I was born a second class citizen. I wish that was an exaggeration, but it isn’t. People born into slavery at the end of the Civil War were still alive when I took my first breath, though their testimonies were not in history books that were mass-produced for American school children.
Since I was a child, I did not know how limited my existence was by law and tradition. I learned my ABCs just before the US Senate began discussing the merits of HR 7152, a pioneering civil rights law that emerged from the House of Representatives.
The bill, debated in the US Senate in 1964, was designed to end racial discrimination and segregation in most areas of American public life. Then, as now, it took a two-thirds majority to cut off the filibuster in the Senate, which was dragging on for months. The question of whether people who looked like me had the right to be first class citizens, including the right to vote, has been the most debated issue in American politics.
For decades, much like their spiritual descendants in the GOP today, the Southern Democrats have successfully used the filibuster to prevent progressive laws. The big difference is that the Senate members did not apologize at the time for using the filibuster to perpetuate the discrimination.
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Today the filibuster is defended in the name of “good order” and the protection of “the rights of the minority party”. Democratic senators lack both the moral imagination and the fuller view of history necessary to do justice to the moment.
I don’t remember what I did on June 10, 1964 when 27 Republicans and 44 Democrats worked together to finally end the filibuster that had blocked all major civil rights laws since the rebuilding collapse nearly a century earlier.
On June 19, 1964, the same Senate Chamber where dozens of proposed civil rights laws had died for decades saw the passage of an ambitious civil rights law that had been almost unimaginable until then. On July 2, the House of Representatives accepted and passed the Senate version.
At a signing ceremony at the White House that was televised the same day, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into effect. It was the moral equivalent of the proclamation of emancipation for millions of Americans who were “free” only on the pages of children’s history books.
I don’t remember what I did on that hot day 57 years ago, when LBJ with the stroke of a pen tore American democracy from the patriotic somnambulance of the previous century to a realization whose fulfillment we had long before our democratic potential.
I can’t possibly explain what I was doing that day almost six decades ago, but the romantic in me wants to think that maybe it was the same day my mom, instead of being annoyed at my incessant whining for ice cream, Atypically, I picked myself up for a sprint behind the slow-moving Mr. Softee truck as he drove down the block and played his circus-style theme music at the highest volume.
Did she really buy ice cream for all of the kids who streamed with us after the truck, as I vaguely remember? Probably not, but I remember one day – probably this summer – when, after chasing the truck with me in her arms, she bought me an ice cream sandwich instead of the much cheaper vanilla ice cream cone with sprinkles they had before had our routine.
I’d like to believe that it was her way of celebrating the signing of the Civil Rights Act in the only way a 4 year old would understand – through the deliciously exquisite pain of the brain freeze caused by the first ice cream sandwich. d ever had. Whenever it happened, it created an indelible memory of a summer that never passed.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was followed by the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by LBJ – a law designed to cement the civil rights achievements of the previous legislature, when southern politicians were already working hard to circumvent them.
Special laws were required to ban literacy tests in elections, particularly in the south, where black voters often had to recite entire sections of state constitutions or interpret obscure sections of the law before voting.
The Senate battle for the Voting Rights Act was as controversial as the battle for the Civil Rights Act the year before, but it went through with a shocking 77:19. After months of debate in the US House of Representatives, it was passed on July 9, 1965 with 333 votes to 85. LBJ, who used the presidential pulpit more effectively than any other American president since FDR, happily signed it on August 6th, 1965.
Suddenly, the US Attorney General was able to investigate the use of modified poll taxes and other devious workarounds in local elections that the South Democrats had devised to keep Jim Crow life-sustaining for as long as possible.
In 1966, the US Supreme Court helped the federal government in its endeavor to bring recalcitrant states into compliance with civil rights laws by finally banning the use of all poll taxes in state and local elections.
Bounty taxes in federal elections had been banned in 1964, but Confederate cul-de-sacs and other advocates of state rights had managed to hold on to a shrinking island of voter repression for several years.
When they realized they were losing the culture war that had enshrined inequality as an American virtue for centuries, their rhetoric changed from openly advocating white supremacy to “protecting the integrity of the voice” from the “unqualified voters,” of them they predicted that they would flood the polls and jeopardize democracy apartheid in America.
In particular, they hated the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that required states that had historically discriminated against blacks to obtain federal permission to make changes, from redrawing district boundaries and setting election times to postponing Polling stations and the design of the ballot papers.
Since 2014, the US Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice John Roberts, has done everything in its power to reverse the democratic dynamic enshrined in the Voting Rights Act by weakening the section where states had to seek federal permission Make changes that would disproportionately affect colored voters.
The attack on the right to vote did not begin with the Trump administration but was compounded by the empowerment of a hostile Justice Department and the appointment of three very conservative Supreme Court justices who agree with Judge Roberts that racial discrimination was no longer an existential threat to democracy it once.
In practice, the Supreme Court has given state lawmakers the right to make it harder for all citizens to vote, as long as those who are slowly being deprived of the right to vote are not deprived of absolute access to the ballot box.
The weakening of the provision of the Voting Rights Act, which allows the federal government to intervene in the power of the state to regulate voter access to elections, has resulted in hundreds of laws being passed by Republican-controlled lawmakers in recent years to order revoke access to the voting slip.
Fueled by the insane ex-president’s big lie that the 2020 elections were “stolen”, restoring Jim Crow’s electoral patterns and voter suppression programs across the country is labeled as “voter integrity” and an attempt to deliver. to correct”. Federal violence tolerated for far too long.
These aren’t even wise updates to the arguments Jim Crow held for decades before LBJ got the US Congress powerfully armed to do the right thing. Yet one almost has to admire the brutal efficiency with which this clandestine multifront campaign against democracy is carried out, despite the fragility of the modern GOP and its descent into cultic Trump worship.
I have three grandchildren who are 2 years old and younger. They were born with rights and opportunities recognized by law and tradition that I did not have at their age. No one in the generations before me would have thought that the rights I now have were even possible despite the lofty rhetoric of this nation’s founding documents.
Although my grandchildren are still decades away from experiencing the creeping fear of disenfranchisement, it is the duty of every citizen who still has unrestricted access to the ballot box to feel fear on behalf of every member of his generation and to vote accordingly.
I was born into a period in American history when my status as a natural born citizen was upgraded by a president who challenged the ingrained prejudices of the American people and their congressional officials. He was realist enough to know that complacent people, convinced of their own righteousness, seldom do what is right.
Because of this, I never lose sight of the fact that our “democracy” is literally younger than me, despite what the history books say. I may not remember the great civil rights struggles that encircled me in the early 1960s, but I know that they, not patriotic abstractions, made my current life possible. I am grateful to every soul that stood up, marched, demonstrated, passed laws and voted for me. Your ability to weld made me a top notch citizen.
As January 6 reminded us, democracies are fragile. The right to vote is a precious generational trust that those of us who have even a vague memory of the world before civil rights and suffrage laws have an obligation to protect. We’re no longer kids chasing ice cream trucks down the street. This is a democracy (if we can grasp it).
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