It is remarkable to me that the dog in the fight with the most to lose is the dog that doesn’t want to participate.
Before I tell you what I am yapping about (more dog humor).….. No disrespect to my dog Bud.
Let us back up a bit to the fight that African-Americans waged just to earn the right to vote.
The 15th Amendment to the US constitution granted African-Americans the right to vote. “Slavery is not abolished until the Black man has the ballot,” Frederick Douglass famously said in May 1865, a month after the Union victory at Appomattox.
After Abraham Lincoln was assassinated it was up to President Andrew Johnson to reconstruct the Union.
Like Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson was a Unionist from Tennesse who was a strong state rights believer.
For those of you not paying attention, state rights are coded language for allowing states to do with black people what they wanted. (It is a term used still today by Republicans when they want laws that discriminate against African-Americas). Republicans like Ronald Reagan, Patrick Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, and most today in the US House and Senate are ardent state’s rights advocates.
Because of Andrew Johnson’s attitude to the over four million newly freed African-Americans, the nation embarked at a blistering pace, to enact anti-black laws, that were later known as the [black codes].
In Early 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill, which aimed to build on the 13th Amendment and give Black Americans the rights of citizens, Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill. Congress overrode his veto, marking the first time in the nation’s history that major legislation became law over a presidential veto.
In 1867 the period when radical reconstruction began, Black Americans voted in huge numbers across the South, electing a total of 22 Black men to serve in the U.S. Congress (two in the Senate).
Even though Blacks voted in numbers and were seeing themselves represented in the Federal Government, local or state power largely remained in white hands, much the way it is today. Black officials faced the constant threat of intimidation and violence, often at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist groups.
Today the Black vote is under constant threat from the Republican party.
Because the 15th Amendment left it up to states to decide the specific qualifications for suffrage. Southern state legislatures used such qualifications — including literacy tests, poll taxes, and other discriminatory practices — to disenfranchise a majority of Black voters in the decades following Reconstruction. (says History.com).
Those discriminatory practices were exemplified in the ignoble statutes in the southern states known as Jim Crowe laws.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in schools restaurants and other public places but did not address voting rights.
In 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes (which the 24th Amendment had eliminated for federal elections in 1964) were unconstitutional for state and local elections as well. (history.com).
As a consequence of these hard-fought-for gains, black voting participation continued to grow.
In 2012, Black voter turnout exceeded that of white voters for the first time in history, as 66.6 percent of eligible Black voters turned out to help reelect Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president.
Are you ready for this?
[One year later], In 2013, the Republican majority on the United States Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, ruling 5 – 4 in Shelby v. Holder that it was unconstitutional to require states with a history of voter discrimination to seek federal approval before changing their election laws.
The courts insulting reasoning for its transparent attempt to roll back voting rights, was that the racism that existed that necessitated the law does not exist anymore.
Immediately after the decision was handed down, states under Republican rule, embarked on a scorched earth strategy to limit voting rights, if not to existentially threaten it completely.
In a ruling in one North Carolina law that was struck down by a federal judge, the judge remarked in his ruling that the law went after African-Americans with surgical precision.
The state was not done, it appealed the ruling to the supreme court, the supreme court would have been better served by hearing the case and destroying it on its demerits, instead of doing so, the high court refused to hear the case which effectively defaulted the case to the appellate court’s decision.
African-Americans yearning to catch a break was weary that the Republican high court would reverse the appeals court decision, thankfully it decided against hearing it.
Had the Republican majority on the Supreme Court left the voting rights Act where it was, by adhering to the principle of (stare decisis), or let the decision stand, there would be no need to deny hearing a malicious case of voter suppression, the case simply would not have progressed that far.
It will forever be unknown how many Black people lost their lives, lynched, their properties destroyed, losing their jobs, suffering grave indignities simply because they wanted to exercise their constitutional right to exercise their suffrage.
And while we are at it, let us not forget the conscientious white people who sacrificed and even died protecting the rights of Black people to simply vote.
Like everything else that everyone takes for granted, African-American patriots of the past have had to fight like hell to earn and secure the right to vote.
Exercising the right to vote is the greatest tool that the average person has, it allows for self-determination and autonomy.
Of course not, there will never be a candidate or raft of candidates that totally embodies all of the things we would like to see done.
However, history, like the present, is our best guide to help us determine how that vote is exercised. Voting is not a transactional endeavor.
The idea that a candidate must offer stuff for your vote is an insult to those who have bled and died so that you can have that right. While many of you pontificate about not getting anything for your vote, here is a clue, how about getting up off your rear ends and go find a job, then go vote?
I have heard so much about the right to vote contextualized in transactional terms, that I am fed up with this so-called woke culture. A little bit of knowledge is certainly dangerous.
Before you try to influence others, please brush up on your American history.
Freedom is not a one-off affair, every generation must work like hell to protect the freedoms that many of us take for granted.
In this election cycle, some skin-folks [with a little money] are pledging fealty to the status quo, because of an extra zero in your bank account from an immoral tax cut for the wealthy. It is important that the rest of us understand that we are not Fifty cents, Ice cube, or Kanye West.
Those unlearned rappers are yet to learn their history, and so they do not understand the reasons that they are where they are today. For the rest of us, understanding what’s at stake this cycle is critical.
Don’t ever for one moment believe that you cannot end up right back on the cotton plantations.
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Mike Beckles is a former police Detective corporal, businessman, freelance writer, he is a black achiever honoree, and publisher of the blog mikebeckles.com.
He’s also a contributor to several websites.
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