photo by Lara Herscovitch
“The colored people think they will be able to vote? But, Honey, I don’t care what laws are passed, how many meetings good people attend at those churches or at community organizations, the white man will never let colored people vote.” -Alice (1901-1989), Mississippi Delta
Alice, my grandmother, was born in the summer of 1901, by the Sunflower River in the Mississippi Delta.
Alice’s mother Eliza, my great-grandmother, was born enslaved — she was seven years old at the time of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863.
My grandmother knew that just because the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law, it didn’t mean reasonable freedom for Black people. And, of course, she was right — the Proclamation did not apply to all those who were enslaved, and there was a very long period of ‘neo-slavery’ after the signing.
Alice lived and recognized the unbroken line between slavery, the black codes, lynching, cross-burning, church-burning, and other violence inflicted on the Black community. She experienced racial injustice in all its suffocation and toxicity. She lived through effort after effort to disenfranchise Black citizens.
Alice knew that her mother was a slave as a girl. She felt the barbaric nature of slavery, the original U.S. sin. She felt all the resistance for full Black citizenship in this democracy. When she learned that her daughter — my mother — was attending community meetings working to get the right to register and to vote, Alice told her, “Honey, I don’t care how many meeting y’all attend, the white man will never let the Negro vote.”
Today, a full 121 years after my grandmother was born, I’m wondering if she was right.
There were the efforts by many in 2020 to undermine a free and fair election – one where high Black turnout in key, heavily-Black cities would largely determine the results. That, along with the introduction of the hundreds of voter suppression laws by Republican lawmakers, has demonstrated once again the lie among some white people that Black and other non-white Americans are illegitimate voters — a racist and undemocratic position that has plagued our country.
This realization of the truth of what I see and sense and feel and fear today in our larger collective, it almost leaves me speechless. It has taken me to a deeper place in looking at real possibilities of the unbroken line that my grandmother saw and felt and spoke about.
The unbroken line sometimes is a pendulum. It swings towards progress, and then it gets pushed back.
As a part of the so-called Reconstruction after the U.S. civil war ended in May 1865, Congress created a one-year “Freedmen’s Bureau.” The aim was to assist former slaves by providing food and housing, education, health care, and employment contracts on farms.
Despite the efforts of President Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson to veto subsequent civil rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and a second Freedmen’s Bureau bill was passed by Congress.
The short-term result on paper was that all citizens were equally protected by the law, and additional rights were granted to those who had been enslaved: to land, schools for their children, the right to “inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms” (the last one was in response to the Southern Black Codes, the KKK and other groups who were taking guns away from freed Black men).
The constitution’s Reconstruction Amendments were ratified:
- The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery (1865);
- The Fourteenth Amendment granted U.S. citizenship and federal civil rights to all those born or naturalized in the U.S. (1868); and
- The Fifteenth Amendment granted that the right to vote could not be denied because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (1870).
Just like we are seeing again today, none of these advances happened without struggle, a serious fight, and demand for change to create a just society.
The year my grandmother was born was the same year Hiram Rhoades Revels died. Revels was the first African American elected to serve in the United States Congress.
Revels couldn’t be sworn in with the other incoming Senators — he had to wait a month until Mississippi was readmitted to the United States (February 23, 1870). Senate Republicans wanted to seat him, but Democrats worked to block it, claiming that his election was “null and void” because Mississippi was under Military rule at the time and thus did not have a civil government to confirm his election. Others claimed that Revels was not a U.S. citizen until the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and was therefore ineligible to be a Senator.
Despite the efforts to undermine his election, the Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat Revels, and he began his work as a U.S. Senator on February 25, 1870.
It wasn’t the first time — nor the last — that white elected officials actively worked to undermine free and fair elections of Black citizens. Two years earlier in April 1868, Georgia voters had ratified the state’s constitution, enfranchising African Americans under the terms of the Congressional Reconstruction, taking a necessary step toward the state’s re-admission to the Union. In the same election, Georgians elected 29 Black men to serve in the state House of Representatives and three to the state Senate. Yet, when the state legislature met in July, moderate white Republicans joined Democrats in both chambers to unseat the Black members, arguing that the state constitution did not permit Black officeholders.
Spurred to action, Black Georgians appealed to Congress for federal intervention before Georgia was readmitted to the Union. The Georgia legislature eventually agreed to a congressional mandate reinstating the Black legislators as a requirement for re-entry into the Union in July 1870.
During the subsequent presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (1869 – 1877), the civil rights movement continued. Black men could now serve on a jury and hold office in Washington D.C. The post office labor force was integrated. Black citizens’ participation in voting and civic matters was markedly increased.
But that was about to change. Across the south, the Republican party — which had championed the progressive changes — was divided. Many local Black leaders started emphasizing individual economic progress in cooperation with white elites, rather than racial equality and progress in general. By the end of Grant’s presidency, the Democratic Party — which had consistently opposed civil rights advances — had gained control.
Reconstruction was defeated, and the civil rights gains quickly receded. Though the U.S. Constitution offered some protections, individual states still had authority over laws related to voter registration and electoral procedures.
White Democrats and insurgent groups regained power in state legislatures, and passed laws and state constitutional amendments that disenfranchised most Blacks (and many poor whites) in the south. U.S. Supreme Court rulings upheld many of these laws and provisions; most Blacks were prevented completely from voting in the South until nearly one hundred years later.
My grandmother Alice was plain-spoken; she did not mince her words. She believed that people should tell the truth. She did not give anyone a “pass,” and thought that most people on most days were up-to-no-good. She had little patience for liars, hypocrites or back-stabbers. As she aged, she told my mother — her only child — that she did not want “them hypocrites” coming to her funeral looking her in her face!
She could — and I’m certain, would — say all the same things were she still alive today.
In the last year, more than 440 bills in 49 states have been introduced that would strip away at our voting rights.
These challenges are a reminder of the individual and collective work we have to do daily. They are policy choices — and we can choose more wisely, like the pro-democracy and anti-gerrymandering initiative, All On The Line.
Like Alice would, in this moment, I’m now re-examining the things I took for granted. The things I thought I knew, and then seeing that sometimes I didn’t know anything! I’m thinking about how I want to move, what difference do I work to create. What do I work to know, to act, and stand in this present doorway into our future.
I invite your comments, experiences and policy suggestions regarding voting rights practice and policy.
To reach Esther directly: sunflowerlvx@comcast.net
Your family history voting rights racism is heartfelt. After so many decades it is still so strong and embarrassing to this country. White power and privilege remains prevalent in 2022 so your personal family story needs a broader platform. Please let me know how I can help make that happen.
I send comfort and tenderness to you my Dear Friend. Cinda
Dear Cinda,
Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I must admit writing this post to share was very challenging for me on multiple fronts. Sometimes I felt like just running away and not writing the post. Then, I took a break and returned to finish Part 1. And I am in the mist of writing more… slowly, but surely. Please know your kind words are appreciated. Esther
This is an excellent article. Much is the same in “Blue” States and even among Democrats. As long as there is white control, all is well. We still wait for equality.
You raised some interesting awareness to this present time, so many points you mentioned needed to be made known. My point of view is pf, what the Constitution says (All Men Are Created Equal) and should have equal rights, including voting rights. Among other lawful rights.
Is the act of voting an opportunity for change or has it become an act devoid of real meaning?
If you believe, as I do, what the writer Gore Vidal said back in 2000, that there “is only one party and that is the corporate party”, something that now seems not even arguable,
then voting seems more like compelling theater rather than part of a process to achieve meaningful change.
Today only 14% of Americans trust any of our major institutions. I think they have a good reason not to trust, but I will not roll thru a list of who and what doesn’t work. My guess is that you already know.
Depriving people of the opportunity to vote by imposing literacy tests, poll taxes, shutting down voting stations so people are forced to wait in line for hours, etc. are all clearly abuses of citizens.
But the system is already closed – or as Bernie Sanders like to say -” the system is rigged”, because there is no opportunity for people to select the candidates by voting; there is no ranked choice voting and no limitations on the amount of money the privileged can spend to control the outcome of an election.
I recommend the book “Caste” by Elizabeth Wilkerson for a different perspective as to the ongoing discrimination and violence against people of color.
There is so much to say on this topic, but all conversation is good.
And now I will look for part 2.
Thank you for opening this conversation.
Dear Patricia,
Thank you for joining in the conversation via your comments to this blog – keeping this vital conversation “in play”. In your comment regarding this blog post, you posed two critical questions: Is the system simply rigged? Or is it simply doing what it is put in place to do?