Category Archives: civil rights

I stand with Texas women

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I’m posting this now in advance of the vote in Austin which will almost certainly impose new and repressive restrictions on women seeking abortions and upon men and women alike seeking medical services relating to reproductive health, constituting a massive and probably unconstitutional violation of the relationship between patients and doctors. Later, I’ll have a good deal more to say, especially about so called conservative states’ denial of basic medical services to children. But today I’d just like to say unequivocally that I stand with my friends in Austin and Raleigh and Madison and Indianapolis and Columbus and in all the surrounding locales in this country where reactionary legislatures are attempting to strip citizens of long established rights.

more about voting rights

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I stayed up late two nights ago hoping for news of the resolution to Senator Wendy Davis’s courageous filibuster against current Republican attempts to shut down most of Texas’s abortion clinics. But it was morning before I learned that she had actually succeeded, with the help of a gallery full of supporters. Of course Texas Lieutenant Governor, David Dewhurst, was quick to claim that the solemn proceedings of the august body over which he presides had been disrupted by a mob, and to promise to fight another day (in a new special session already called by Texas Governor Rick Perry).

My Facebook news feed remains full of celebration of Senator Davis and of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, of which more later. But Senator Davis, though she has become a new national celebrity as photos of her pink shoes have gone viral on the Internet, may need to seek other public office than the seat in the Texas Senate she now holds. Voter suppression legislation, that Texas enacted just hours after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision striking down part of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, redraws the Texas Legislative map in a way that effectively destroys Davis’s district.

The predictable Antonin Scalia has been widely noted, as he seemingly felt obliged to vent about his colleagues’ legitimation of “homosexual sodomy.” Declaring that he feels personally (and unfairly) stigmatized by the DOMA decision, Justice Scalia registered his discomfort at being thought a bigot. The very kindest thing that can be said about the good Justice, though, is that he is on the wrong side of this issue and the wrong side of history. Of course, his church is equally on the wrong side and entirely disingenuous in its official expressions of discomfort. Scalia is not disingenuous, just extreme. As a sidebar, the St. Louis Post Dispatch yesterday carried an op-ed piece by St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson again claiming that the Affordable Care Act infringes upon Catholic religious freedom.

I’m not hopeful about the voting rights issues. I do not think Justice Roberts’s claim that race no longer counts in our national politics is naive. I think it is calculated. Justice Roberts is surely aware that his court’s decision to weaken the voting rights act is as blatant an intervention into electoral politics as was Bush v. Gore. He is surely aware as well that present Republican strategy relies heavily upon attempts to disenfranchise minority, female, student, and elderly voters who tend to favor Democratic candidates. Republicans have hardly been secretive about this aim.

The conservative punditry are singing the praises of the voting rights decision, ignoring the fact that voter ID laws, which conservatives favor, aim to destroy the very success they (and Justice Roberts) claim that the Voting Rights act has achieved. Over the past several years voter protection groups, the League of Women Voters, and others have achieved some success in combatting voter suppression through legal means. Now much of this will have to be re-litigated. Reactionary state legislatures, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, and others are already announcing readiness to enact and/or reaffirm repressive new laws designed to disenfranchise voters who tend to vote for democrats. The Texas law, hurriedly announced by state Attorney General, Greg Abbott, has already been challenged legally. In states outside the South, such as my own state of Missouri, voter suppression has been given a new impetus.

The Roberts argument about race is grounded in the color-blind ideology (so-called) of aversive racism. It will be interesting to see how all these things play out in the next few weeks as the radical right seeks to express its belief in its own entitlement through voter suppression and liberals and progressives attempt to counter it. I don’t, myself, think we’re that far removed these days from the politics of Bull Connor. Blacks, Hispanics, and now people who look Muslim or have Muslim sounding names, are routinely targeted, beaten, and harrassed by police. Race and class-based repression are not localized in the South or directed solely at black people these days, but then they never were. Minorities are routinely subjected to selective law enforcement, including the death penalty. Our incarceration rate remains the highest in the world, with minorities overrepresented among our incarcerated populations. Texas has just completed its 500th execution since 1976, its eighth so far this year, executing Kimberly McCarthy, a black woman convicted by a jury that escaped being all white by including one black member. A good case can be made that we are not only resegregating our country, but rebarbarizing it as well.

Oh Freedom

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Today’s news reports announce that the Supreme Court has struck down section four of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that its coverage formula, which determines what areas of the country must receive prior approval for any changes in voting laws (most recently revisited by Congress in 1975) is out of date. Of course that’s not the whole story. The court has not ruled narrowly. This decision is an outrageous piece of judicial activism masquerading as something else.

Last evening we watched “Brother Outsider,” the award winning documentary about the life and career of Bayard Rustin. The ten-year-old film is circulating again in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 march on Washington, which Rustin organized. The screening was presented by the Missouri History Museum and was attended by a large and diverse crowd. It was good to see such a high level of interest for this classic memoir of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Most present-day evocations of the famous march focus on Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which, though it climaxed the program, was hardly the first event of note or the only speech before the Lincoln memorial that day fifty years ago. One candid moment in “Brother Outsider,” for instance, shows Rustin walking directly behind Bob Dylan and Joan Baez singing Dylan’s “When the Ship comes In.” Rustin is casually smoking a cigarette and seeming not to listen. And what has largely been forgotten about that day is the list of demands that Rustin delivered in a speech that preceded Dr. King’s, along with the fact that the march’s full title was “March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom.” It was the brain child of A. Philip Randolph, but it could never have happened without Rustin. And the presence of both men at the center of it underscores something else we have forgotten as a people: that the civil rights movement was as much about economic justice and equality of access to the goods of our society as it was about ending Jim Crow laws.

And it’s worth noting that even during the program on the mall dissent raged between members of SNCC, particularly John Lewis, and more moderate members of the civil rights coalition over the language of Lewis’s speech. A pretty good short history of the march is here, and here’s the text of the speech that Lewis delivered that day; Lewis’s unedited speech is quoted in in material I have cited previously. Fifty years later, we live in the midst of the resegregation of America. Looking back on the 1963 march, one witness, Evelyn Cunningham, exclaimed:

I must’ve cried for an hour and a half at one point during the march. Part of it was sheer happiness, part of it was pride, and part of it was my family. I’m steeped in my respect for my people. After the march, I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re almost there’ — God, was I wrong.

If you think resegregation is too strong a word, perhaps you should reflect on the high rate of incarceration among persons of color in this country along with the systematic attack on voting rights being orchestrated through state legislatures by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Resegregation is now widely documented, both in schools and in our civic life. The process is being exacerbated by the growth of income inequality, and Texas is moving a voter suppression measure into place as I write.

The President and many members of Congress have spoken out against the high court’s decision, but I don’t think the present congress will be able to act in support of voting rights. So what I am left with today is a host of memories and a good deal of anger. It was good to relive parts of the civil rights movement last evening in company with many good folk. This morning I have listened to the great Odetta Holmes’s recording of her matchless rendition of “Oh Freedom,” a spiritual that Bayard Rustin also sang beautifully. It would be fine to be able to think that my country has embraced civil rights—pretty to think so, to draw on another memory. No, it would be beautiful. It’s just not true.