Op-Ed: Voter Suppression & How Black Organizations Are Combatting It
Written by: Jason Ponterotto
2021 National Urban League Summer Intern
We are facing one of the most consequential periods for Civil Rights and Voting Rights of African Americans in the U.S. in modern history. Black voters are under assault by Republicans across the country in state legislatures that they control. Seventeen states have enacted 28 voter suppression bills with more expected. These bills restrict voting in ways that directly impact Black voters but Democratic voters overall. Across these bills, they cut access to absentee or mail in voting, remove drop off ballot boxes in counties with the highest Black populations, make it legal for Republican legislatures and judges to review ballots and be able to overturn elections, cut polling hours on Sundays, have election observers be able to video record voters as they are filing out their ballot – which are intimidation tactics fully in line with Jim Crow.
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America is becoming more brown and more progressive. It is changing organically from the people outward as has always been the process of any major change in a society. We saw firsthand a glimpse into the future of America with the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests across the country over the summer months and then the fallout in the 2020 Presidential election.
That is why they are doing everything in their power to stir up propaganda and use cheating and corruption to attain power as they know they can never do so based on fairness of the elections, based on the facts or actual policy, nor based on the issues people are actually being affected by. When evolution and progress take shape in a society, it is important to never take the eye off the ball in terms of efforts to hold onto power and in this case, the fight to preserve the White Supremacy power structure that has always been the way of the United States.
President Biden made a speech on Tuesday, July 13th, making it very clear what is happening with voter suppression is horrendous and needs to be put to a end as he emphasized voting is the most fundamental right of living in a democracy, and that former president Trump’s ‘’Big Lie’’ is nothing but a pure lie. However, as people, including Civil Rights groups are pointing out, Biden stopped short of committing to saying the Filibuster has to be dealt with or at least reformed in order for legislative action to combat these voter suppression bills.
The bottom line is that urgent action is needed from President Biden, and Democratic lawmakers to combat and eliminate these racist laws. However, the onus first and foremost is on President Biden and how much of an urgent issue he can make this. For instance, will President Biden take actions such as meeting with Democratic lawmakers Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema? and going to these states? Will he rally Democrats in states such as Texas, Georgia, Arizona, etc. as people are calling on him to?
On Thursday, July 8th, President Biden kept a promise to meet with the legacy Civil Rights organizations to discuss these issues. He met with representatives of the National Urban League, NAACP, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Council of Negro Women, National Action Network, National Coalition for Black Civic Participation, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Lawyers’ Committe for Civil Rights Under Law.
On Roland Martin Unfiltered Thursday, July 15th, Cliff Albright, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter stated the claim plainly for what is needed now by President Biden and the federal government.
‘’We are not magical negroes’’, he said in discussing why the burden should not be on the Black organizations to work twice as hard getting people out to vote when the most crucial action needs to be taken from the top down with Biden. ‘’These are not normal times we are in, this is literally an attack on voting rights’’, Albright said.
However, with that said, Black organizations and leaders still do understand what is at stake and in the spirit of Black people in all of history, they understand we will need to pull out all the stops. ’To overcome Republican attempts to scalpel out voting rights for groups they don’t like, it will likely take an explosion of organized grassroots pressure from below, of the type being taken up by the Poor People’s Campaign and other pro-democracy groups’, Reverend Barber, the Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign emphasized in a tweet recently.
The issue is that in a dire situation, federal legislation is undoubtedly and definitively the best route to ensure protections of Black voters and all voters. In places like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Black organizations and residents who gave their time to the fight to get out the vote and making sure Black folks got to the ballots know that they should not have to be in this position where it may fall on them once again after they fought like hell to turn these states blue and get President Biden in office to make these changes. Nonetheless the work has to be done.
One might argue what is the point of constantly voting if the people we vote in will not fight. This is a matter of freedom and the ability to live fully. As the history of Black people has shown, no matter what hurdles there are, we have to still make sure our vote gets through. ‘’We have to understand that unlike Jim Crow where we had to literally fight to get to the ballot, you can put all the rules in place, we need to follow all those rules while they are in place, overflow the ballot box, we need to continue to put pressure on politicians and then when the politicians get in, we need to tell them ‘hey we like you personally but right now I am going to break your political back’, Dr. Carr laid out fully.
As absurd of a situation this is with the Filibuster preventing critical legislation for Civil Rights as it was created to do, the fundamental reason and the point that needs to be remembered and taken away going is not Democrats being spineless, it is that more voting would have solved all of these issues in not enough Democrats to overcome a Manchin or Sinema. If we had people like Jamie Harrison or Beto O’Rourke win their Senate seats or if Democrats had won any number of other races the Voting Rights legislation as well as the Criminal Justice Reform bills in addition to other important legislations would have been passed likely months ago. None of that justified the actions of Democratic Senators upholding the filibuster and putting in jeopardy Black voters’ civil rights.
The onus is on what President Biden will do with his power and to reform or eliminate the filibuster if he believes as he stressed, this is a dire situation.
Voting is a most basic and critical element of attempting to live in an equitable society. When discussing the betterment of the Black community in the United States, of course, there are layers upon layers of the kinds of work following that that has to be done however voting and the government is a crucial element in the solution. For Black neighborhoods across the country, it doesn’t matter how many ‘’do it yourself/ pull yourself up by your bootstraps’’ methods that might implemented, without having those who support the policies and legislation that benefit the community in office in forms of government, structurally and systemically, the community will still be negatively impacted and prevented from our basic rights to live freely and fully, as is the ultimate goal like Dr, Carr says. And, at this point, if action is not taken or these voter suppression measures are not altered, we could see the kind of disenfranchisement of Black voters not seen since Jim Crow at the state level and then zero movement on the critical bills Progressives and African Americans support, nationally.