As the United States commemorates the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. today’s civil rights advocates face the reality that, despite years of increased public attention on racial injustice, they are likely to fall short of their goal of improving “voting access” for minorities.
Last week, King’s family requested that celebrations of the civil rights leader’s legacy be suspended this year unless Congress passes legislation to expand voting rights in the United States.
Democrats have championed legislation that would give Washington a stronger voice in how federal elections are administered in each of the 50 U.S. states. While the federal government does not control elections at the state level, the new federal requirements could affect them, since they are often conducted in tandem. Among other provisions, the two Democratic-sponsored bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, aim to undo laws passed by Republican-led states that limit the methods and opportunities to cast ballots.
Democrats and many civil rights activists say the state laws will disadvantage minority voters and accuse Republicans of thinly veiled voter suppression. Republicans reject the charge and insist their goal is to protect the integrity of elections and prevent voter fraud.
Stalled in the U.S. Senate for months, hopes of passing the Freedom to Vote Act appeared to be extinguished last week. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, both Democrats, said that while they support reforming election laws, they will not vote to change Senate rules to pass those reforms with the exclusive backing of Democrats.
A change in Senate rules would be necessary because no Republicans support the voting bill. Under House rules, Republicans can block most legislation even if the Democratic majority supports it.
On Friday, during a live interview with The Washington Post, Martin Luther King III bitterly criticized Sinema and Manchin’s position.
“History is not going to judge them … the way they would perhaps like to be remembered. History is looking them in the face to say, ‘When it came time to make sure that democracy was preserved, what did they do?”‘” he said.
How did we get here?
Voting rights did not return to the top of the Democratic priority list overnight. The journey of civil rights issues to the forefront of public discourse in the U.S. has been years in the making.
The rise of the movement Black Lives Matter after multiple murders highly publicized killings of unarmed black men by police officers between 2014 and 2019 galvanized many Americans behind the idea that America still had a long way to go to achieve racial equality.
At the same time, the launch of Project 1619 of. The New York Timesan effort to retell U.S. history by focusing more on the role of slavery, highlighted the centuries-old racial inequalities in the U.S. So did a movement to tear down many monuments to the Confederacy, which fought to preserve slavery during the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65.
Rejection, sometimes violent.
The increased focus on racial justice in the U.S. has not come without a virulent backlash. White supremacist groups have become more active and vocal across the country. In 2017, a group of white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia. During related protests, a white supremacist activist drove a car into a group of counter-protesters and killed a young woman.
It was also difficult for many to disassociate Donald Trump’s presidency from the battle over racial inequality. Trump came to political power by promoting the falsehood that President Barack Obama, the first black president, was not a natural-born American and that his presidency was therefore illegitimate. (By law, the president must be a U.S. citizen by birth).
Trump also called for violent repression of the movement. Black Lives Matter, and at one point sent federal agents to break up a peaceful but boisterous protest near the White House. He also reportedly demeaned African and black-led countries, stating that the U.S. should not accept immigrants from them.
At the same time, a movement arose on the political right to restrict the teaching of racially sensitive subjects in public schools. The topics opposed by the protesters were abbreviated as “critical race theory,” even though that subject is a relatively obscure area of legal scholarship that is never taught in elementary or secondary schools.
Election 2020
The focus on voting rights has always been an important element of the civil rights movement in the United States, but it became especially acute in 2021, after minority voters played a major role in electing Joe Biden as president in the 2020 election and helped give Democrats control of the House and Senate.
Across the country, minority voters turned out in record numbers. This was especially true in states like Georgia, a Republican stronghold, where a campaign to register new minority voters and get them to the polls resulted in the state voting for a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992, and sent two Democrats to the Senate for the first time in a generation, giving the party control of that chamber.
After the election, the defeated President Trump insisted that the election had been “rigged,” a falsehood he has continued to repeat and echoed by many of his supporters, including many state legislators.
In the months that followed, many Republican-controlled states passed restrictive new election legislation that will make it harder for minority groups, including non-English speakers and people with disabilities, to vote in future elections than in 2020, when measures to ease voting during the coronavirus pandemic helped drive record turnout.
In some cases, states did more than reverse pandemic-related voting accommodations. Some created new provisions allowing state legislatures to intervene in vote count certification, established new rules allowing poll watchers to challenge individual voters, and put volunteer poll workers at risk of criminal prosecution for providing what, in years past, would have been routine election. assistance.
A common reaction
According to Carol Anderson, historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University, there is a long history in the United States of changing laws after African Americans exercise their freedom in a way that challenges power structures.
“What is happening is what always happens in the United States,” he told the Voice of America Anderson, bestselling author of the New York Times White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. “When we look at the 2020 election, where you had black people coming out and voting, willing to stand in line for 11 hours to vote, to fight for this democracy, the result was that Trump was removed from the White House and the Senate changed. The response to that was a white-rage policy of a series of voter suppression laws and a series of laws on how to handle election certification.”
Not so, according to Republicans, who say they are fighting federal overreach and accuse Democrats of trying to tip the electoral balance in their favor.
“This effort by liberal Democrats to take power away from states to run elections is not about voter enfranchisement, it’s about shifting power to benefit the liberal Democratic agenda,” tweeted Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently.
Amid the acrimony and on the eve of what appears to be a more somber Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, Anderson said she is confident that the fight for voting rights, and civil rights in general, will continue.
“We have an incredibly engaged civil society fighting for this democracy,” she said. “We have people who are litigating against these voter suppression laws. We have people who are registering people to vote by jumping over all the hurdles. We have people who are providing a citizen training school (…) It’s that civil society that has been absolutely pivotal in the fight for American democracy.”
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