Sorry, Joe, Stacey and AOC, your crystal ball about the New Jim Crow was cracked

Midterm vote totals in Georgia are through the roof. Claims that the state's new voter integrity were like the Old Jim Crow laws were not only wrong, they insulted the victims of America’s apartheid.

From April 2021:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined the parade of hallucinatory politicians who see the New Jim Crow around every corner.

Trailing a few months behind President Biden, Stacey Abrams and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, she recently told the New Yorker magazine that the United States resurrecting the corpse of Jim Crow segregation by passing new voting laws that require voter ID.

Like her fellow hysterics in the Democrat Party and the media, AOC is also warning that she sees the end of our democracy coming. We’ve got 10 years, she says.

AOC can’t be blamed for seeing the End Times. That’s something she needs to talk with her analyst about.

But requiring an ID to vote (90 percent of Americans have drivers licenses, by the way) is hardly a sign of Jim Crow 2.0.

And outlawing the teaching in public schools of historically challenged and arguably racist things like critical race theory or the New York Times-created “1619” curriculum, which some GOP places have foolishly done, is hardly what people like AOC like to call an ‘existential’ threat to our democracy.

AOC says we’ve already gone ‘Jim Crow 2.0 ‘ in Texas and Florida with disenfranchisement laws: "You have the complete erasure and attack on our own understanding of history, to replace teaching history with institutionalized propaganda from white-nationalist perspectives in our schools. This is what the scaffolding of Jim Crow was."

Joe Biden thinks Georgia’s new voting integrity law is “Jim Crow on steroids.”

Stacey Abrams says the voting law changes are “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie."

And House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has added his partisan hyperbole to the fight, telling Jake Tapper at CNN that yes, he sees Georgia’s new law as “The New Jim Crow.”

With all respect, Clyburn needs glasses as badly as Biden needs a history book. 

As for the ambitious Abrams, she’s said to be testing whether the “New Jim Crow” claim is a campaign theme she can exploit to become governor of Georgia.

But sorry.

What the Republicans running Texas, Florida and Georgia are allegedly doing to “suppress” black voters has little in common with the “Old Jim Crow.”

Requiring an ID for absentee voters is really not voter repression or intimidation.

Neither is preventing campaign operatives from giving water or other snacks to voters waiting in line for hours at polling places or asking early voters to get their votes in earlier so they can be counted by Election Day.

No one should pretend that the Republican politicians in Georgia and other Red states who are tightening and securing their voting laws have put aside their own interests.

But by calling it “Jim Crow 2.0” Georgia Democrats and the woke liberal media are committing a gross and misleading exaggeration for their own partisan purposes and showing their ignorance of history.

They are also diminishing the oppressive and dehumanizing awfulness of the “Old Jim Crow,” America’s 70-year regional experiment in apartheid.

The racist white Democrats in charge of 17 Jim Crow states used local and state laws to create and perpetuate a separate, unequal and parallel society that prohibited blacks from interacting with whites in public and private spaces.

A Montgomery, Ala., bus stop — still segregated in 1965.

When it came to elections, they didn’t mess around.

They openly used violence, intimidation and any devious government means necessary to systematically prevent millions of blacks in the South from voting or even registering.

AOC, President Biden, Abrams, Clyburn and the liberal journalists who don’t challenge their serial sightings of “The New Jim Crow” need to remember what obstacles to voting millions of blacks actually faced in “The Old Jim Crow” from 1890 to 1965.

For the record, the American Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee lists eight ways blacks were kept from voting in the 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.