If asked what I consider to be a defining moment of the 20th century, I would have to say that it was the moment on the Edmund Pettus bridge in 1965 that led to the historic passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Let me talk about the things that I most distinctly remember. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young Black man, was 26 years old when he was shot by the police while trying to protect his mother from being brutalized in Marion, Alabama. This was a peaceful demonstration for voting rights. Jackson was a Black worker who made $6 a day as a woodcutter before he was murdered on that fateful night. And here we are, over 60 years later, still following up on what Dr. King told us when he said, “now we must see that Jimmie Jackson didn't die in vain.”

We must see even now that all those who were murdered in Alabama, Mississippi and throughout the disenfranchised Black Belt South didn’t die in vain.

I was 21, turning 22 years old in the summer of 1964 and I had lived through four young Black girls being killed by a bombing in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 and three young men, two white and one Black, being murdered in Mississippi in the same period. Then I saw Bloody Sunday on TV, where hundreds of people, protesters, were teargassed and beaten for peacefully demanding the right to vote.

And as I was saying earlier, here we are 60 years later, where Black legislators in the deep South and in Tennessee are sitting down in the state legislatures in protest demanding that the right to vote not be taken away from them, demanding that all majority-Black political districts not be disenfranchised based on the recent decision of the United States Supreme Court to totally gut the Voting Rights Act. That's what they did, they just struck down the Voting Rights Act, which took us over 100 years to enact. They struck it down in a day.

And now there's a wave of protests throughout the South, mainly Black people, but not just Black people, saying to this Supreme Court, to the Congress, and particularly to the Republican-dominated Congress, and to the world, that we’re not going back. And the world will see that through our united actions, that we’re not going back. The world will see once again the ironclad determination of Black people and their allies, refusing to go back, protesting and demanding that we go forward.

Protesting and demanding that not only will we not be pushed back to Jim Crow, but that we’re going to put an end to those who are trying to take us back there: Donald Trump and his minions, Donald Trump and his Supreme Court, Donald Trump and his corrupt Congress, Donald Trump and his corrupt White House. You’re not going to take us back. We refuse to go back. We’re fighting to go forward. And in going forward, we will put an end to all of these travesties of justice. We will put an end to the so-called white backlash, which thinks it has a political destiny to make America worse again, not great again, to take the American dream and turn it into the American nightmare.

We will not go back, and we can’t say this strong enough, that what we need to do in the days ahead is protest what the Supreme Court has done, to confront and challenge what's going on in the state houses in the Deep South, and what the governors and congresspeople in the Deep South are trying to do to bring back Jim Crow, to bring back that period when Black people were terrorized, brutalized and murdered for trying to exercise their constitutional right to vote, which was earned through a revolution that took place in the 1860s.

There are three amendments that came out of that revolution. These were the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment, and the 15th Amendment. The 13th, abolishing the buying and selling of Black people. The 14th Amendment, giving equal protection of law, and making it a law that if you are born in America, you are automatically an American citizen. And the 15th Amendment, extending the franchise, the right to vote, to those who had been in bondage during slavery.

Since the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the political history of the Deep South has been about state governments in the Black belt states’ resistance to the voting rights of Black citizens.

Since 1877, the year when the North and the South agreed that the South was uniquely suited to be the guardians of the “Negro Problem,” they agreed on keeping Black folks out of politics and redeeming the South from biracial coalitions that protected and enforced the voting rights of Black folks and the masses of propertyless people who were denied the franchise.

1877, the year of the great betrayal, with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes for president, marked the beginning of the reign of white supremacist terrorists initiating campaigns of racist violence and political repression. Mississippi, a state whose population was 70% Black, led the South to hold state conventions to establish a movement of disfranchisement creating a system of obstacles between the voter and the ballot box, ushering in an era of disenfranchisement that lasted for over 75 years.

Electoral structures designed to keep Black folks from voting were not only profoundly undemocratic but helped to maintain a status quo that keeps the South the most economically, socially and culturally most backward quadrant of the nation.

Those amendments to the Constitution were revolutionary then, but apparently not enough to settle this question once and for all. So, that’s our task. Our task is to finish this revolutionary process that was started back in 1861, to finish this revolutionary process in the 21st century.

We will not go back, and if we’re not going back then we have got to go forward, and going forward means putting an end not for once but once and for all to these racist policies and the racist regime that sits in Washington instituting these policies.

All Power to the People!

#Commentary #VotingRightsAct #OppressedNationalities #FrankChapman #PeoplesStruggles #Featured

We strongly condemn the June 25 decision by the Supreme Court of the U.S. to gut the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. On a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the requirement that seven southern and southwestern states have to get federal government approval for changes in their election practices. Such approval was to make sure that the changes do not prevent African American and Chicano voters from full participation in elections.

The Voting Rights Act was first passed in August of 1965, after a long struggle in the South led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to allow African Americans to vote. SNCC was born out of the Feb. 1, 1960 sit-in by four Black college students at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. As waves of sit-ins at diners, buses and bus stations, and other segregated facilities exploded across the South, SNCC began to do voter registration among African Americans.

This effort peaked with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, which brought thousands of college students from across the country to Mississippi to register voters and open freedom schools deep in the heart of the Black Belt South. On June 21, 1964, three young organizers, James Chaney, aged 18, Michael Schwerner, aged 25, and Andrew Goodman, 20, were arrested by the local police in Neshoba County, Mississippi, brutally beaten and then murdered. But this violence did not stop the Mississippi Summer Project or the mass civil rights movement of African Americans.

50 years later, there has been progress for African Americans in electoral politics. There are now thousands of Black elected officials, including the President of the U.S. But at the same time the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites,” continue to ring true: The unemployment rate for African Americans is twice that of whites, while African Americans are more than four times as likely to end up in jail. African Americans are half as likely to be college graduates as whites and African American wealth is just 1/20th that of whites.

What progress that has been made by African Americans in elections is under renewed attack by the Republican right. Many Republicans have adopted a strategy of ‘voter suppression’ against African Americans and other oppressed nationalities by making it more difficult to register and to vote. Many local elections have ‘at-large’ elections that can lead to all-white government bodies even where the population is a minority white. The U.S. Supreme Court decision opens the door to even more of these attacks on the political rights of African Americans and other oppressed nationalities. These attacks by the right must be met with even more struggle by the masses.

#UnitedStates #Editorials #Racism #SupremeCourt #VotingRightsAct #1964MississippiSummerProject