'Jim Crow 2.0' isn't showing up for the Georgia midterm elections
Georgia's new voting laws have not suppressed voting and are nothing compared to the real terror and violence black voters faced in the Old Jim Crow South.
The record high turnout so far in the early voting in the midterm elections in Georgia has shown that the voter integrity laws recently passed by Republican legislators in that state have nothing in common with the Old Jim Crow.
President Biden, Stacey Abrams and the liberal journalists who didn’t challenge their ominous — and silly — predictions of the second coming of Jim Crow this fall — ‘Jim crow on Steroids’ — need to read some history books.
Fom 1890 to 1965 millions of blacks in the 17 Jim Crow South states faced real terrors and violence if they tried to vote or even register. It’s an insult to them to compare what they suffered to what today’s voting process is like.
For the record, the American Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee lists eight ways blacks were kept from voting in the Old Jim Crow South:
1) Violence: Blacks who tried to vote were threatened, beaten, and killed. Their families were also harmed. Sometimes their homes were burned down. Often, they lost their jobs or were thrown off their farms.
Whites used violence to intimidate blacks and prevent them from even thinking about voting. Still, some blacks passed the requirements to vote and took the risk. Some whites used violence to punish those “uppity” people and show other blacks what would happen to them if they voted.
2) Literacy tests: Today almost all adults can read. One hundred years ago, however, many people – black and white – were illiterate. Most illiterate people were not allowed to vote. A few were allowed if they could understand what was read to them. White officials usually claimed that whites could understand what was read. They said blacks could not understand it, even when they clearly could.
3) Property tests: In the South one hundred years ago, many states allowed only property owners to vote. Many blacks and whites had no property and could not vote.
4) Grandfather clause: People who could not read and owned no property were allowed to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1867. Of course, practically no blacks could vote before 1867, so the grandfather clause worked only for whites.
5) All-white primary elections: In the United States, there are usually two rounds of elections: first the primary, then the general. In the primary, Republicans run against Republicans and Democrats run against Democrats. In the general election, the winner of the Republican primary runs against the winner of the Democratic primary. The Republican or Democrat who gets the most votes is elected.
In the South from about 1900 to about 1960, the Democratic candidates usually won. (See the exhibit Political Parties in Black and White to learn the reason for this.) Republicans were almost never elected, especially in the Deep South. This means that the Democratic primary election was usually the only election that mattered.
African Americans were not allowed to vote in the Democratic primary elections. White Democrats said the Democratic Party was a “club” and did not allow black members. So blacks could not vote in the only elections that mattered.
6) Purges: From time to time, white officials purged the voting rolls. That means they took people’s names off the official lists of voters. Some voters would arrive at the polls and find that they were not registered to vote. Often they could not register to vote again until after the election. Purges more often affected blacks than whites.
7) Former prisoners: People who had gone to prison were often not allowed to vote. Blacks were very often arrested on trumped-up charges or for minor offenses. Sometimes, white owners of mines, farms, and factories simply needed cheap labor, and prisons provided it. This law kept many more blacks from voting than whites.
8) Poll taxes: In Southern states, people had to pay a tax to vote. The taxes were about $25 to $50 dollars in today’s money. Many people had extremely low incomes and could not afford this tax. This poll tax applied to all people who wanted to vote – black and white. There were ways for whites to get around other laws, but not around the poll tax. Many poor whites could not vote because of the poll tax.
The “Old Jim Crow” era of legalized segregation is said to have ended in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed and blacks in the South could vote without fear.
The American Black Holocaust Museum does a fine job of showing how shamefully unjust, unequal and demeaning the “Old Jim Crow” was for blacks.
But it also argues that today’s laws and customs “make it difficult or impossible for many black citizens and other minorities to vote.” It thinks felons should be able to vote and complains that black and Latino voters are often still unfairly purged from voter rolls.
It also has a convoluted explanation for why the bureaucratic process of getting government-issued IDs is like a poll tax that discriminates against poor, black, brown and old people.
The museum makes a mistake to agree so closely with the liberal black activists and the Democrat Party who exaggerate the impact of these voting integrity issues for self-serving political reasons.
But it has the good sense not to call Georgia's new voting law “Jim Crow on steroids.”
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To freshen up your memory of how awful the Old Jim Crow was, see my 2021 ebook Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow and 2017’s 30 Days a Black Man.
Both deal with the undercover journalism mission into the Deep South that Ray Sprigle made in May of 1948. The Post-Gazette’s star reporter’s 21-part series shocked the white North, enraged the white South and pleased millions of blacks and the NAACP.