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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJohn Lewis: How we won, and are losing, the right to vote
I hope this isn't a duplicate. I have been away for a few days, but didn't see it when I returned.
With all of our disagreements about candidates and issues, I think surely we can all agree that the erosion of voting rights in AfAm communities is paramount in importance for this and all elections; indeed for the future of our country. We cannot and must not allow the right to vote to be destroyed by the republicans.
This post is review written by Congressman Lewis of the book Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman. I hope you will take the time to read the entire review because a few paragraphs cannot begin to do it justice.
Lewis quotes from MLK's speech in 1957 at the first national civil rights rally on the Washington Mall:
And in the Southern Baptist oratorical tradition, King added a powerful refrain: Give us the ballot, he called out, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. . . . Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the Southern states governors who . . . have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.
snip to Lewis' review:
Berman describes two strategies undertaken to denigrate and dilute the voting act. The first sought to undermine public confidence in applying any federal solution to fix a centuries-old injustice. It did so by likening states creation of districts with majorities of minority voters to a kind of congressional quota system. Opponents began to suggest that the advent of these districts assured that a fixed number of congressional seats would always be held by minorities. Policing fairness was a role the public was willing for government to play. But overseeing a system of favoritism through quotas was taboo.
Also, certain hired guns were placed inside the Justice Department, nurtured within academia and tasked with complicating the success of the act. As Berman tells it, Hans von Spakovsky, a George W. Bush appointee to the civil rights division of the Justice Department, was assigned specifically to impede the voting acts enforcement. Harvard-educated Abigail Thernstrom, Berman writes, was encouraged to devote her research career to the creation of an academic framework for the neutralization of the law.
The second salvo, perhaps the more insidious, turned the act on its head. Begun in the Reagan years, this effort seemingly defended the law but with the unspoken motive of destroying it. Justice Department officials under Reagan promoted the maximum use of gerrymandering by the states to string minority communities together, ostensibly in step with the tenets of the act. Oddly shaped, winding districts were formed to link communities of color, sometimes across many counties. This increased the numbers of black elected officials, but their origin was part of a long-term strategy to isolate minorities inside the Democratic Party and drive white voters into the Republican Party.
Well worth the read. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/john-lewis-how-we-won-and-are-losing-the-right-to-vote/2015/09/10/5f77e644-50bc-11e5-933e-7d06c647a395_story.html
Gothmog
(143,998 posts)Voting rights are under attack in the US