Racism is Alive and Unwell

My front row seat to history helped me understand America’s complicated racist history.

President Lyndon Johnson hands a pen to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. after signing the Voting Rights Bill in 1965. Credit: Getty Images

When an American, any American, regardless of skin color, casts a ballot, it has to count. Not anymore. The Black vote in America has been diluted overnight by a Republican-packed Supreme Court.

Last week, the Court further silenced Black Americans by gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The justices, in a 6-3 vote, eliminated legally mandated congressional districts that give people of color the ability to participate in American democracy.

The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais struck down the state’s congressional map that required two majority-Black districts out of six. A third of Louisiana’s population is Black.

The extent to which Southern, white, Republican governors have already used the ruling to maximize partisan advantage is stunning.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry (R) immediately suspended the state’s May 16 primary to allow for the adoption of a new map, which would eliminate one of the two majority-Black districts. Early and absentee voting has already begun.

In Alabama and Tennessee, both Republican governors called special legislative sessions to redraw their congressional maps. Alabama, which has two minority-Black districts, would have one. Tennessee could end up with none.

On Monday, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed an aggressively gerrymandered electoral map into law, which could net four additional Republican seats in Congress. Florida’s new map was already in the works when the Callais decision came down. The ruling will make it harder to combat the new map in court.

Texas, Georgia, and Mississippi are also considering new gerrymandered maps.

The fight to improve civil rights, and therefore voting rights, was hard fought, and the road to equality was paved with the sweat and blood of many courageous Americans. I witnessed the struggle firsthand.

Soon after I was hired by CBS News in 1962, I became one of the first national reporters to cover the Civil Rights Movement. Though it began in 1954, there had been little coverage by national news organizations.

One of the first people I met was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Georgia. His bearing, his embrace of Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent protest, his deep Christian faith, and understanding of philosophy set him apart as a leader.

I spent the next few months crisscrossing the South. I reported on Ku Klux Klan rallies. Seeing hate course through a crowd of hooded men as they rallied around a burning cross chilled my heart.

It is hard to explain to those who weren’t there, but more than 60 years later, I can still see the hope in the eyes of so many Black Americans who only wanted to be treated equally. The vitriol of those Southern whites filled with hostility and anger still boils my blood.

Seeing this up close changed me. But it did not change our country as much as one might hope. Simmering hatred still lives on in the hearts and minds of too many.

I then visited Jackson, Mississippi where I met Medgar Evers.

Evers, who was only in his 30s at the time, was already a veteran of the civil rights struggle. While King sought a broad mandate of social change, Evers was laser-focused on voting. He was an impressive man who looked you square in the eye when he spoke. And the right to vote is what he wanted to speak about.

In 1962, I accompanied Evers and a group of Black voters to the polls on Election Day. They were armed with documents proving they were registered to vote.

Evers approached the polling official who said, “What you doing here, boy?” Evers politely responded that they were there to vote. “You aren’t voting today, you aren’t voting any day.” The reply seethed with hatred and contempt.

The brazenness of a white election official tossing aside the constitutional right of enfranchisement, a right that was enshrined in the Constitution because of the Civil War, was shocking. The fact that I would report on his actions did not stop him, nor did he even seem to care. The actions of Evers that day are the very definition of patriotic courage.

Over the next several months we became better acquainted. I found that Evers did not hate white people, he hated the system and the elected officials who manipulated it.

Less than a year later, Evers was dead, assassinated in his driveway. He was shot in the back.

The right to vote is the principal tenet of a representative democracy. President Lyndon Johnson understood the importance of voting rights as an essential pillar of civil rights. Two years after Evers’ murder, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which did away with many of the levers people used to disenfranchise Black voters.

Now the Supreme Court has all but killed it and the promise of equal citizenship, which they are sworn to uphold. Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, said the ruling would have “a devastating impact” on our democracy.

“[S]tates that used to play old games, they’re playing new games. They’re 21st-century Jim Crow tactics in new clothes: moving voter polls, closing polls in Black and brown communities, purging people — people literally showing up and not knowing that their names have been purged from the rolls. And the data shows that this disproportionately impacts Black and brown citizens,” he told Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation.”

Racism has been called cowardice. It is that, but it has also morphed into a cudgel used to oppress. Gerrymandering is institutionalized and sanctioned racism with the sole purpose of keeping the shrinking white majority in power, disenfranchised voters be damned.

North Carolina State Senator Michael Garrett wrote eloquently about where the country goes from here.

“November is when we answer. November is when ordinary Americans, neighbors, parents, teachers, veterans, kids casting their first ballot, pick up the work that six robed figures in Washington tried to set down. We do not need this Court’s permission to keep the covenant. We never did. We keep the covenant by showing up. At the doors. On the phones. At the polls. For each other.”

And for the men and women who died trying to further the ideal that we are all equal under the law and at the ballot box.

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Stay Steady,
Dan