Academic Freedom Is Ultimately Tied to the Right to Vote

Cecil Canton, my colleague on the CBC Executive Committee, has passed along this “Weekly Commentary” from Jesse Jackson, Sr., about the erosion of voting rights in Alabama. Very ironically but very predictably, once the Supreme Court ruled that the states subject to federal monitoring under the Voting Rights Act had moved beyond the need for such oversight, their state governments have quickly resurrected many of the strategies that they had employed to suppress the African-American vote during the Jim Crow period.

And as Cecil states in his e-mail, “Clearly, as academics we justify protecting what we do by saying that we teach our students to be able to more effectively participate in our democracy. If that is true, then we need to be first in the fight to protect the most essential part of that democracy: the franchise! Especially in those places where it is most under attack and for those folks who are most vulnerable to that attack. Otherwise we need to stop saying it.”

Jesse Jackson’s commentary is titled “Alabama’s New Jim Crow Far from Subtle”:

“In Alabama, 50 years after Selma, voting rights are once more under assault. Even as Alabama finally took down its confederate flags this year, it has raised new obstacles to voting. The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder to gut the Voting Rights Act, supported by the five conservative justices alone, opened the floodgates to legislation in over 21 states erecting new obstacles to make voting more difficult. These have included limiting the days for early voting, eliminating Sunday voting, requiring various forms of ID, shutting down voting sites and more. Alabama—the home of Selma and the Bloody Sunday police riot that spurred the passage of the original Voting Rights Act 50 years ago—is one of the leaders in the new forms of voter suppression. Alabama passed a bill requiring for the first time a photo ID for voting, hitting African-Americans, the poor, the young and the old disproportionately. Now Alabama is using a budget squeeze to shut down 31 satellite offices that issue driver’s licenses, the most popular form of voter ID. This new Jim Crow isn’t subtle.

“Al.com columnist John Archibald reported that eight of the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of nonwhite registered voters saw their driver’s license offices closed. ‘Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed,’ Archibald wrote, ‘Every one.’ First the state demands that you get a photo ID, and then it makes it harder to do so, particularly in areas heavily populated by African-Americans. Not surprisingly, civil rights activists are asking the Justice Department to intervene. Rep. Terri A. Sewell, who represents Selma and is the only Democratic member of the Alabama congressional delegation, called the restrictions ‘eerily reminiscent of past, discriminatory practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests that restricted the black vote.’ State officials claim that other ways of obtaining photo IDs are available for voters. But this is Alabama, infamous for its segregationist history, for its rejectionist Gov. George Wallace, for bloody Sunday in Selma, for the murder of four little girls in the bombing of the Birmingham church.

“Under the original Voting Rights Act, Alabama’s measures would have required preclearance from the Justice Department. With the bipartisan leadership of Rep. John Conyers, Sen. Pat Leahy, and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a bill to resuscitate the Voting Rights Act is now pending in Congress, although it has yet to get a vote. It revives preclearance measures, applying them to states with five violations of federal law to their voting changes over the past 15 years. While the old law applied to nine Southern States and parts of several others, this standard would apply only to Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

“Yes, Alabama would still be exempt from preclearance, as would other states with an extensive history of voting discrimination such as North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Arizona and Virginia.

“The right to vote is fundamental to any Republic. Voting should be facilitated, not obstructed. We should register citizens automatically. Early voting should be extended and easy. Voting day should be a holiday, so workers have time to cast their votes. American voting rates are scandalously low, largely because we make registration and voting so difficult.

“It is particularly outrageous that 50 years after Selma, when the country celebrates the courage of the civil rights marchers, we still witness efforts to suppress the vote, skewed to discriminate against minorities. Alabama’s actions demand a Justice Department investigation. And that demand should be met immediately.”

 

 

5 thoughts on “Academic Freedom Is Ultimately Tied to the Right to Vote

  1. You would think that the right to vote would also be fundamental to any institution of higher education. Is the denial of the right to vote for adjunct faculty in “shared governance” a kind of Jim Crow law, segregating faculty by rank?

  2. The Right to Petition, Poem by Angela Brown

    A commuter suffers
    The injustice of inequality
    Nations of women stand up
    equal pay and equal work
    An immoral democracy
    Suffers, universally
    and in temperance
    Society suffers
    Their state of mind, suppressed
    In deeds, not words
    A women’s place
    Is a natural role
    That will not be discouraged
    A women’s vote will be heard
    A movement to the world
    That shook society
    From ill-circumstance
    And challenged an ideology
    Men and women equality
    Have their right to act freely
    In an open society

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