DC Talks

African Americans across Texas are in the dark on efforts around the nation to undermine, dilute, discourage and downright remove voting power in the Black community.
The sad part is this move is going on right under our noses and most of Black America is as asleep at the wheel.
We have seen the impact of tinkering with the voting rights of the people. According to America’s Story in the Library of Congress, many Southern states adopted a poll tax in the late 1800s. This meant that even though the 15th Amendment gave former slaves the right to vote, many poor people, both Blacks and Whites, did not have enough money to vote. States used the payment of a poll tax as a pre-condition of the exercise of the right to vote. These laws achieved the desired effect of disenfranchising African and Native Americans, as well as whites of non-British descent.
Well, during the presidential election of 2000, we saw again the dangers of mucking with voting rights when an election was swayed by the state of Florida because of its poor handling and disenfranchisement of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters. President George W. Bush benefited from that weak attempt by Florida state officials to conduct an election. Now on the “Bush watch,” we have seen the high fallout cost of this 2000 election debacle. Black people and other minorities have suffered and we have been poster children for the “new push” backward, especially when you follow the way the government continues to botch domestic policy and mishandle the displaced Black people from New Orleans whose suffering continues months after Hurricane Katrina disappeared in the North Atlantic. But, the foolishness does not stop there. The American people have endured years of lies in Iraq and countless cases of corruption, broken promises and foreign policies that will affect generations of young, poor Americans.
It is one of the worst presidencies since Republican Ulysses S. Grant’s corruption and scandal plagued administration during the post slavery and Civil War era. Even in Bush’s home state, the fight over redistricting and voting rights is heating up again because of the questionable practices and actions of former Republican House leader and Sugarland Rep. Tom Delay. The voting rights of thousands of Blacks and Hispanics across the state are at stake in that case.
Now, we see a new southern initiative rising in Georgia against the voting rights of Blacks and the poor by resurrecting a new type of back door strategy. The legislation signed by Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue would require residents to show up at the polls with a driver's license, military ID or state-issued identification card with a photo. Most voters who didn't already have state-approved identification would have been forced to pay $35 to get one.
Lawmakers argue that the bill is designed to prevent voter fraud, but Sen. David Jordan (D-Miss.) said the bill weakens the driving force behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that so many African Americans fought for. “It's like we'll be going back in time.”
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called voter IDs a ploy to keep the Democratic base of the poor and elderly Blacks from getting to the polls and contends the measure unfairly targets the poor, the elderly and minorities less likely to have driver's licenses. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) expressed concerns that the move does not develop into a back-door poll tax where people who can’t afford an ID are denied a chance to vote.
At the ceremony in 1964 formalizing the 24th Amendment, President Lyndon Johnson noted that: “There can be no one too poor to vote. Thanks to the 24th Amendment, the right of all U.S. citizens to freely cast their votes has been secured.”
Johnson would be shocked today, because he could not have predicted or imagined that 42 years later that anyone in this country would be thinking or turning back the clock or that Black Americans, the poor or other minorities would have to face voting obstacles again, because they don’t have enough money to vote.
African Americans in Texas need to be weary of this trend... It appears just in time for 2006 and 2008 elections.
We must awake and stop this before it starts to snowball … and you know what I mean.