Friend,

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn called Georgia’s sweeping new voter suppression law the “new Jim Crow.”

Voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams called it “Jim Crow 2.0”

President Joe Biden called it “Jim Crow in the 21^st century.”

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. 

The painting wasn’t the only symbol of the racist politics at play that day in Georgia, as Will Bunch of the 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 14^th 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. 

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Sincerely,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center