A Short History of Bigotry and Voting Rights in America

[bats]

Historian Heather Cox Richardson publishes a daily newsletter. Today, as CPAC was holding its annual conference for bigots and traitors to the constitution, she posted a short history of where we came from. It's amazing how similar are the issues then and now, especially in the disgraceful Trump era.


On this day in 1880, the Republican candidate for president, James A. Garfield, spoke to thousands of supporters from the balcony of the Republican headquarters in New York City. Ten years before, in 1870, Americans had added the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, making sure that Black men could vote by guaranteeing that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

As soon as the amendment was ratified, though, white southerners who were dead set against their Black neighbors participating in their government began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds. Their objection to Black voting, they claimed, was that poor, uneducated Black men just out of enslavement were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could be paid for only with taxes levied on people with the means to pay, which in the post–Civil War South usually meant white men.

Complaining that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—white southerners began to keep Black voters from the polls. In 1878, Democrats captured both the House and the Senate, and former Confederates took control of key congressional committees. From there, in the summer of 1879, they threatened to shut down the federal government altogether unless the president, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to end the federal protection of Black Americans in the South.

The congressional leader who eventually forced them to back down was James A. Garfield (R-OH). Impressed by his successful effort to save the country, in 1880, party leaders nominated him for president.

Garfield was a brilliant and well-educated man and had served in the Civil War himself. On August 6 in New York City, he singled out the veterans in the crowd to explain how he saw the nation's future.

"Gentlemen," he said, "ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory. But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet tonight as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought."

"[W]e will remember our allies who fought with us," he told them. "Soon after the great struggle began, we looked beyond the army of white rebels, and saw 4,000,000 of black people condemned to toil as slaves for our enemies; and we found that the hearts of these 4,000,000 were God-inspired with the spirit of liberty, and that they were all our friends." As the audience cheered, he continued: "We have seen white men betray the flag and fight to kill the Union; but in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in a black skin." To great applause, he vowed, "[W]e will stand by these black allies. We will stand by them until the sun of liberty, fixed in the firmament of our Constitution, shall shine with equal ray upon every man, black or white, throughout the Union." As the audience cheered, he continued: "Fellow-citizens, fellow-soldiers, in this there is the beneficence of eternal justice, and by it we will stand forever."

Garfield won the presidency that year, but just barely. The South went solidly Democratic, and in the years to come, white northerners looked the other way as white southerners kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with state election laws using grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had voted, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes that were enforced arbitrarily, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. In 1880, the South became solidly Democratic, and with white men keeping Black people from the polls, it would remain so until 1964.

But then, exactly 85 years after Garfield's speech, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: "An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes."

Black Americans had never accepted their exclusion from the vote, and after World War II, they and other people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally. White reactionaries responded with violence, but Black Americans continued to stand up for their rights. In 1957 and 1960, under pressure from President Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed civil rights acts designed to empower the federal government to enforce the laws protecting Black voting.

In 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) began intensive efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point, and in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, volunteers set out to register voters. On June 21, Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, murdered organizers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and, when discovered, laughed at the idea they would be punished for the murders.

That year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strengthened voting rights. On March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, marchers led by John Lewis (who would go on to serve 17 terms in Congress) headed for Montgomery to demonstrate their desire to vote. Law enforcement officers stopped them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and beat them bloody.

On March 15, President Johnson called for Congress to pass legislation defending Americans' right to vote. "There is no constitutional issue here," he told them. "The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of states' rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights." Congress passed the measure. And on this day in 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

"Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield," he told the country. "I pledge [to] you that we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy."

"[M]en cannot live with a lie and not be stained by it," he said. "The central fact of American civilization...is that freedom and justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us. We believe in them. Under all the growth and the tumult and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some among us are oppressed—and we are part of that oppression—it must blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose."

—

Notes:

"Speech of General James A. Garfield delivered to the 'boys in blue.'" New York, August 6, 1880, at Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.12900200/?sp=1.

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/august-6-1965-remarks-signing-voting-rights-act

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/06/us/voting-rights-by-the-numbers-2022/index.html

Link to Richardson's post: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-6-2022?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

[dogwalker]

too short

[bats]

too short

Damn, you're hard to please.

[Hobby]

Damn, you're hard to please.

DW wasn't commenting about the op being too short...LOL

[Romanticlover]

More history...

[Tuscano]

Love you bats. I am sure good stuff. Too long. Let's meet at a very upscale wine bar!

[Blkfyre]

More history...

Wow, what a source you used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU#:~:text=Despite%20the%20name%2C%20PragerU%20is,a%20billion%20views%20in%202018.

PragerU has presented misleading and sometimes factually incorrect content in its videos

https://www.newsweek.com/prageru-karlyn-borysenko-holocaust-hitler-heaven-1656788 - PragerU Presenter Karlyn Borysenko Says Jewish People Chose To Die In Holocaust

https://theintercept.com/2021/12/21/ppp-loans-prager-university-hypocrisy/

"GOVERNMENT SPENDING IS a HUGE problem," the conservative video site PragerU tweeted in September 2019. "We must reinvest in Americans by giving them a hand up, not handouts," the group wrote in another tweet that November with a video of then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson discussing rehabilitation for incarcerated people titled, "Americans Need A Hand Up, Not Handouts."

But last year, right-wing groups that have long opposed the concept of increased government spending on "handouts" were the recipients of more than $1.7 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans while seeing significant increases in contributions or net assets, according to new research from the government watchdog group Accountable.US. Last April, the Small Business Administration launched the $349 billion emergency loan program to help small businesses struggling at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Prager University Foundation, which hosts PragerU, received more than $704,000 in PPP loans the same year that it saw a 55 percent, $12.3 million increase in contributions from 2019, and a $15 million increase in net worth over the same period. The nonprofit group, founded in 2009, has long criticized the concept of government spending and "handouts." In October, PragerU published a video titled "The Bankrupting of America," which criticized former President Donald Trump's approval of "a massive increase in government spending" during the pandemic, as well as additional spending by President Joe Biden.

https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/nros-dennis-prager-heterosexual-aids-entirely-manufactured-myth

Conservative columnist Dennis Prager claimed that "heterosexual AIDS" is a crisis "entirely manufactured by the Left," continuing his years-long campaign of peddling dangerous and inaccurate AIDS denialism.

[HighStepper]

We previously discussed this issue. https://fantasysaloon.com/index.php?msg=5751
This is a reposting of the same video. The title "The Inconvenient Truth about the Democratic Party" is misleading. There is nothing inconvenient about the truth.  Fact is the Democratic Party was the racist spawn of the KKK. The party of Lincoln, Republicans, was antislavery.   However, let's not try to get cute and claim the same ideologies remain with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party of today as they did yesteryear.

I tried to be temperate with my comments then. However, I now will be blunt. PragerU is one of the worst propaganda mills around, established to make money in 2009.

PragerU is not an academic institution. It is strictly a conservative YouTube video channel and news website. PragerU is rated questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, promotion of propaganda, the use of poor sources who have failed fact checks, and the publication of misleading information. Link

You cannot view this attachment.

[Romanticlover]

Everything in that video from Prager U is true, just because Prager U is a conservative outlet doesn't mean they tell lies. MSNBC is a lefty outlet and always tells lies, it really is a joke. CNN has gotten better and more objective in their reporting, I actually started watching CNN again.

[Blkfyre]

Everything in that video from Prager U is true, just because Prager U is a conservative outlet doesn't mean they tell lies. MSNBC is a lefty outlet and always tells lies, it really is a joke. CNN has gotten better and more objective in their reporting, I actually started watching CNN again.

So you are saying that it's true that Jewish People Chose To Die In Holocaust? And that there is NO SUCH THING as heterosexuals having AIDS as they claim?

[Romanticlover]

The person who made those stupid statements no longer works for or represents PragerU, especially after her "Hitler went to heaven" comment. PragerU deleted all of her videos. Karlyn Borysenko continues to Tweet ridiculous claims on her own.


 

[Blkfyre]

The person who made those stupid statements no longer works for or represents PragerU, especially after her "Hitler went to heaven" comment. PragerU deleted all of her videos. Karlyn Borysenko continues to Tweet ridiculous claims on her own.


 

And yet, they posted them. Someone on their staff reviewed them and said "This is OK to post". Those aren't streams, they are professionally made videos. This means filming, editing, post production, and PragerU had to be involved in all of that and OK it being put on the site.

And as we have been told, if something looks professional like that it means that someone deliberately made the choice that the content of her videos were fine at the time, ONLY taking them down after the backlash.

That says more about PragerU than you think...

And that not even addressing the whole Heterosexual AIDS is a myth thing by the FOUNDER of PragerU...

[Romanticlover]

I agree someone at PragerU should of checked her content before publishing it, to be fair to PragerU Karlyn Borysenko went full retard anti-Semitic around two years ago. She has a PhD in psychology and is a motivational speaker, if you read her recent Tweets or watch her videos on YouTube you will see she's a nut.

I don't agree with her views at all and I know PragerU doesn't either. 

[HighStepper]

Yes, essentially everything in that video from Prager U is true. However, the disingenuous spinning of facts is what makes it despicable.