Still under assault 50 years later

Tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By Moristotle

In “What the Supreme Court Doesn’t Get About Racism” [NY Times, April 2], the Editorial Board of the NY Times reminds us that Dr. King

considered the right to vote the centerpiece of the civil rights movement. “Voting is the foundation stone for political action,” he wrote in an essay titled “Civil Right No. 1,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in March 1965, days after the march and bloodshed in Selma and months before the Voting Rights Act would become law.

    The article goes on to reflect that

Unfortunately, the [United States Supreme] court’s conservative majority has severely weakened the protections the law was intended to provide…In [a 2013 decision], the five conservative justices, led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., gutted the heart of the act, which identified several states with long histories of voting discrimination, most in the South, and required them to get federal permission before changing their voting laws.…
    …[T]he idea that the American fixation on race and power had magically evaporated in just a few decades was… disproved within hours of the court’s ruling, when Republican lawmakers in Texas and North Carolina, both states that had been covered by the Voting Rights Act, rammed through discriminatory new voting laws that they had been gunning to pass for years, including some that had been blocked under the act….
    …[T]he point was driven home by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and the resurgence of overt racism and white nationalism that has followed….
    In the years before Mr. Trump’s election and in the time since, Republican lawmakers around the country aggressively pushed through laws to make voting harder for certain groups, particularly minorities. Poll taxes and literacy tests have given way to voter-ID laws, cutbacks to early voting and same-day registration, polling place closings, voter-roll purges, racially discriminatory redistricting and felon disenfranchisement laws….

    I am ashamed that North Carolina, the state I have lived in since 1983, is mentioned unfavorably three times in the article. For example: “Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina [are] home to some of the worst voting laws in the country.” Come on, North Carolina!

Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle