Same Old Jim Crow: Georgia voter law continues long history of
disenfranchisement

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The Southern Poverty Law Center | Read the full piece here

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Friend,

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn called Georgia's sweeping new voter
suppression law the "new Jim Crow."

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Voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams called it "Jim Crow
2.0"

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President Joe Biden called it "Jim Crow in the 21st
century."

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It's all that. But in some ways - though certainly not
including the prevalent racial terror and violence of the era -
it's much like old Jim Crow, wrapped up in a new package, one
that's only slightly less transparent than the laws enacted
across the South in the late 1800s and early 1900s to deny Black
people access to the ballot, along with many other rights.  

And so the scene of the March 25 bill signing couldn't have been
more appropriate: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp surrounded by six other
white men standing in front of a painting of a Georgia plantation
where hundreds of people had been enslaved before the Civil War. 

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The painting wasn't the only symbol of the racist politics at
play that day in Georgia, as Will Bunch of the

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Philadelphia Inquirer wrote:

At the very moment that Kemp was signing the law with his all-white
posse, a Black female Georgia lawmaker - Rep. Park Cannon
- who'd knocked on the governor's door in the hopes
of watching the bill signing was instead dragged away and arrested by
state troopers, in a scene that probably had the Deep South's
racist sheriffs of yesteryear like Bull Connor or Jim Clark smiling in
whatever fiery hellhole they now inhabit.

For those who don't know or understand the parallels between the
period we're in today and what happened more than a century ago,
it's worth a quick review.

At the end of Reconstruction, in an era known by historians as the
"Redemption," Southern states enacted an array of Jim Crow
laws and new state constitutions designed and promoted explicitly to
disenfranchise Black people. Unlike today, there was no attempt to
disguise what was happening. And it was all done for a simple reason:
to maintain political power for the aristocratic class at a time when
Black people were gaining a political voice and helping elect
candidates of their choice.

After the 14th Amendment guaranteed Black men the right to vote in
1868, for example, 33 Black members were elected to the Georgia
Assembly. The same thing happened in legislatures and various city and
county offices across the South. 

Of course, though the impact was not nearly as severe, the Jim Crow
laws also disenfranchised many poor white people who were increasingly
siding with the more progressive candidates not only favored by their
Black neighbors but more likely to respond to their similar needs. The
laws and customs of Jim Crow took care of this loss for poor white
people by segregating society along racial lines and creating
alternative systems of justice, relegating Black people to
second-class citizenship. 

READ MORE

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Sincerely,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center

 

The SPLC is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond,
working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy,
strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of
all people.

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