Until everybody’s free
The first time Black men got the right to vote in this country was in 1867, in the former Confederate states. With the exceptions of Vermont and Maine, that right wasn’t guaranteed in the North until the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. Then it all went away when Reconstruction was abandoned with the Compromise of 1877. Nearly 90 years later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed us that right, again.
Some states had such a consistent history of racist voter suppression that their election processes were overseen by the federal government. That particular function of the Voting Rights Act, called “preclearance,” was eliminated by the 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder. Within hours of that ruling, states were already passing discriminatory election laws. Nearly 100 of these laws have been enacted since then, and as you might guess, the racial voting gap has grown.
The number of members each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives is determined by the census. But the census consistently undercounts Black people, so our representation in the House is diminished.
The Black population of California is almost four times larger than the entire population of Wyoming, our reddest state. Since both states get two U.S. senators, it’s easy to see how the Black vote gets diminished there, too.
Then there’s the fact our country is covered in racially gerrymandered maps, something the Supreme Court made a lot easier to do just last year. We shouldn’t forget the Electoral College, originally designed to dilute democracy in exchange for giving enslavers more political power. This is what gave Trump the presidency in 2016, against the will of the people, in case you forgot.
I’m not going to lie. It is more than a little maddening to know all of this while also knowing that white liberals think Trump is the only obstacle to a “free and fair election.” Especially because 80-to-90 percent of Black people always vote Democrat, and Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win a majority of white votes.
The suffering of Black people is such an acceptable part of the American Narrative that white people have no idea that oppressing us inevitably leads to their oppression by the same elites. One of history’s clearest examples of this is from what is called the “Progressive Era.”
In 1901, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Andrew Jackson Montague made a pledge. Not only would he “exclude the idle, shiftless and illiterate of the negro race” from voting, but also, “no white man will be disenfranchised” in the process. That same year, James Taylor Ellyson, chairman of Virginia’s Democratic Party, pledged to change the state constitution to “take away from the negro the right to vote, and, at the same time preserve to the white men of the Commonwealth their right of suffrage.”
John Goode Jr., a former Confederate soldier and politician elected to preside over Virginia’s Constitutional Convention, joined them. “The Democratic party is pledged in its platform to eliminate the ignorant and worthless negro as a factor from the politics of this state without taking the right of suffrage from a single white man,” he announced, “and speaking for my colleagues in the convention, I solemnly declare to you that they will keep that pledge to the letter.”
A few weeks later, Montague won the governorship with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Then he, Ellyson and Goode carefully amended the Virginia Constitution to include voter restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests, and by 1904, Black votes in Virginia had declined by 90 percent.
Also, the white vote declined by 50 percent.
The elite vote remained intact.
The 24th Amendment ended poll taxes and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended literacy tests, but the bigots didn’t stop. They worked around new laws, bending bureaucracy to target specific voters, just like Trump’s new SAVE Act. The president is attempting to restrict mail-in ballots, ban ranked-choice voting for federal elections and impose voter ID requirements that could disenfranchise millions of citizens.
Mainers understand how wrong this is. Sixty-four percent of us rejected a similar proposal at the polls last November. Unfortunately and predictably, Susan Collins yet again disagrees with the majority of Mainers: she supports the SAVE Act.
“We have to show a license or some sort of ID when we board an airplane, when we buy an alcoholic beverage, when we stay at a hotel,” Collins said, apparently unable to discern the difference between her daily itinerary and a right guaranteed by the fucking Constitution.
As of this writing, it’s still unclear whether the Save Act will pass the Senate. Regardless, the far-right will continue trying to destroy democracy. When you see these laws and rulings, don’t forget what Fannie Lou Hamer said: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
