What’s Missing From Reports on Alabama’s Black Turnout
Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones will have to get significant numbers of black voters to the polls in order to win, but the state’s voter suppression will make that a tough task.
In order to understand democracy in the United States, take a moment to consider Alabama. In the good old heart of Dixie, the story of voting rights can be told just about from beginning to end. It was in towns and cities throughout the state where the civil-rights movement fought most fiercely for the ballot, among other things, and where 52 years ago Martin Luther King led the famous march from Selma to Montgomery that helped push through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Throughout the state, black people organized for decades in order to finally acquire that most central American right. And they paid the price of the ticket in blood.
Yet, as Alabama’s story today tells, the Voting Rights Act was not ironclad. As the cornerstone of the movement for the franchise, Alabama has also played the part of headquarters of resistance, a long legal and legislative guerrilla war against voting rights that culminated in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder case, one where officials in the…
