Ghosts of Joe Slovo

This was originally posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters and at Project Vote's diary on DailyKos.

Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the journal Social Policy, has authored a comprehensive look at the recent history of partisan attacks on the voting process itself and the unfolding attempts to roll back all of the voting rights gains of the past 50 years that have gained speed and urgency under the Bush Administration.

Pointing out that modern voter suppression attempts and larger projects to reshape the entire electorate to favor conservatives no longer rely on the open fear and intimidation that characterized past practices from American history, Rosenfeld opens his in-depth survey with this observation,

“Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the 21st century he is apt to be a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers, proposed legislation and talking points about “voter fraud” and protecting the sanctity of the vote.”

The entire article, which Social Policy has placed outside their subscriber wall (pdf), is worth reading in its entirety.

From the article, here’s the overall thesis:

The newest barriers include state laws that target various phases of the voting process. Registration by individuals has been made more rigorous. Mass registration drives face new deadlines and increased potential fines. Citizens must present new identification to register and to vote, and in some states newly registered voters face increased prospects that partisan challengers will question their credentials before voting. Civil rights groups have noted that all of these new laws and procedures disproportionately fall on people of color, poor people, senior citizens and the disabled.

The Department of Justice, which for decades fought to ensure all eligible citizens could vote, has encouraged states to take these steps in the opposite direction. Political appointees who advocate for stringent requirements before ballots are cast and votes are counted now drive much of the Voting Section’s actions. As a result, the Justice Department has been pushing states to purge voter lists, and to adopt newly restrictive voter ID and provisional ballot laws – actions all that are known to cause delays if not confusion at the polls. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Voting Section has not enforced other federal laws, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients a chance to register to vote. Similarly, the Bush Justice Department has filed few cases on behalf of minority voters.

The Department’s political appointees have also pressured federal prosecutors to pursue “voter fraud” cases against the Bush administration’s perceived opponents, such as groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which conducts mass registration drives among populations that tend to vote Democratic. Two former federal prosecutors have said they believe that they lost their U.S. attorney posts for failing to pursue those cases. The proponents of this renewed impetus to police voters are almost all from a powerful and well-connected wing of the Republican Party that believes steps are needed to protect elections from what they call “voter fraud,” or allegations that Democrats – or their allies - are fabricating voter registrations en masse, and voting more than once to win. It is “an article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas said in a May 17, 2007 Houston Chronicle report. The report continued, “He [Masset] doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3% to the Republican vote.”

Rosenfeld’s piece adds deeper context to the Art Levine piece we highlighted yesterday. Taken together, these two articles show the depth and breadth of recent partisan attempts to shape the electorate and the resulting corruption of independent non-partisan agencies and departments including the Department of Justice itself. They further show the mechanics of those attempts and how they centered largely on ACORN, a national organization fighting for the rights of low- and moderate-income families. (ACORN is also one of Project Vote’s field partners in our Voter Participation Program.)

Martin Luther King, Jr. has now been dead more years than he was alive.

I am now one year younger than he was when we was killed by James Earl Ray in Memphis on April 4th, 1968.

Were I a man of great eloquence and insight, these facts would elicit, no doubt, some profound truths about the world, the country, and myself; profound truths that would read with something near the poetry that the Rev. King put into his most powerful prose.

However, lacking both eloquence and insight, I have only my own truth.

Reverend King changed America and I was privileged enough to grow up in a world that was just adjusting to what he and the cadres of famous, semi-famous, obscure, and faceless organizers and activists wrought through their courageous struggle before and after, but most spectacularly during, the Civil Rights Movement.

I went to first grade 8 years after King was killed. Two years after his assassination the public schools in my hometown in the South were desegregated, fully 16 years after Brown v Board (Thurgood Marshall's defining moment), the decision that was the catalyst for the "modern" Civil Rights Movement. Six years after desegregation, my elementary school, of which I've seen an early 70's newspaper photo of the last day of school with nothing but white kids bursting out the front door, was about 85%-90% black.

I recount that not to show that people benefitting from white skin privilege are sore losers (or willing to give into their fears easily), though the evidence there is stark, or to show that the advances of the Civil Rights Movement, most especially the destruction of de jure apartheid in America and the vigorous defense of voting rights for all people, were hollow or even pyhrric.

I recount that to show how fast change can come and how change can wash over everyone, even a 6 year old going to elementary school for the first time. At the time, I didn't know the context for what I was experiencing. I learned that later, in high school, and not through any curriculum, but through repeated viewing of Eyes On The Prize, the best documentary of the Civil Rights Movement in existence today.

Those experiences, which I won't detail here for lack of time and space, but which, in many ways mirror most American's schooling experiences with certain glaring exceptions, helped shape me, my values, and my world view.

And, to get back to my original point, they would never have been possible without the Civil Rights Movement and its towering champion, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Even in death, his life deeply affected mine. And I say that not as hagiography, not to place Dr. King in a space in which he is clawless to whites and flawless to blacks, to use Micheal Eric Dyson's artful phrase, but to recognize this deeply courageous, deeply committed, deepy introspective and gifted strategist, and deeply, deeply flawed man for the profound influence he had on my country and the little bubble of NathanHJ-ness that has grown up and prospered in the world that he, in a very real way, made.

Kick ass, take names, and birth a new world