Vol. 77/No. 31      August 26, 2013

Holder’s July 25 announcement came as dozens of Black rights organizations, many unions and other groups are mobilizing to march in Washington, D.C., Aug. 24 on the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organizers — including the NAACP, Martin Luther King Center, and National Action Network — have put defense of the Voting Rights Act at the center of the action.

The Supreme Court ruled “unconstitutional” the preclearance list put together with the passage of the 1965 law and subsequent renewals. These included governments of nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — as well as scores of local governments from sections of New York City to Monterey County, Calif.

The 5-4 Supreme Court decision overrode a 25-year extension of the provision that was passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush in 2006.

The majority argued that the preclearance list was based on outdated criteria and that today voter registration rates of Blacks and Caucasians were roughly equal.

“True, conditions in the South have impressively improved since passage of the Voting Rights Act,” wrote Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a dissenting opinion. “Congress noted this improvement and found that the VRA was the driving force behind it. But Congress also found that voting discrimination had evolved into subtler second-generation barriers, and that eliminating preclearance would risk loss of the gains that had been made.”

Ginsburg cited eight recent examples typical of attempts to disenfranchise Blacks and Latinos in which the Justice Department had to step in. Among them:

— “Following the 2000 Census, the City of Albany, Ga., proposed a redistricting plan that DOJ found to be ‘designed with the purpose to limit and retrogress the increased black voting strength.”

— “In 2001, the mayor and all-white five-member Board of Aldermen of Kilmichael, Miss., abruptly canceled the town’s election after ‘an unprecedented number’ of African-American candidates announced they were running.”

— “In 2003, after African-Americans won a majority of the seats on the school board for the first time in history, Charleston County, S.C., proposed an at-large voting mechanism … found to be an ‘exact replica’ of an earlier voting scheme that … violated the VRA.”

— “In 2004, Waller County, Texas, threatened to prosecute two black students after they announced their intention to run for office. The county then attempted to reduce the availability of early voting in that election at polling places near a historically black university.”

“The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled,” Ginsburg wrote. “Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story.”

“Given a record replete with examples of denial or abridgement of a paramount federal right,” Ginsburg said, “the Court should have left the matter where it belongs: in Congress’ bailiwick.”

Immediately after the Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the act, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the state’s law requiring voters have government-issued IDs would take effect immediately and that redistricting maps already challenged in court would be implemented without federal approval.

In 1975 Congress, again by a large majority, included provisions that outlawed discrimination aimed at Latinos, Asians and other “language minority groups” as part of the Voting Rights Act.

Last year a federal court found the Texas state legislature had drawn congressional districts that were clearly aimed at diminishing the weight of Latino voters. Citing this decision as evidence that “intentional discrimination” exists in Texas, Holder is asking the court to reimpose preclearance for voting changes for the next 10 years.

“The Justice Department’s brief cited four instances in the last three years alone in which local jurisdictions failed to show that proposed voting changes did not have a discriminatory purpose,” the New York Times editorialized July 27. “That’s not including either the redistricting case or a separate suit filed over Texas’s new voter ID law.”

“A lot of Blacks don’t have transportation to get to the polls and funds to get a voter ID card, which cost $15 to $25,” Kenneth Davidson, NAACP president in Palestine, Texas, told the Militant in a phone interview Aug. 12. “Officials also try to intimidate older Blacks who go to the polls, saying something is invalid with their IDs.”

Speaking before the National Urban League July 25, Holder said he is considering filing other actions to reimpose federal control, including in South Carolina, where a voter ID law is set to be implemented for the upcoming election.

In North Carolina the legislature also passed a bill that requires government-issued photo IDs to vote; shortens the early voting period; bans same-day registration during early voting; and prohibits counties from extending voting hours because of long lines. More than 300,000 lack the required IDs.

Since opponents of voting rights can’t openly declare their intent, arguments for new anti-working-class measures are often couched as attempts to prevent “voting fraud.”

In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott in early August ordered state election officials to resume a hotly contested effort to remove “noncitizens” from voting rolls. This had been stalled after immigrant advocacy groups challenged it under the Voting Rights Act.

When the state started to implement the original effort in 2011, it began with 182,000 names. The list was quickly cut down to 2,600, many of whom were later found to be citizens. “The list of possible noncitizens shrank to 198. Of those, fewer than 40 had voted illegally,” the New York Times reported.

“The stated purpose of the Civil War Amendments was to arm Congress with the power and authority to protect all persons within the Nation from violations of their rights by the States,” Ginsburg wrote.

The Voting Rights Act was a historic gain for the working class, passed as the massive proletarian Black rights movement fought to destroy Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and ’60s. The fight for this right is rooted in working-class battles coming out of the Second American Revolution — the 1861-65 Civil War and Radical Reconstruction over the following decade.

This revolution changed what the Constitution stood for with passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude; the 14th Amendment, which made due process and equal protection the law of the land; and the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed every citizen the right to vote.

The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were written with a heavy emphasis on protection of “states rights” against monarchical tyranny from abroad. But by the Civil War, “states rights” became a banner of the reactionary rebellion of Southern states against the Union. With the passage of the historic 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, built on the defeat of the slaveholders, federal powers over state governments was used for a period immediately following the Civil War and again after the Black rights battles of the 1950s and ’60s to deal blows to racist reaction.

In the decades after the federal government withdrew union troops as part of the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction in 1876, state governments across the South, backed by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist vigilante gangs, imposed Jim Crow racial segregation by force and violence. In this period of counterrevolutionary reaction, the Supreme Court essentially backed Southern “states rights,” eviscerating the power of the three amendments. The defeat of Radical Reconstruction was the single greatest defeat inflicted on the working class in U.S. history.

It wasn’t until the proletarian-led street battles for Black rights starting in the 1950s that the Jim Crow segregation system — including denial of the right to vote — was brought down. The fight against its vestiges continues today.
 
 
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