We Shall Be Overcome
Undoing the civil rights movement


Over the years since the Emancipation Proclamation, hundreds of African Americans and a number their white allies lost their lives in the battle to secure the basic right to vote. In the 1890s poor white and black southerners joined together politically for their common economic interests in independent political parties. Their threat to the political domination of the South's economic elite was a major spark to a frenzy of lynching during that decade, which saw an average of two African Americans lynched each WEEK.

This battle continued in the modern civil rights movement, leading to the deaths of Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney in Mississippi during 1964. Their deaths were three among many and probably got the most publicity because two of the victims were white.

Whereas many people take the right to vote for granted, only the blood of fellow Americans made it possible for all to vote. Their deaths and the bloody scene at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, AL in 1965 were the impetus for passage of the Voting Rights Act that year. Now political appointees in the Justice Department are stripping away the protections of that law for partisan purposes.

Reporters have already noted that the legal experts in the Justice Department were overruled by their bosses in clearing the Georgia voter ID law, which thankfully the courts declared unconstitutional. (Why do you suppose the Right so hates the courts and wish to shape them in their own image?) Now we learn that the bosses overruled the experts again in the Texas redistricting case. See the WP article Justice Staff Saw Texas Redistricting as Illegal:

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post.
But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department's voting section, said the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections.

[ . . . ]

The 73-page memo, dated Dec. 12, 2003, has been kept under tight wraps for two years. Lawyers who worked on the case were subjected to an unusual gag rule. The memo was provided to The Post by a person connected to the case who is critical of the adopted redistricting map. Such recommendation memos, while not binding, historically carry great weight within the Justice Department.

I hope more people become as angry as I am about the stripping away of hard-earned rights of minorities. I am also scared because the protection of minority rights is only guaranteed by an independent Supreme Court. Take away that last leg in the system of checks and balances, and we will be left with the tyranny of the majority (of those who actually voted and had their votes counted).

Scary thought?