unpleasant truths of this political moment are:

1. Renewable portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA)
seem increasingly likely to die in the Congress this session.

2. Recent Supreme Court decisions indicate the court is
inclined to "interpret" permanent provisions of the Voting
Rights Act into meaninglessness.

3. Democrats in the US. House and Senate seem disinclined to
fight very hard for the voting rights of blacks, and;

4. With no superpower rival on the international scene and the
domestic mass movement disbanded and sent home a generation
ago, the powers that be face little or no meaningful
consequences at home or abroad for killing the VRA.

Significance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

The University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Anderson and Jeffrey
Jones, in their excellent web offering titled The Geography of
Race in the US, identify five types of direct
disenfranchisement addressed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These are violence against those who would register or vote,
electoral fraud, poll taxes, literacy tests, restrictive and
arbitrary registration practices, and white-only primary
elections.

The Civil War ended slavery, but left many questions
unsettled. The Reconstruction governments, which opened up
access to education and a measure of equality before the law
to former slaves, and which allowed blacks to vote and hold
office were swept aside in a wave of postwar violence and
bloodshed that southern whites called redemption. This was the
birth of the Ku Klux Klan.

Hundreds of black businesses and schools were torched, their
white and black teachers killed or driven away. Armed gangs
of whites confronted black voters at polling places throughout
the region. Ballot boxes were stolen, stuffed and destroyed.
Black elected officials in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana were evicted from office by
armed whites or murdered routinely and with impunity. Federal
courts of the era refused to enforce any right to take part in
federal elections, and ruled that since participation in local
elections wasn’t a right guaranteed by the federal government
that was out of their hands too, freeing southern states to
ignore armed violence against black voters if they chose, or
to erect their own legal barriers against them as long as
these barriers were not explicitly race-specific in nature.

Georgia was first to adopt the poll tax in 1871, and in 1877
made the tax cumulative, which meant that if you were old
enough to vote ten years ago, before you could vote this year,
you had to prove that all your poll taxes for the past
decades, were paid along with interest and penalties. In a few
years every former Confederate state adopted the poll tax.
Since most blacks were sharecroppers who saw very little cash
in the course of a year, this measure alone cut the black vote
by half. States made registration inconvenient and
inaccessible, introduced felony disenfranchisement for
offenses blacks were deemed more likely to commit than whites,
implemented literacy tests and dozens of other measures.Â
Courts conveniently ruled that the Democratic Party, which was
the White Man’s party in the South of that time, was a private
and non-governmental organization, could explicitly ban
nonwhite voters from its primary elections, and the whites-
only primary also became a southern staple.

The poll tax was removed by constitutional amendment in the
early 1960s, but the rest of this array of impediments,
including mob violence with impunity, were still in force in
large parts of the southern US until passage of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. The VRA made it an offense punishable by
imprisonment to conspire or act to intimidate or threaten
black voters, or engage in many practices which had been
customary for generations of southern officials. The VRA also
required that ballot materials in areas with large numbers of
voters whose English proficiency is limited, such as many
Asian American and Latino communities, be printed in those
languages too. And most tellingly of all, any changes in
voting or election law which affected the votes of African
Americans in those states which had openly and explicitly
carried out a public policy of excluding or limiting black
participation, would have to be approved by Justice Department
officials before they could be put into effect.

So large was the segment of America’s white ruling elite that
objected to the VRA that the last two provisions could only be
attached to it on a temporary and renewable basis. It is this
renewal which is before Congress now.

The Balance of Forces in 1965, and Today

Passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was no easy trick, and
required a unique lineup of forces quite unlike anything on
the horizon today.

In the legislative process, the VRA had as its chief sponsor
the president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. An
enthusiastic supporter of the VRA, and former Senate Majority
Leader during most of the 1950s Johnson was famously effective
at bribing, cajoling, persuading and when necessary
threatening legislators to get his way.

A key external factor behind a portion of the US elite’s
embrace of the cause of black voting rights was the presence
on the international scene of a superpower rival to the US,
the Soviet Union. The USSR was a global competitor of the US,
and the persistent denial of black civil and voting rights
placed the US at a severe disadvantage, especially with Asian
and African people who had their own all too recent and bitter
memories of racist exploitation and colonialism at the hands
of European powers. Ending Jim Crow, for a piece of the US
elite, was a Cold War priority.

And spurring presidents, judges, legislators, the media and
pundits of the time was a vast, decentralized and often
illegal mass movement with inroads and a presence in virtually
every black community across the land. Though many of the
movement’s principals espoused Ghandhian nonviolence, not all
did, and an even greater number had a healthy disrespect for
the law. The willingness to encourage masses of people to
step outside the law when the occasion demanded it was in
fact, central to Dr. Martin Luther King’s version of
nonviolence.

"We contend that the law that is broken must be broken openly,
cheerfully, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the
penalty. I submit that any individual who disobeys a law that
conscience tells him is unjust and is willing to pay the
penalty by staying in jail, if necessary in order to arouse
the conscience of the community concerning the injustice of
that law, is at that moment expressing the very highest
respect for the law."

It was common, for instance, for mobilizations of the 1960s to
empty a town or a city’s high schools to put bodies in the
street in defiance of the writ of judges, legislators and
local sheriffs. The Freedom Movement, as most of its
knowledgeable actors called it, was the engine behind the end
of Jim Crow and the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1968.

The whole lineup stands in stark contrast to the political
scene of today. In 1965, the pro-voting rights forces had
the president, and that president had the congress and the
courts. Lyndon Johnson’s dire prediction that the white
South would go Republican for at least a generation in
response to the limited triumphs of the Freedom Movement has
come true. Republicans have replaced Democrats as the White
Man’s Party of the South, and southern blacks, many of whom
could not vote at all 40 years ago, are a majority or near
majority of southern Democrats. In some states they are
nearly all the Democrats.

Instead of an activist, pro-civil rights president we have
George W. Bush, whose abysmal record and willingness to pander
to racism at every opportunity speaks for itself. Republican
leaders in the House and Senate earlier this summer were
shouted down in their own caucus by legislators who opposed
the VRA, causing their leaders to table it for the time being.
Whether Republican leaders will bring it up again, and in what
form is anybody’s guess. Whether they will be willing to put
the screws to reluctant Republicans to vote for it is even
more doubtful. For their part, savvy Democrats like Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi calculated that yanking the names of all
the Congress’s black members from co- sponsorship improved its
chances for passage. But even after removing the offending
faces of black legislators from co- sponsorship, no white
national Democrat has been willing to step up and be the face
and point person for this legislation, telling Americans why
we still need a VRA.

In 1965, at least some of the federal judiciary supported the
cause of black voting rights. But no more. Rightists have
been campaigning against suspected liberals on the bench since
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The radical rightist
Federalist Society is widely believed to have exercised a near
monopoly of clerkships for federal judges for some time now.
And federal appellate judges have lifetime tenure. Hence we
can expect the courts to be increasingly hostile to the cause
of black voting rights for the foreseeable future.

Nowadays, the US has no rival on the world stage. American
politicians openly proclaim their disrespect for international
law or international anything, and their disdain for world
opinion. Ignorant politicos who ascribe foreign criticism to
jealousy, and "they hate our freedom" are treated as though
they talk sense.

And what of the 1960s mass movement, which could turn out
crowds, which cranked up demonstrations, boycotts and unlawful
mass actions in hundreds of cities and towns north and south?
Dr. King died believing that mass action had definitely not
outlived its usefulness. But black leaders after his death
called what amounted to a unilateral truce, and disbanded the
mass movement. The fire beneath the feet of judges, media and
politicians and the white and black elite was extinguished.

As BC co-publisher Glen Ford reminded us in a January 2005
cover story.

Now that Blacks had the vote, North and South, some sectors of
African Americans decided it was time to get out of the
streets so that a few Blacks might occupy high political
offices and corporate suites. The masses would be summoned
every few years at election time, or to celebrate the latest
entrepreneurial acquisition or corporate promotion among the
thin slice of Blacks who had, indeed, been set "free at last"
by the civil rights gains of King"s unfinished movement.

With few or no visible powerful advocates in any branch of
government, without much support in the corporate mass media,
with American authorities determined to ignore world opinion
and with the mass movement sent home a generation ago, it may
be time for black America to contemplate where we will be by
the end of this year, with a severely weakened Voting Rights
Act. We may be about to see one of the seminal gains of the
1945-1965 Freedom Movement rolled back.

Some have said that we marched in the Sixties and got the VRA,
we marched in the Seventies and the war went away. We should
march again. That’s probably true. But the custom nowadays is
for marches to look more like picnics, and for everybody to go
home the next day. That’s not how it worked in Belarus or the
Philippines and it’s not now it worked here forty years ago.
Back in the day, people stayed in the street till something
changed. A march is one day. A movement continues till it
obtains a victory or something changes. Or until misguided
leaders send it home.

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