- Originally published on Tom Paine.com [here
] on August 26, 2004
By Julian Bond
The 1965 Voting Rights Act, for all the good it did, also contributed to voter intimidation by forcing disenfranchisement proponents to be more covert and creative--and moving it to the Republican party. Yes, the days of burning crosses were over, but in their place were police at the polls, demanding obscure identification and using phony voter-purge lists. NAACP chairman Julian Bond says racial disenfranchisement isn't just a legacy in the United States--it's a present-day reality. [Click here for more TomPaine.com voting commentary ]
- Julian Bond has been chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors since February 1998. He is a distinguished professor in the School of Government at American University in Washington, DC, and a professor of history at the University of Virginia.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the People for the American Way Foundation (PFAWF) released a report this week that documents decade after decade of race-based efforts to deter minority voters--African Americans, Latinos, Indians--from casting their votes.
While American history--especially Southern history--is full of horror stories about minority voter intimidation, many of the documented instances of targeting racial groups to keep them from casting votes are current-day events. They aren't happening in long-ago Selma, Alabama; instead, they occur today in Michigan, Kentucky, South Dakota and Pennsylvania--as well as in the heavily black counties of the South.
Ironically, it was the country's most successful civil rights law--the 1965 Voting Right Act, passed in the aftermath of Selma's Bloody Sunday--that eliminated harsh measures and ushered in today's more polite discrimination.
When the 1965 Act eliminated literacy tests, poll taxes and gave the federal government added tools to punish anti-voting terrorists and protect access to the franchise, the enemies of democracy turned to other means. With the whip, dynamite, torch and burning cross no longer effective weapons, they turned to more sophisticated tools.
They posted armed guards and real and make-believe policemen at the polls. They told voters they could cast their votes on alternative days, even after the actual election was over. They demanded forms of identification not required by law. They told voters outstanding warrants or utility bills would prevent them from voting. They said immigration officials would haunt the polls, checking on voters' immigration status. They constructed phony voter purge lists which included names of longtime legitimate voters. They loosed the FBI and State Police on elderly voters. They videotaped voters approaching polling places. They set-up so called "ballot security" and "ballot integrity" programs, based on the racist presumption that minority voters are inveterate election-day cheaters, and they harassed and intimated those voters at will.
And when they were caught, and their illegal practices proved in a court of law, they promised to never, ever to it again.
And then they did it again. And again. And again.
In the pre-1965 one-party South, intimidation, often fatal, was the exclusive handiwork of the nearly all-white Democratic Party. When he signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Present Lyndon Johnson was prescient when he told an aide: "We are delivering the South to the Republicans for a generation."
After 1965 and the Voting Rights Act, as resistant whites fled the Democrats and found a sympathetic home in the Republican Party and newly franchised blacks joined the Democrats, these menacing and threatening practices have increasingly become the province of Republicans.
That they continue at all, under any sponsorship, is a continuing blot on our democracy.
PFAWF, the NAACP and our coalition partners intend to field an army of 25,000 volunteers, including 5,000 lawyers, to monitor precincts in 17 states. But private citizens should not have to guard the public's polls.
We are calling on Attorney General John Ashcroft, all state attorneys general, political parties and their state divisions and election officials everywhere to condemn and halt these evil schemes, to closely monitor groups in their communities with a history of voter suppression, and to send a clear message that America guarantees that every voter can cast his or her vote without running a gauntlet of hostile forces or dirty tricks, and that every vote will be fairly counted.
Bigots cannot be allowed to continue frustrating our democracy.