Monday, December 27, 2021

A Liberal Dose, Dec. 23, 2021 "What's the Big Deal about Voter ID?"

 


A Liberal Dose

December 23, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“What’s the Big Deal about Voter ID?”

 

I spent the last seven columns describing the history of voting in America. It was details everyone should know, but it was also written to provide context for what I’m writing next, which is a brief look at voting problems in the present. You can’t understand the present without understanding the past. If you want to refresh your memory, you can see the previous columns at SpartaLive.com or at my blogsite, tnwordsmith.blogspot.com.

So, let’s talk about voter ID, something that has become a hotly debated topic this past decade. The first time I heard about it as an issue was in 2005, at a Southern History conference. I met a man who had been a civil rights lawyer in Georgia since the 1960s, and was about to retire. He was angry about that state crafting a voter ID law, and warned that other conservative states would do the same in coming years -and that it was one of the biggest civil rights challenges coming around the bend, one which could undo years of work.

My reaction was probably the same one many of you would have, or have had. What’s the big deal about Voter ID, I asked. That doesn’t seem like a problem. You need ID to do practically anything nowadays. And wouldn’t it prevent fraud?

Almost all the states with voter ID laws lean conservative. The reason they give is to prevent voter fraud, which sounds reasonable. But there is absolutely no empirical evidence of widespread voter fraud. When you do something to address a problem that is not really a problem… that is not really the problem you are addressing, it is a cover up.

11% of adult Americans don’t have a driver’s license or other government-issued ID… but 25% of black Americans don’t. Why not? Many live in large cities, where a car -a big expense for a poor person -is not necessary. Now, going to GET an ID -even if the ID itself is free -costs time and money. Sometimes an applicant has to travel a considerable distance (and they don’t have a car). In order to get the ID you have to have a lot of paperwork- which often does cost money to get. Travel and long lines mean the process could take several hours. If you have ever been among the working poor (and I have), missing a day of work might mean not being able to pay your bills. Altogether, the process could cost a poor person $100 or more. Therefore, voter ID laws suppress voter turnout among poor people.

Remember our earlier column about how voting laws during the Jim Crow era suppressed the black vote by making it expensive to do so? And how that was an end-around to suppress black turnout without mentioning the word “race”?

Sound farfetched? In 2012, a GOP leader in Pennsylvania said, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.” Literally the day after the Supreme Court took away the Voting Rights Act restriction on formerly segregated states changing voter laws without federal approval (in 2013), North Carolina issued a voting law that courts have repeatedly struck down, saying it specifically targets black voters. Additionally, records were discovered which showed that Republican NC legislators had approved a study of voting habits in black neighborhoods, and specifically curtailed only the voting procedures frequently used there. In addition to the Voter ID element, some states have closed polling places, making it necessary to take a longer trip and wait in line perhaps all day to vote… with similar tactics for sites to obtain an ID. Maybe this is not about race as much as suppressing votes in Democratic districts, but the effect is the same.

What if every state with voter ID laws made getting them, and voting, easier instead of harder? More sites, free transportation? But they don’t.

Why?

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   



Thursday, December 16, 2021

A Liberal Dose, December 16, 2021 "Voting History Part 7- the Civil Rights Era"

 


A Liberal Dose

December 16, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“History of Voting, Part 7: The Civil Rights Era”


Read PART 1

Read PART 2

Read PART 3

Read PART 4

Read PART 5

Read PART 6

 

Last time, we talked about voting rights in the Jim Crow South and the fact that, via a combination of local laws that circumvented the 15th Amendment and physical violence or intimidation, most African Americans (and some poor white people) were not allowed to vote in Southern states. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, civil rights activists had been struggling to end segregation, but by the early 1960s they were focusing heavily on the right to vote. In Mississippi in 1962, only around 6% of eligible black voters were registered to vote (despite being one-third of the state’s population). Several civil rights groups came together under the umbrella of a newly formed coalition, The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), to change that. The “federated organizations” in question were the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), led by MLK; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snik”); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), who had organized the first “freedom rides” in 1947.

COFO embarked on a ten-week project known as “Freedom Summer,” in which they endeavored to register as many black voters in Mississippi as possible. The work was done by a combination of local African American activists and allies, black and white, from around the country. They were opposed by groups like the White Leagues and the Ku Klux Klan, by many white locals who may or may not have been affiliated with those organizations (and who frequently described the civil rights workers as “trash”), and by state and local government officials. Before the summer was out, over a thousand COFO volunteers had been arrested, 80 had been beaten, and 30 churches and 37 black-owned homes and businesses had been bombed or burned down.

On June 21, 1964, three young men who were engaged in voter registration work were arrested by a sheriff’s deputy who was also a Klansman. They were James Chaney, a local black man, and two young Jewish volunteers from New York City, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. They were released from jail after dark, whereupon they were ambushed by Klansmen, abducted, and murdered. It took weeks to find their bodies; while combing the swamps for them, searchers found the bodies of 8 other murdered black males, killed recently.

It is a sad commentary, but a truth, that the murder of two white students from New York attracted a lot more media attention than the murders of nine black men from Mississippi. Press coverage of the incidents drew the country’s attention to the lack of voting rights African Americans still suffered in the South -and the country was still reeling from the events of the previous late spring/summer (1963). From May to September of that year, TV viewers across the country had seen Bull Connor using attack dogs on black children in Birmingham, Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was shot dead in his driveway, and four little girls were killed in a church bombing (also in Birmingham). People were calling for something to be done.

And the next year, something was: Congress passed, and LBJ signed into law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The VRA expanded the federal government’s ability to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments. It outlawed literacy tests or any similar methods, and prohibited state and local governments from passing voting laws that disadvantaged minorities. It also specified a special status for all states that had allowed any such disadvantaging techniques in the previous five years (to be revisited regularly) -which were mostly in the South and West. In such states, no changes to local or state laws about voting could be made without the approval of the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. district court in Washington, DC. That last item protected minorities and greatly expanded their (constitutionally guaranteed) access to the ballot.

Until a Supreme Court decision in 2013.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.


A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE  

Thursday, December 9, 2021

A Liberal Dose, Dec. 9, 2021: "History of Voting Part 6: The Jim Crow South"

 


A Liberal Dose

December 9, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“History of Voting, Part 6: The Jim Crow South”


 Read PART 1

Read PART 2

Read PART 3

Read PART 4

Read PART 5

 

Last time, we talked about voting and Reconstruction, and how the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments freed slaves, made them citizens, and guaranteed their right to vote. This added half-a-million black men to the voter rolls, and led to the election of 2,000 black men to public office in the South. Federal troops were on hand during that period to enforce the law.

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, though, those troops were withdrawn. State and local governments then had free rein to adjust their voting laws, while violence and intimidation prevented black Southerners from exercising their rights. Lynching became commonplace, with no legal action against the killers. Historians call the period between 1877 and the 1920s The Nadir, or low point, in African American history. Worse than slavery? In many ways, yes. During slavery, any random white person on the street could not kill a black person because they didn’t like their looks and face no consequences -because, horrible as it is, they would have been destroying a wealthy person’s property. White people who murdered freed slaves during Reconstruction had to hope they didn’t get caught by the federal authorities, because they would possibly face a military tribunal. But in the Jim Crow era, black people could be killed on a whim and, even if the killer was arrested, an all-white jury would almost never convict him.

Local and state governments, starting in the 1890s (when segregation became the norm), could look for loopholes in the 15th amendment, which said voting rights can’t be denied because of race. New laws were passed which, although they did not specifically mention race, targeted black voters. Poll taxes required a payment to vote, and most black citizens had little money (this was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court -much later). Literacy laws required you to pass a reading test to vote -it had been illegal to teach slaves to read, and few freed people could. Wouldn’t these laws also affect poor whites? Potentially, but poll workers were often selective about who they applied the laws to, and there was a “grandfather clause” -even if you were illiterate and poor, if your grandfather had been a registered voter in the state you could be, too. This excluded almost all black people.

Because all these tactics did not specifically mention race, they had “plausible deniability” to claim they did not violate the 15th amendment… but it was an “open secret” what the reasons for them were. Politician James Vardaman said in 1890, “In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the peculiarities of the Negro… when that device fails, we will resort to something else.” Alabama delegate John Knox said in 1901, “The convention’s goal is to establish white supremacy in the State, within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution.”

Add to those legal tactics the prevalent violence against black people, and you get a predictable end result. By 1940, in some Deep South states only 2% of eligible black people were registered to vote. Voting could get you killed, after all, and the deck was so stacked that your vote probably wouldn’t be counted anyhow.

Courts of the time often upheld these laws. There is a great new book out, “Justice Deferred”, that tracks that phenomenon. It is co-written by my mentor Orville Vernon Burton (one of the country’s top scholars on Reconstruction and civil rights) and Armand Derfner, and I recommend it highly. I also recommend Burton’s book “The Age of Lincoln.”

This, then, is the situation that existed in the South at the end of WWII. Black people were guaranteed their rights, including voting, by those constitutional amendments -but in reality, they were blocked from exercising them by corrupt local and state laws tailored specifically to exclude them, using whatever constitutional loopholes possible.

For the rest of this series of columns, we will bring it to the present.

 

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE  

 

 


Thursday, December 2, 2021

A Liberal Dose, December 2, 2021 "Voting History part 5: Reconstruction"

 


A Liberal Dose

December 2, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“History of Voting, Part 5: Reconstruction”

 Read PART 1

Read PART 2

Read PART 3

Read PART 4


Last week we talked about the Reconstruction Amendments. Now we’re going to look at how they affected the voting rights of African Americans. The 13th Amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865 (the Civil War had ended in April), ended slavery. President Andrew Johnson (of Tennessee) had initiated a Reconstruction program that was remarkably conciliatory to Southern states, which did not abridge the voting rights of former Confederates and allowed them to reinstate their local and state governments -this led to, essentially, the same people being in charge as had been before the war, and every Southern state drew up “black codes” to control the newly freed back population. For example, black workers were required to call their employer “master” and were forbidden to quit their job without the employer’s permission. Any who did so would be hunted down by “negro catchers” and forced to return. Children could be forcibly taken from their parents and apprenticed out until adulthood. African Americans were not allowed to buy alcohol or bear arms, could be publicly beaten for insolence to a white person, were not allowed out after dark without papers from their employer, and were required by law to work from dawn to dusk. They were not allowed to vote.

In other words, they were still slaves, except in name.

Many Northerners were outraged by this turn of events. It felt like the war had been fought for nothing, as the South seemed to have mostly returned to the pre-war status quo. This motivated voters in the 1866 midterm elections to turn out many Democrats and moderate Republicans, and sweep in a large number of what were called “radical Republicans” who were determined to impose stricter rules on the South. The radical Republicans gained a supermajority, enabling them to overturn any vetoes President Johnson made (they also impeached him, though he managed to stay in office -but his power was broken.) They imposed much a much stricter regimen of Reconstruction, keeping the former Confederate states under military occupation and martial law -and enforcing the newly acquired rights of the freed slaves, including the right to vote.

The 14th Amendment, ratified on July 8, 1868, declared that everyone born in the United States was a citizen, and therefore had all the rights of a citizen. Therefore, in the presidential election of that year, African Americans could vote. In most Southern states, though, any white men who had served in the Confederate government or as officers in the Confederate military could not vote, or hold public office. This lasted for several years. Not only was Republican U. S. Grant elected president in 1868, but all through the South black men were voted into public office: as magistrates, city councilmen, state legislators -and several were elected to Congress. Jefferson Davis’s old Mississippi U. S. senate seat was won by a black man named Hiram Revels. Even beyond the advances made by African Americans, Republicans in general won big throughout the South.

It is important to remember that, at that time, Democrats were the more conservative party and radical Republicans were what we today would call liberal. Most white Southerners did not like Republicans, and especially did not like seeing them get elected. Paramilitary groups sprang up to prevent Republicans from voting -groups like the Red Shirts, the White League, and the Ku Klux Klan. They focused mostly on black voters, but also hated white Republicans -whether they were “carpetbaggers” (transplanted northerners) or “scalawags” (southern-born but supportive of Reconstruction and black rights). You know their tactics. They would intimidate people -especially black people -by burning their property (burning crosses didn’t come until the 1900s), beating people up, and often committing murder. In 1871, Congress passed “the Ku Klux Klan Act”, further empowering the federal government to enforce the 14th amendment and the more recent 15th (February 3, 1870) -to protect black voters.

Until 1877, when everything changed.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE