Since the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote in 1870, policymakers have thrown obstacles between marginalized voters and the ballot box. Author and historian Carol Anderson says the tactics may change, but the erosion of democracy is relentless.
Anderson joins LPM’s Michelle Tyrene Johnson on a new episode of “Race Unwrapped.” Here’s part of their conversation, edited for clarity.
This season, I'm going to tackle how many of the voter suppression and intimidation tactics that took place during the Reconstruction are revisited in a different packaging now. Do you think that's an overstatement, since, of course, we're not coming out of the heels of slavery?
Mark Twain apocryphally said, “History may not repeat itself, but it sure do rhyme.” And we are listening to the rhymes right now. It's the same kind of rhyme of, how do we stop these Black folk from voting? How do we make it sound legitimate?
So with the poll tax, for instance, it was a way to flip the script, to put the onus on the voter, saying if you really believed in democracy, you would be willing to pay a small fee in order to be able to vote.
But because of slavery, hundreds of years of unpaid labor, followed by sharecropping — which is wage theft, massive wage theft — Black folks did not have the money. And so what that poll tax looked like in Mississippi came to 2-6% of a Mississippi farm family's annual income. Imagine paying 2-6% of your annual income to be able to vote, and to have to do that every year.
Another way was the literacy test.
See, I saw in your book you gave an example of something from the literacy test. I'm a non-practicing attorney who used to practice and was licensed in two states. And I couldn’t make heads and tails of that, and I'm glad it wasn't on the bar, because I would never have passed the bar.
Right. And this is doing the work it's supposed to do, right? So the work that it's supposed to do is to figure out, how do we stop Black folk from voting while making it look like this is legitimate? Those are the rhymes then, that we're dealing with the same kind of rhymes now.
So when I think about where we are today, I'm thinking about felony disenfranchisement coming out of Florida.
Forty percent of black men in Florida could not vote because of a felony conviction. Over 20% of African-American adults could not vote because of a felony conviction. Amendment 4 handled that. That was a ballot initiative driven by the people in order to deal with permanent felony disenfranchisement, which was the law in Florida since 1868 — a Reconstruction law.
But then the Florida legislature said, okay, this thing passed. Do you see who's getting ready to vote? Okay, how do we write this so that they can't vote? And so they said, okay, completion of sentence means you have to pay all your fees, fines and court costs. That case then goes up through the courts. And what folks were arguing was that this is a poll tax, because you have to be able to pay in order to vote. Because I don't have to pay my income tax to be able to vote. I don't have to pay my property tax to be able to vote. But now I’ve got to pay fees, fines and court costs?
Do you think that Black people are still the target of a whole lot of this voter suppression? I mean, I know there are other groups that obviously — other ethnic groups, other people, like poor people, regardless of race — but are Black people, in your opinion, still a big target of all this?
Let me answer that by giving you what Newt Gingrich said after the 2020 election. He said they stole the election in Atlanta. They stole it in Philadelphia. They stole it in Milwaukee. They stole it in Detroit. Notice he didn't say they stole it in Salt Lake City.
So the identification of Black people with voter fraud, the identification of Black people with the theft of American democracy is also something that emerges straight out of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, some of the rhymes. And so yes, Black folks are still the target of these laws.