Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
To anyone who stupidly thinks even for a nanosecond that these virulently racist judicial tyrants masquerading as legal protectors of our constitutional rights cannot and will not blithely take away and destroy our rights as both citizens and human beings if we simply sit idly by and allow it to happen in this modern racist cesspool we call "civilization", I strongly advise you to guess again...
Remember Dred Scott and what happened not only to him but to far too many of his historical forebears and descendants (i.e. us)...Stay tuned, stay woke, and pass the word...
Kofi
THE PAST IS PROLOGUE:
Dred Scott v. Sanford case: The Supreme Court decision of 1857
Click here for the text of this major historical document:
Citation: Judgment in the U.S. Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford; 3/6/1857; Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v. John F. A. Sandford; Appellate Jurisdiction Case Files, 1792 - 2010; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States, Record Group 267; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
In March of 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks -- slaves as well as free -- were not and could never become citizens of the United States. The court also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, thus permiting slavery in all of the country's territories.
The case before the court was that of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom.
Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery and intent on protecting southerners from northern aggression -- wrote in the Court's majority opinion that, because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."
Referring to the language in the Declaration of Independence that includes the phrase, "all men are created equal," Taney reasoned that "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration. . " Voting Rights Law Draws Skepticism From Justices
Voting Procedures: A lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund talks about arguing in favor of the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court.
by ADAM LIPTAK February 27, 2013 New York Times
WASHINGTON — A central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 may be in peril, judging from tough questioning on Wednesday from the Supreme Court’s more conservative members.
Related:
Voting Act Challenge Hinges on a Formula (February 27, 2013) Statue of Rosa Parks Is Unveiled at the Capitol (February 28, 2013) Times Topic: Voting Rights Act (1965) Brief Supporting Same-Sex Marriage Gets More Republican Support (February 28, 2013)
Related in Opinion:
Charles M. Blow: Vulnerability of the Vote (February 28, 2013) Editorial: Congress’s Power to Protect the Vote (February 28, 2013)
Christopher Gregory/The New York Times. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, spoke at a rally outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday as the justices heard arguments over a central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The provision was challenged by Shelby County, Ala.
Christopher Gregory/The New York Times. Protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Readers’ Comments:
"Ironic that this comes to the Supreme Court after the 2012 election, which witnessed the most aggressively racist voting laws and policies in certain states since the Civil Rights era."
--Look Ahead, WA
If the court overturns the provision, nine states, mostly in the South, would become free to change voting procedures without first getting permission from federal officials.
In a vivid argument in which the lawyers and justices drew varying lessons from the legacies of slavery, the Civil War and the civil rights movement, the court’s conservative wing suggested that the modern South had outgrown its troubled past and that the legal burdens on the nine states were no longer justified.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked skeptically whether “the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose vote is probably crucial, asked whether Alabama today is an “independent sovereign” or whether it must live “under the trusteeship of the United States government.”
Justice Antonin Scalia said the law, once a civil rights landmark, now amounted to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
That remark created the sharpest exchange of the morning, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the other end. “Do you think that the right to vote is a racial entitlement?” she later asked a lawyer challenging the law, with an edge in her voice that left little doubt she was responding to Justice Scalia’s statement. “Do you think that racial discrimination in voting has ended, that there is none anywhere?”
The outcome of the case will most likely remain in doubt until the end of the court’s current term, in June. Many legal observers predicted that the justices would overturn part of the voting law in 2009, when the court had the same conservative-leaning majority, only to be proven wrong.
One important change, however, is that Chief Justice Roberts suggested in the 2009 ruling that Congress update its formula to determine which parts of the country should remain subject to the law. Congress has not done so.
The question at the heart of Wednesday’s argument was whether Congress, in reauthorizing the provision for 25 years in 2006, was entitled to use a formula based on historic practices and voting data from elections held decades ago.
Should the court strike down the law’s central provision, it would be easier for lawmakers in the nine states to enact the kind of laws Republicans in several states have recently advocated, including tighter identification standards. It would also give those states more flexibility to move polling places and redraw legislative districts.
The four members of the court’s liberal wing, citing data and history, argued that Congress remained entitled to make the judgment that the provision was still needed in the covered jurisdictions. The law passed the Senate unanimously and House overwhelmingly, by a vote of 390 to 33 in 2006.
“It’s an old disease,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said of efforts to thwart minority voting. “It’s gotten a lot better. A lot better. But it’s still there.”
Justice Kennedy said that history taught a different lesson, referring to the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. “The Marshall Plan was very good, too,” he said. “But times change.”
Justice Breyer looked to a different conflict.
“What do you think the Civil War was about?” he asked. “Of course it was aimed at treating some states differently than others.” He also said that the nation lived through 200 years of slavery and 80 years of racial segregation.
Debo P. Adegbile, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which joined the government in defending the law, echoed that point. “This statute is in part about our march through history to keep promises that our Constitution says for too long were unmet,” he said.
The law was challenged by Shelby County, Ala., which said that its federal preclearance requirement, in Section 5 of the law, had outlived its usefulness and that it imposed an unwarranted badge of shame on the affected jurisdictions.
The county’s lawyer, Bert W. Rein, said that “the problem to which the Voting Rights Act was addressed is solved.”
In any event, he added, the unusual requirement that a sovereign state’s law did not count until blessed by the federal government required substantial justification. The law, he said, was “an unusual remedy, never before and never after invoked by the Congress, putting states into a prior restraint in the exercise of their core sovereign functions.”
It was common ground among the advocates and justices that the act was important and necessary when it was first enacted.
“There is no question that the Voting Rights Act has done enormous good,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said. “It’s one of the most successful statutes that Congress passed in the 20th century and one could probably go farther than that.”
There was agreement, too, that the nation and the South in particular have taken great strides toward equality.
“There isn’t anybody on any side of this issue who doesn’t admit that huge progress has been made,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.
Most of the argument instead concerned the formula for determining which states the law covered.
Chief Justice Roberts reeled off statistics to suggest that the coverage formula no longer made sense. Massachusetts, which is not covered, “has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout,” he said. Mississippi, which is covered, has the best ratio, he said, with African-American turnout exceeding that of whites.
The more liberal justices responded that the nine states were responsible for a sharply disproportionate share of federal voting-rights violations, adding that Alabama was in a poor position to challenge the choices Congress made in deciding which parts of the country to cover.
“Under any formula that Congress could devise,” Justice Elena Kagan said, citing data about voting rights suits, “it would capture Alabama.”
The point seemed to interest Justice Kennedy, in one of his few questions skeptical of the law’s challenger. “If you could be covered under most suggested formulas for this kind of statute,” he asked Mr. Rein, “why are you injured by this one?”
Should the court strike down the coverage formula when it decides the case, Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96, Congress would be free to take a fresh look at what jurisdictions should be covered. But Congress seems unlikely to be able to agree on a new set of criteria, given the current partisan divide, meaning the part of the law requiring federal pre-approval of election changes would effectively disappear.
Justice Kennedy asked whether it would be proper to make the entire country subject to the provision. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said no, at least based on the information compiled by Congress in connection with the 2006 extension of the law.
Justice Kennedy seemed to view the response as a concession. “And that,” he said, “is because that there is a federalism interest in each state being responsible to ensure that it has a political system that acts in a democratic and a civil and a decent and a proper and a constitutional way.”
Congress has repeatedly extended the preclearance requirement: for 5 years in 1970, 7 years in 1975, and for 25 years in both 1982 and 2006.
But it made no changes after 1975 to the list of jurisdictions covered by Section 5, relying instead on a formula based on historical practices and voting data from elections held decades ago.
It applies to nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — and to scores of counties and municipalities in other states, including the boroughs of Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.
Congress Honors Rosa Parks While the Supreme Court Targets the Voting Rights Act by Ari Berman February 27, 2013 The Nation
President Johnson Signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In this photograph, taken by Yoichi R. Okamoto on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the President's Room of the Capitol building while Civil Rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. look on. The Voting Rights Act was designed to the "enforce the 15th amendment" and remove the barriers that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote. The statue's provisions included: banning literacy tests, empowering the attorney general to investigate the unlawful use of poll taxes, and made the act of harassing, intimidating, threatening to prevent a lawfully registered voter from voting punishable by a fine of up $10,000, a five-year prison sentence or both. The legislation also allowed for the appointment of federal examiners with the ability to register qualified citizens to vote in jurisdictions where less than 50 percent of the voting age population was registered to vote. This legislation had a tremendous and immediate impact with over a quarter-million African Americans registered to vote by the end of 1965.
PHOTO: Credit Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum/NARA President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act at US Capitol alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Photo: Yoichi R. Okamoto, courtesy Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
Photographer Yoichi R. Okamoto Date of Work August 6, 1965 Type Photograph
At 11 am, as Congress unveiled a statue honoring Rosa Parks, the civil rights leaders of today (Including Rep. John Lewis, who nearly died in Selma during "Bloody Sunday") were gathered inside the Supreme Court, listening to a challenge to the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act. The stark contrast illustrated the profound contradictions of American democracy when it comes to race and political power—the progress we’ve made has always been met by equally intense efforts to roll back that progress. And that remains true today, especially on February 27, 2013.
“To honor Rosa Parks in the fullest manner, each of us must do our part to protect that which has been gained, defend the great documents upon which those gains were obtained and continue our pursuit of a more perfect union,” Congressman James Clyburn, who grew up in segregated South Carolina in the 1940s and ’50s, said at the statue unveiling. Parks herself was present when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in the Capitol rotunda on August 6, 1965. Twelve years before famously refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Parks attempted to register to vote. She was denied three times, and had to pass a literacy test and pay a poll tax in 1945 just to exercise what should have been her fundamental right. That’s the way America was before the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Inside the courtroom, five conservative Justices made the case for why Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election-related changes with the federal government—is no longer necessary. (See my recent Nation article, “Why Are Conservative Trying to Destroy the Voting Rights Act?” for a definitive account of the Shelby County v. Holder case and the conservative organization and money behind the challenge.)
Section 5 is the most effective section of the most effective civil rights law ever passed by Congress and has been called the “keystone of our voting rights” by Attorney General Eric Holder. But to the conservative majority on the court, Section 5 is an antiquated infringement on state sovereignty, treating some states differently than others based on outdated data from the 1960s and ’70s. Justice Scalia mocked the entirety of the Voting Rights, calling congressional support for the legislation (which has been overwhelmingly reauthorized four times, most recently in 2006, and signed by four Republican presidents) a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
It quickly became clear inside the courtroom that there are four votes to uphold Section 5 and four votes to strike it down. Justice Kennedy, as is so often the case, appears to be the swing vote, although he certainly leaned toward the conservatives. Justice Kennedy seemed preoccupied by two questions: number one, does Section 5 still cover the states and localities where discrimination is most concentrated in order to justify its federalism constraints? And number two, are other parts of the Voting Rights Act, most notably Section 2, an adequate replacement for Section 5?
Section 2 applies nationwide, permanently, and puts the burden of proof on plaintiffs to show that a voting change is discriminatory after it has gone into effect, whereas Section 5 must be reauthorized by Congress and is targeted only at those with the worst history of voting discrimination, who must pre-clear any voting change with the Department of Justice or a federal court in DC. Section 2 has often been described as the “sword” to Section 5’s “shield.”
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and NAACP Legal Defend Fund counsel Debo Adegbile did their best to assuage Kennedy’s concerns. Adegbile noted that jurisdictions covered by Section 5 accounted for a quarter of the US population but made up 81 percent of successful published and unpublished lawsuits that reached a favorable verdict for minority plaintiffs under Section 2, proving that discrimination remained localized in Section 5 states. Kennedy seemed unpersuaded:
JUSTICE KENNEDY: if Congress is going to single out separate States by name, it should do it by name. If not, it should use criteria that are relevant to the existing [problem] — and Congress just didn’t have the time or the energy to do this; it just reenacted it.
VERRILLI: I think it was rational and effective in 1965. The Court upheld it then, it upheld it three more times after that.
JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, the Marshall Plan was very good, too, the Morale Act, the Northwest Ordinance, but times change.
VERRILLI: But the question is whether times had changed enough and whether the differential between the covered jurisdictions and the rest of the country had changed enough that Congress could confidently make the judgment that this was no longer needed.
Verrilli and Adegbile described Section 2 as a poor substitute for Section 5. As Kennedy himself noted in 2009, “Section 2 cases are very expensive. They are very long. They are very inefficient.” Section 2 lawsuits are incredibly complex, can take years to adjudicate and often cost millions of dollars, which few victims of voting discrimination can afford. Congress included Section 5 in the Voting Rights Act precisely because case-by-case litigation had failed to stop voting discrimination prior to 1965. “The reason Section 5 was created was because States were moving faster than litigation permitted to catch the new forms of discriminatory practices that were being developed,” said Justice Sotomayor. The genius of Section 5 was to “shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the 1966 case South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the first of five unsuccessful challenges to Section 5.
In last year’s election cycle, the Justice Department under Section 5 opposed voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, early-voting cutbacks in Florida and redistricting maps in Texas. The federal courts in Washington sided with the DOJ in three of four cases, finding evidence of discriminatory effect and/or purpose, while also blocking South Carolina’s voter ID law for 2012. If Section 5 was gone and Section 2 was the only recourse, these major changes would’ve been in effect during the last election, and could only be challenged after years of costly and difficult litigation. The voters disenfranchised in the meantime would have no recourse, other than the hopes of a preliminary injunction from the courts, which is an increasingly rare prospect in a judiciary dominated by conservatives, especially in the South.
Amazingly, the voter suppression attempts that spread nationwide during the last election never came up during the oral arguments. The justices did not hear, for example, that six of the nine fully covered states under Section 5 passed new voting restrictions since 2010, including voter ID laws (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), limits on early voting (Georgia) and restrictions on voter registration (Alabama and Texas), compared to only one-third of noncovered jurisdictions during the same period. The insularity of the Supreme Court was particularly evident today. Opponents of Section 5 pointed to the fact that minority voter registration and turnout rates in places like Alabama are equal to or exceed states not covered by Section 5, but that hardly covers the scope of voting discrimination that exists in the South today.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: General, is it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?
GENERAL VERRILLI: It is not, and I do not know the answer to that, Your Honor, but I do think it was reasonable for Congress—
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, once you said it is not, and you don’t know the answer to it.
GENERAL VERRILLI: It’s not our submission. As an objective matter, I don’t know the answer to that question. But what I do know is that Congress had before it evidence that there was a continuing need based on Section 5 objections, based on the purpose-based character of those objections, based on the disparate Section 2 rate, based on the persistence of polarized voting, and based on a gigantic wealth of jurisdiction-specific and anecdotal evidence, that there was a continuing need.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: A need to do what?
GENERAL VERRILLI: To maintain the deterrent and constraining effect of the Section 5 preclearance process in the covered jurisdictions
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And not impose it on everyone else?
GENERAL VERRILLI: And—that’s right, given the differential in Section 2 litigation, there was a basis for Congress to do that.
One of the main tensions inside the courtroom was whether Congress or the Court gets to determine what is and isn’t valid under the Voting Rights Act. After all, the act has been overwhelmingly reauthorized four times by Congress, most recently in 2006. To Justice Scalia, that means it must be unconstitutional. “Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act,” Scalia said sarcastically. “Who is going to vote against that in the future?”
Yet both conservative and liberal members of Congress are urging the Court to respect both the original and recent findings of the legislative body. Notes an amicus brief filed by bipartisan members of Congress, including recent chairs of the House Judiciary Committee: “This Court has recognized that Congress acts at the height of its powers when it legislates to regulate the concerns at which the VRA is aimed: racial discrimination, infringement of fundamental rights, and elections. When Congress exercises its powers at the intersection of these three concerns—as it did here—this Court should defer to Congress’s considered judgment.”
Justice Kagan brought this up in an exchange with Shelby County’s lawyer, Bert Rein:
JUSTICE KAGAN: You said the problem [of voting discrimination in the South] has been solved. But who gets to make that judgment really? Is it you, is it the Court, or is it Congress?
MR. REIN: Well, it is certainly not me.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE SCALIA: That’s a good answer. I was hoping you would say that.
MR. REIN: But I think the question is Congress can examine it, Congress makes a record; it is up to the Court to determine whether the problem indeed has been solved and whether the new problem, if there is one.
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, that’s a big, new power that you are giving us, that we have the power now to decide whether racial discrimination has been solved? I did not think that that fell within our bailiwick.
It would be a truly radical step for the Court to dismiss the repeated and overwhelming judgment of Congress by striking down Section 5. The disappearance of Section 5 would be a devastating setback for voting rights—akin to the way the Citizens United decision eviscerated campaign finance regulation—and would greenlight the kind of voter suppression attempts that proved so unpopular in 2012.
It’s particularly ironic that Shelby County, Alabama, of all places, would bring this challenge to Section 5, given the recent history of discrimination in the county and state. Before local elections in 2008, the city of Calera redrew its city boundaries, eliminating the City Council’s lone majority-black district, represented by Ernest Montgomery since 2004. The city decreased the black voting-age population in Montgomery’s district from 71 percent to 30 percent by adding three overwhelmingly white subdivisions while failing to include a large surrounding black neighborhood. A day before the election, the Justice Department objected to the change. Calera could have preserved the majority-black district, the city’s demographer told Washington, but the City Council chose not to. Calera held the election in defiance of Justice Department orders, and Montgomery lost by two votes.
The Justice Department negated the election results and, after a year of negotiations, Calera moved from single-member districts to an at-large election system for the City Council. Montgomery was easily elected under the new system, winning the largest number of votes of any candidate, while his opponent from 2008 received the second-fewest. After the two elections, “I realized how important Section 5 is,” Montgomery said.
If it hadn’t been for Section 5, there would be no black members of the city council in Calera. “Assuming I accept your premise…that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t,” Justice Sotomayor told Rein.
Mr. Montgomery and a large delegation of voting rights activists from Alabama attended the arguments. “Things have gotten a lot better and the reason it has gotten better is because of legislation like Section 5,” he told me after. “We definitely feel it’s still needed. We don’t claim the playing field has leveled. It’s leveling. Eventually maybe we’ll get to the point where Section 5 is not needed, but we’re not there yet.”
Tennessee just completely disenfranchised its black voters after the Supreme Court gave red states the green light to rig the midterms by redistricting black majority districts out of existence—as long as lawmakers pretend they don’t see color when they’re doing it. And while partisan gerrymandering is A-OK with Alito & co., it apparently is not alright for Democratic voters in Virginia to do anything like that to Republicans. Sure sounds like the free speech rules of the Trump administration, where people are free to say what Republicans want said. Plus, the burning rage in the Democratic base, the male doomer industry is selling a bill of goods, and Trump’s very Victorian underestimation of Iran’s ability to fight back. The Atlantic's Adam Serwer joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod.
SOME OF THE COMMENTARY IN RESPONSE TO THIS PODCAST/VIDEO CONVERSATION:
People aren’t as naïve as they pretend to be and people who say people/family are naïve know in their heart that they are not. People VOTED FOR HATE because they are HATEFUL
We have a winner...Trump validates their hatred/anger - that's all he needs to do. The only naive ones here are the ones who discount the power of hatred.
The Vichy media and super rich super villains have carried the load for the Southern racists during the last 30 years. They will not stop, they must be replaced.
but conservatives have never actually implemented that when they’ve had the chance. I don’t think the KKK is voting for a Black woman. And I’ve never heard of them getting indicted or their leaders raided. But I did see a Black woman a few days ago get raided for wanting to do the same thing Texas does. It’s just strange the seeming two faced actions.
pretend. Because will never be colorblind. People in this country never let you forget how you are different. They even subdivide races based on place of birth.
Trump does have a cult of personality though. It doesn’t include everyone who supports him politically, but there are plenty of Americans who absolutely worship that old creep.
As far as I'm concerned SCOTUS in its current form is so corrupt they are no longer legitimate. Dems who don't support serious court reform are committing governance malpractice
Nah, Trump voters voted exactly for this. They will never live this down in my eyes. There's folks that will never again be welcomed at my home. You don't like rights for people like me; you will not have the friendship of this individual. That's how it goes; F'em.
One thing that I don't buy is that these people are naive. John Roberts is a racist, same with Alito. The KKK traded in their hoods for black robes. What educated white person believes for one second that racism doesn't exist, and that black people aren't discriminated against? It's absurd
I am so discouraged. I live in Indiana and racism is rampant here. I was a teenager during the Civil Rights movement and I marched for equality. I am so very angry.
“You're forcing the only Black majority and Democratic majority district to be cut up and cracked up… That doesn't seem fair… To target and to devastate Black political representation and the opportunity at Black political representation in Memphis, which is one of the Blackest cities in the United States of America.” After the far-right Supreme Court issued a ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act, Republican Governor Bill Lee arranged for a special legislative session about redistricting the state. Tennessee Republicans are set to redraw and eliminate the only majority-Black congressional district in the state today. Prem Thakker sits down with Rep. Justin Pearson who lays out how Republicans scrambled to redraw the district he’s running in, why he’s fighting for future generations and how Democrats failed to prevent this moment. In the conversation, Rep. Pearson details the history of racism and voter suppression in the South, noting the stakes in Tennessee and the rest of the US and how it reflects on inaction of Democrats. He also takes a moment to look back at the history that led up to this moment and why he’s pushing an effort to save Black political power in the South. This live conversation took place last night on zeteo.com, the day before Tennessee Republicans passed a congressional map to break up the state’s only Black-majority district
“They’re Rigging the Map”: Justin J. Pearson on Tennessee Redistricting Battle
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, on Tuesday pushed back against the notion that states should not consider race when drawing electoral lines to comply with the Voting Rights Act. At the heart of the Merrill v. Milligan case is Alabama’s 2021 congressional map. A three-judge district court ruled that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it diluted the votes of Black Alabamians by packing those voters into one district, even though about 27 percent of Alabamians are Black and only make up a majority in one of the state’s seven congressional districts. The district court agreed with challengers of the map, who argued that those voters deserved a second congressional district based on their proportion of the population. However, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, allowed the map to take effect. During oral arguments Tuesday in the redistricting case, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour said the state’s legislature drew the map “in a lawful race-neutral manner” – an argument that Jackson rejected. “I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution, at what the framers and the founders thought about. And when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way,” Jackson said. “That we were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the Freedman, during the Reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.” Voting rights advocates worry that the conservative majority on the high court is prepared to once again cut back the Voting Rights Act, considered the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.
Charles
Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895-April 22, 1950) was a legendary
black lawyer and teacher who helped play a major role in dismantling the
national Jim Crow laws and helped train and mentor future Supreme Court
justice Thurgood Marshall. Known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow”, he
played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court
between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston’s
brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the
inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine (from the Supreme
Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision) as it pertained to public education
in the United States was the master stroke that brought about the
landmark Brown decision.
“This fight for equality of educational
opportunity (was) not an isolated struggle. All our struggles must tie
in together and support one another. . .We must remain on the alert and
push the struggle farther with all our might.”
Born in
Washington, D.C., Houston prepared for college at Dunbar High School in
Washington, then matriculated to Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta
Kappa in 1915.
From 1915 to 1917, Houston taught English at
Howard University. From 1917 to 1919, he was a First Lieutenant in the
United States Infantry, based in Fort Meade, Maryland. Houston later
wrote:
“The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our
fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a
world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I
would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike
back.”
In the fall of 1919, he entered Harvard Law School,
earning his Bachelor of Laws degree 1922 and his Doctor of Laws degree
in 1923. In 1922, he became the first African American to serve as an
editor of the Harvard Law Review.
After studying at the
University of Madrid in 1924, Houston was admitted to the District of
Columbia bar that same year and joined forces with his father in
practicing law. Beginning in the 1930s, Houston served as the first
special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, and therefore was involved with the majority of civil
rights cases from then until his death on April 22, 1950.
He
later joined Howard Law School’s faculty, establishing a long-standing
relationship between Howard and Harvard law schools. While at Howard, he
was a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of
Education and was later appointed to the Supreme Court.
Houston
used his post at Howard to recruit talented students into the NAACP’s
legal efforts (among them Marshall and Oliver Hill, the first- and
second-ranked students in the class of 1933, both of whom were drafted
into organization’s legal battles by Houston).
By the mid-1930s,
two separate anti-lynching bills backed by the NAACP had failed to gain
passage, and the organization had won a landmark victory against
restrictive housing covenants that excluded blacks from particular
neighborhoods only to see the achievement undermined by subsequent legal
precedents.
Houston struck upon the idea that unequal education
was the Achilles heel of Jim Crow. By demonstrating the failure of
states to even try to live up to the 1896 rule of “separate but equal,”
Houston hoped to finally overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had
given birth to that phrase.
His target was broad, but the
evidence was numerous. Southern states collectively spent less than half
of what was allotted for white students on education for blacks; there
were even greater disparities in individual school districts. Black
schools were equipped with castoff supplies from white ones and built
with inferior materials. Black facilities appeared to be part of a crude
segregationist satire – a design to make black education a
contradiction in terms.
Houston designed a strategy of attacking
segregation in law schools – forcing states to either create costly
parallel law schools or integrate the existing ones. The strategy had
hidden benefits: since law students were predominantly male, Houston
sought to neutralize the age-old argument that allowing blacks to attend
white institutions would lead to miscegenation, or “race-mixing”. He
also reasoned that judges deciding the cases might be more sympathetic
to plaintiffs who were pursuing careers in law. Finally, by challenging
segregation in graduate schools, the NAACP lawyers would bypass the
inflammatory issue of miscegenation among young children.
The successful ruling handed down in the Brown decision was testament to the master strategy formulated by Houston.
Houston was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.
Houston
was posthumously awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1950 and, in
1958, the main building of the Howard University School of Law was
dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. His importance became more
broadly known through the success of Thurgood Marshall and after the
1983 publication of Genna Rae McNeil’s Groundwork: Charles Hamilton
Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
Houston is the
namesake of the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton
Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, which
opened in the fall of 2005. In addition, there is a professorship at
Harvard Law named after him
Southern
states are taking advantage of a pair of recent Supreme Court decisions
in order to quickly re-make their congressional maps ahead of
November’s midterms. In effect, the political power of many Black
Americans are being taken away. “All eyes ought to be on the South,”
Harvard professor Imani Perry tells Antonia Hylton. Princeton professor
Eddie Glaude adds that what’s happening is “a political will to white
power.”
Trump’s GOP’s alarming talent: dismantling multiracial democracy MS NOW
Trump’s
Republican Party is carrying out a coordinated assault on Black
political and economic power, and the consequences for Black America
could last for generations. The question now facing the nation is
whether the political will exists to confront those determined to
dismantle multiracial democracy.
Trump’s
Republican Party is carrying out a coordinated assault on Black
political and economic power, and the consequences for Black America
could last for generations. The question now facing the nation is
whether the political will exists to confront those determined to
dismantle multiracial democracy.
They’ve ‘turned back the clock on history’’: TN Rep. Justin Jones on GOP’s forced redistricting
Tennessee
has long been a battleground for civil rights, from the Nashville lunch
counter sit-ins to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis.
This week, that legacy was tested again as Tennessee Republicans
redistricted and eliminated the state's only majority-Black
congressional district. Democratic representative Justin Jones says we
must call this moment for what it is. “Whether they do it with crosses
and violence or with the sophistication of suits and decorum,” he warns
the fight is far from over. They have “turned back the clock of history”
and “we must err on the side of action.”
The
Shocking Truth Behind America’s Democracy Crisis! Welcome to our
YouTube channel, "Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. TV. Like and subscribe to make
these videos widely available. Thank you!! Get ready for short,
insightful videos highlighting his groundbreaking work on race,
democracy, and American society. From bestselling books like "Democracy
in Black" to his thought-provoking commentary on platforms like MSNBC
and TIME Magazine, Dr. Glaude challenges us to confront our history and
envision a better future.
Voting
rights activist Stacey Abrams joins The Weeknight just after Tennessee
Republicans fast-tracked a new gerrymandered map that wipes out the
state’s only Democratic, majority-Black district.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Voting Procedures: A lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund talks about arguing in favor of the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court.
