Finish the Civil War! For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Black Disenfranchisement and American “Democracy”
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 833, 1 October 2004.
In the 2000 elections, Florida made headlines across the globe as its electoral machinery worked to spit out a result favorable to George W. Bush—an outcome subsequently assured by the blatantly partisan intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose chief justice, William Rehnquist, launched his career 40 years ago by purging blacks from Arizona’s voter rolls. While confusing ballots that led many old Jewish women to vote for sinister rightist Patrick Buchanan dominated the news, black people were the target of a concerted effort to rob them of their right to vote. Police roadblocks barred the ways to polling places, and many black people who managed to get through found themselves barred from voting even if they carried a voter registration card.
Nearly 140,000 black men in Florida were denied suffrage in the last presidential election due to felony convictions, many of them resulting from the racist, bipartisan “war on drugs.” In Jacksonville, an astounding 9 percent of ballots cast were invalidated, over a third of them cast by black people. Meanwhile, over in Missouri, the corpse of Democrat Mel Carnahan beat the still breathing John Ashcroft, now Bush’s Attorney General, for a seat in the U.S. Senate in a stinging repudiation of Ashcroft’s fanatical conservatism—and with a heavy turnout of black voters.
Florida was not alone. In many black precincts in Chicago, as many as one in six ballots were tossed out. The Republicans have forgotten none of this and are hatching new plans to prevent black people, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, from voting. A Republican state legislator in the bitterly contested state of Michigan, John Pappageorge, has stated bluntly, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote [in a city that is over 80 percent black], we’re going to have a tough time in this election” (New York Times, 13 September). Florida election officials drafted a list of those disqualified due to past felony convictions; of some 48,000 felons, roughly 22,000 were blacks. Strikingly, the list included only 61 Hispanics, who in southern Florida are largely anti-Castro gusano reactionaries, a key Republican constituency.
These are nothing less than a frontal attack on the basic democratic right of blacks to vote. While there is not a candidate in this election who represents the interests of workers, black people and other oppressed minorities, we are intransigent defenders of the hard-won right to vote. The bloody Civil War that smashed chattel slavery won black men the right of the franchise, which was then largely stripped from them in the South during the Jim Crow era. Black people in the South regained voting rights through the courageous struggles of the civil rights movement—struggles that faced brutal police repression and KKK nightriding terror. Civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, whose bodies were dredged from a muddy dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964, were among those lynched for fighting for black people’s right to the franchise.
In a throwback to that era, Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement has sent armed state troopers into elderly black voters’ homes on an “investigation” of voter fraud—despite the department having decided in May that the charges were baseless! The president of the Florida Voters League (a group that works to increase black electoral turnout), Eugene Poole, stated:
“These guys are using these intimidating methods to try and get these folks to stay away from the polls in the future. And you know what? It’s working. One woman said, ‘My God, they’re going to put us in jail for nothing.’ I said, ‘That’s not true’.”
—New York Times, 20 August
“Not true”? In 1985, longtime Alabama civil rights activist Spiver Gordon was convicted of “voter fraud” for the “crime” of assisting elderly black people to file absentee ballots, which allowed blacks to vote without fear or intimidation in the privacy of their own homes. The prosecution and conviction of Gordon were part of a concerted campaign by the Reagan administration to disenfranchise black voters, particularly in the South.
Today, a national law, ironically named the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), has significantly tightened ID requirements for those newly registering and voters across the country, making it easier to turn voters away. In a test run of these requirements in Chicago, 95 percent of the provisional ballots cast by those whose “identity” was in question were invalidated. In an amusing twist, Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, who pushed through the HAVA, found himself struck from the rolls in his hometown and had to go through a tedious rigmarole to vote for himself. The Spartacist League stands opposed to any and all restrictions on the rights of citizens to vote and for the right of all immigrants (documented or not) to full citizenship rights—including the right of franchise.
Many states are moving toward electronic balloting. The companies that provide these machines have close links to the Republican Party: Election Systems and Software (its predecessor company was headed by current Republican Senator Chuck Hagel), Sequoia Voting Systems (whose products were rejected as insecure against fraud in the 1990s by New York City), Hart InterCivic (one of whose main investors was an early financial backer of Bush’s business schemes) and Diebold Election Systems (also linked to the GOP). These systems eliminate any paper trail and, as the Nation (16 August) put it, could be used “to invisibly falsify the outcomes” of elections. With a little finagling with the software, these “innovations” could render old methods of stealing an election, like leaving dead people on the rolls and stuffing ballots, superfluous. And there would be no gravestones to check.
Stealing elections is nothing new, and it’s hardly limited to the Republicans. In fact, one could say that this old American “art” was perfected by Democratic Party machines in cities like New York (Tammany Hall) and Chicago (the Daley machine—“vote early, vote often”).
Beyond dicey electronic voting systems and police intimidation, though, and far more instrumental in the purge of black people from the rolls, is the racist “war on drugs.” We have long declared that this “war” is a war against black people. Over two million people are in state and federal prisons, largely on drug charges. This attack focuses on black people, whether through cop rampages through the ghettos of the inner cities or through the depredations of regional narcotics task forces, like the one in rural Texas that framed up 46 people in 1999 (see “Tulia Victims Freed, Finally,” WV No. 813, 7 November 2003). While the white population in prison for drug offenses increased by 306 percent between 1985 and 1995, the number of black people incarcerated for the same period shot up by 707 percent under mandatory sentencing schemes supported by both Republicans and Democrats—including John Kerry. We are for the decriminalization of drugs.
The war on drugs has a direct effect on who votes and who doesn’t. Five states permanently ban felons and ex-felons from voting (including Florida), while only two states allow prisoners to vote (Maine and Vermont—both of which have tiny black populations), and the rest have policies that to one degree or another fall between these two poles. The result is clear. Felony convictions bar 4.6 million Americans from voting (some 2.3 percent of the electorate), of whom over a third are black men. Indeed, 13 percent of black men are currently barred from voting, and many more felons who could vote believe they cannot.
All of this emphasizes the tenuousness of basic democratic rights in capitalist America—especially for black people. The Republicans know that they are not going to get the black vote; they are a party of plutocrats, racist bigots and bible-thumping yahoos and make no bones about it. But what of the Democrats, the party that stands to lose from the purge of black voters? At first blush, one would think that they would vigorously defend black voting rights, if only for the obvious electoral advantage.
But no. Even after their betrayal of the black masses following Reconstruction, the Republicans, guaranteed the black vote given that the Democrats were the party of choice for the KKK, were quite willing to let the Democrats terrorize and disenfranchise the black populace—which generally voted Republican until the era of the New Deal, an alliance between Northern liberals and Southern Dixiecrats that did nothing to enfranchise the majority of black people, most of whom then lived in the Jim Crow South. In the aftermath of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, and with the Republicans’ strategic drive to become identified as the party of right-wing reaction, the Democrats have been guaranteed the lion’s share of the black vote.
Democrats have been at most tepid in their defense of the franchise for black people. According to the New York Times (26 September), there has been a big increase in the registration of new voters, mainly black and minority, in swing states. But the key thing here is swing states. In states where a Democratic victory is all but assured, black disenfranchisement continues apace. For example, more than 40 percent of black men in several neighborhoods in south Providence, Rhode Island are barred from voting because of felony convictions.
One of the most striking scenes in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 showed Al Gore, as President of the Senate, ruling a series of black Congressmen out of order as they contested the 2000 presidential election results due to the events in Florida—the very events that almost certainly cost him the presidency. Because of the black constituencies that these Congressmen represented (or misrepresented), they felt even more robbed by the election outcome than the man from whom the election was actually stolen. But in ruling out these Congressmen, Al Gore was not acting out of faintheartedness. Rather, it was due to the class nature of the Democratic Party. As a capitalist party, the Democrats are every bit as committed to the maintenance of the racist, capitalist order as the Republicans. They merely argue over the details.
The overriding factor for Gore and the Democratic establishment was that the “sanctity” of the imperial American presidency not be blemished by a dispute over who won. In urging Gore to back down, for example, the New York Times (9 November 2000) wrote: “This is a time for both presidential candidates, their advisers and their parties to proceed with extreme caution—a caution merited by the danger that events could lurch suddenly toward political or constitutional crisis. The tradition of regular, reliable elections and orderly transition of power is one of the glories of American democracy.”
Another “one of the glories of American democracy” is the oppression of black people, which forms a key structural component of American capitalism; the ruling class wields racism to maintain a pernicious division in the working class. Whether it be “ending welfare as we know it” under Clinton, consigning already poverty-stricken families to greater privation, lining up behind the racist “war on drugs” or throwing themselves foursquare in support of the “war on terror,” the Democrats have proven, and every day continue to prove, that they are no friends to black and working people. Even a longtime hustler for the Democrats (and sometime wire for the FBI), Al Sharpton, faced a barrage of hostility when he attempted to simply address the racism black people face in the United States at the Democratic National Convention in Boston this summer. (The speech of the current black Democratic rising star, Barack Obama, which whitewashed the bitter reality of racist oppression in America, went over much better.)
But while the ballot is a fundamental right, a right we tenaciously defend, fundamental change will not come through voting. It was not by the ballot that slavery met its demise; it was not by the ballot that Jim Crow was ended. Union rights did not come from Congress or the president. All the gains working people and black people have made came through their seizing them, by mass struggles on the battlefields, in the factories and on the streets, from the racist rulers.
These gains, though real, are also, as one can see from the erosion of black voting rights, reversible, and the racist, warmongering Democratic Party is no defense against the racist, warmongering Republican Party. Working people need their own party, a revolutionary party that recognizes that the fight for black freedom and the fight for the emancipation of labor are inextricably linked. We in the Spartacist League seek to build such a party to do away with the capitalist order and create an egalitarian socialist society in which the perfidies of the past shall be relegated to the history books and expunged from the lives of future generations.