Voting While Black
By Dominique Thomas
This essay has been very difficult for me to write.
As much as I would like to say that this current political moment does not scare me and confirm some of the worst fears I have had, I am afraid. I’m afraid because what is happening with voter suppression has happened before, and it has happened to African Americans before. Much of our history in the US has involved a constant struggle for our dignity, humanity, and rights. Through every stage, African Americans were disenfranchised in some way, and African Americans have had to use both electoral politics and social protest to enact social change.
Voter Suppression
Just before I started my new position in August, I lived in Decatur, Georgia, and I grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi. As many people are aware, Georgia is the site of a historic gubernatorial race with the potential to elect the first Black female governor of Georgia. Leading up to the election, there have been reports of voter suppression that disproportionately affects African American voters in the state. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is Stacey Abrams’ opponent, but he has refused to recuse himself of his role in charge of the voting process. Former President Jimmy Carter wrote Secretary Kemp asking him to cede oversight of the election to a neutral party. Thousands of voters were at risk of being disenfranchised with the closing of polling locations, particularly in Randolph county, which is 70% African American. There have also been reports of votes for candidate Abrams being switched to votes for Secretary Kemp.
Georgia was one of the states that had to gain federal approval for any changes made to their voting process due to the Voting Rights Act. This protection was put into place to prevent states from imposing discriminatory policies —such as poll taxes — that were intended to disenfranchise African Americans. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that these protections were no longer needed. It did not take long for many of those states to begin instituting strict voter ID laws, and reports began circulating that many polling centers were being shut down in predominantly low-income and/or African American communities. For many who were alive before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, they may have seen this scenario coming.
African Americans and Voting
African Americans have not always possessed the civil right to vote. The founding fathers (many of them slaveholders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) drafted a constitution in which only White men with land were eligible for citizenship and the right to vote. This obviously excluded African Americans, many of whom were the property owned by these White male citizens. This became an issue in terms of determining representation based on population. Slave states had large populations of non-citizens, so this had to be accounted for. The resulting 3/5 compromise counted each enslaved African as 3/5 person toward the population to determine elector votes in the Electoral College, even though this number of elector votes did not reflect the number of eligible voters. This heavily tilted power towards slave states to drive policy.
After the conclusion of the Civil War, Congress passed a series of civil rights legislation protecting African Americans (13th Amendment abolished slavery; Civil Rights Act of 1866 gave African Americans full citizenship [except due to incarceration]), but African Americans were not allowed to exercise their right to vote. Many ended up in similar scenarios to their recent enslavement such as sharecropping and convict leasing programs. Slave codes regulating enslaved Africans became Black codes regulating “free” African Americans. For example, Mississippi declared vagrant “anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run away [from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money careless, and…all other idle disorderly persons.” These violations were punishable by incarceration, further disenfranchising African Americans.
During a brief period of the Reconstruction era, African Americans were exercising their electoral power in their communities and electing representatives to their state governments. Public schools were established and literacy rates began to climb, but these gains would be short lived as Reconstruction was halted and Southern legislatures began instituting Jim Crow laws that further subordinated African Americans. Vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were informally deputized to keep Black populations disempowered and in terror and, in many cases, their ranks consisted of citizens, ministers, and lawyers. Segregated spaces were the norm and White-controlled Southern legislatures gave less funding and resources to the African American schools and communities.
When African Americans could not rely on electoral politics and voting to save them, they turned to resistance, just as they always have. Many of the changes toward progress have been pushed forward by the protest and resistance of everyday African Americans, not only the great leaders. The Civil Rights Movement, as most people know it, emerged from events such as the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycotts, and the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. Centered at this movement was the attainment of civil rights, especially voting rights. Resistance came in the form of protests, marches, sit-ins, speeches, and boycotts. This mass movement of resistance resulted in gains, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which would ensure formal political equality. This formal political equality was then met by a significant backlash.
Backlash
The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) intended to eliminate, delegitimize, and subvert Black organizations such as the Black Panthers and members of the Civil Rights Movement such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and even surveilled Black student unions at universities. This is a case in which segments of the American government actively worked to suppress the ability of African Americans to advocate for themselves. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. changed the tenor of the times as pleas for nonviolence were met with riots and rebellions in the immediate aftermath that King himself would say was the “language of the unheard.” These urban rebellions were met with characterizations as the root cause of crime that required more forceful policing. This “law and order” narrative used racially coded language as a part of their “southern strategy” to disenfranchise African Americans. Such increasingly punitive and disempowering policies led many to question the utility of electoral politics and voting. African American communities would vote for Black politicians who would presumably serve in the community’s interest, only to see those elected officials’ efforts stymied by White-dominated committee and legislatures. Michele Alexander points out that in 1870 (5 years after the Civil War), 15% of southern representatives were Black, while in 1980 (15 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965), only 8% of southern representatives were Black.
This disparity in political power had an impact on many aspects of African American life. The way many anti-discrimination laws were written placed much of the burden of proof on the accuser to prove racial discrimination. The use of racially coded language such as the “southern strategy” made it easier to evade accusations of discriminatory behavior. Economic inequality also became exacerbated, which in turn exacerbated political inequality. For example, to counteract federal efforts at desegregation, White citizens in Mississippi removed their children from public schools and created private white academies, or “segregation academies,” funneling public funds away from the public schools and essentially creating a two-tier education system. Research on civic engagement and participation in electoral politics highlights these lasting effects. White Americans are presented with more opportunities for civic engagement in its various forms (electoral politics, volunteering, etc.). The racial gap in civic engagement also remained relatively unchanged between 1976 and 2009.
Continuing the Resistance against Systemic Racism
The election of Barack Obama instilled hope in many that the first African American would signal the dawn of a post-racial society. Many African Americans warned against such assertions. While the election of Barack Obama was aided by a surge in African American and young voters, the same groups began to become disillusioned as a result of high profile cases of police brutality, shooting of unarmed African Americans, and a growing awareness of the mass incarceration and prison-industrial complex that continued to thrive.
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election and leading up to the 2018 midterms, African Americans have continued to organize and advocate for their civil and human rights. The Movement for Black Lives created a policy platform that includes a demand for political power: “We demand full and independent self-determination in all areas of society.” They have established the Electoral Justice Project, which seeks to establish a political base for African Americans through efforts such as mobilizing Black voters by recruiting, training, and sending out Black messengers to engage Black voters on relevant local issues. This generation of organizers and activists realizes the shortcomings of electoral politics; yet realizes that electoral politics are an important tool in the struggle for Black liberation. Organized protest, coalition building, and electoral politics are a number of skills that African American have had to utilize in order to secure their voting rights, protect their voting rights, and expand their civil and human rights.
Dominique Thomas is a scholarship-to-practice fellow at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan, and is a member of the Diversity Scholars Network. Dr. Thomas studies how African American college students experience the campus racial climate as a reproduction of institutional, cultural, and individual racism.
