Last week, Senate Republicans ruled to stop Senator Elizabeth Warren as she spoke against the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. She was stopped as she read a 1986 letter written by Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr.; the rule under which Senator Warren was silenced was a rule forbidding senators from “any conduct or motive unworthy of unbecoming a senator.”
However, the importance of this event goes beyond the 1986 response that King had to Jess Sessions. There is a history of voting rights between 1986 and 2017 that casts an even darker shadow on the events surrounding Senator Warren and the silencing of Coretta Scott King’s words.
The right to vote is a critical characteristic in any democracy, and democracy is the cornerstone of American politics. Historically, the ability to vote has been used to define personhood in the United States. Due to a lack of recognition as an entire person, black voters have been disenfranchised since the colonial era; the same goes for women. Today, those lacking full citizenship status are unable to vote, as well as those who have been previously incarcerated.
Voting rights for Black Americans goes back to the 1800s. In 1866, the Civil Rights Act gave citizenship to all people born in the United States, and in 1870 the 15th amendment was enacted, outlawing voter discrimination on the basis of race and opening the vote to black men (black women would not gain the right to vote until 1920).
However, federal supervision for these laws ended in 1877. The states were free to regulate themselves, which resulted in the creation of many round-about means of suppressing black voters, through legislation that effectively disenfranchised black voters while remaining race neutral in language. This included legislation that created literacy tests, poll taxes, and the grandfather clause, which ultimately led to effects such as a massive drop in the black registered voter population in Louisiana, which fell from 130,334 to 5,320 between 1896 and 1900.
This remained the case for almost 100 years, until 1965.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed under President Johnson in an effort to actually enforce the 15th amendment. The Voting Rights Act required specific states and counties to get pre-clearance on state voting legislation. The act was relatively effective in its goal of securing better protection for minority voters.
That is, until 2013.
In 2013, the Voting Rights Act was gutted by a Supreme Court ruling: the preclearance portion of the act was removed. Similar to 1880, the states that had been previously supervised began to turn out new voter laws, including highly restrictive voter ID laws, ex-felon laws, and laws that cut early voting periods, all of which impact primarily minority, democratic voters.
Jeff Session’s state, Alabama, is one of those states. Starting in 2014, Alabama Act 2011-673 requires voters to display specific photo ID at the polls. Research has shown repeatedly that voter ID laws have been shown to hurt minorities at the polls.
In the 1986 letter, King expressed concern about Jeff Sessions, citing his “hostility to the enforcement of [the Voting Rights Act], and thus, to the exercise of those rights by Black people should not be elevated to the federal bench.” Sessions’ hostility has not changed, but after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, his support of illegal discriminatory legislation is now support of legal discriminatory legislation.
What we are seeing now is a country running the circles of history. The United States is doing a rerun of 1880, when the federal government stopped its enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and the 15th Amendment, and states have jumped at the chance to legally continue suppressing voters of color.
When White House press secretary Sean Spicer says that he hopes Coretta Scott King would be supportive of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, he is misleading and taking advantage of an uneducated population.
Coretta Scott King would be horrified, and there is absolutely no doubt in that.
“The appointment of Jefferson Sessions to the federal bench would irreparably damage the work of my husband, Al Turner, and countless others who risked their lives and freedom of the past twenty years to ensure equal participation in our democratic system”
-Coretta Scott King
