Hungry Blues

The epigraph for this blog includes these lines:

Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
      anybody dyin'

The two existing recordings of these verses by Langston Hughes, set to music and played by James P. Johnson, are pretty obscure, so it's hard to say if my father would have known the lines. Be that as it may, these words are at the crux of what drove him to live as he did. In these lines and in my father's mind, the world doesn't have to be this way: poverty and racism can be eliminated. It's all a matter of making choices, choices that may well mean putting one's life on the line. Underlying my searching the life and times of my father is the question, what leads to this kind of commitment? The song's answer is them hungry blues—the real physical hunger caused by deprivation, but also a spiritual hunger, different in each person.

This blog started out as a vehicle for me to write about my father. Knowing more about his life and his times has changed me and has consequently broadened the scope of what I do here. Lately, I have been writing very little about him and instead posting a lot about race and racism in America. Learning more about my father's participation in the Civil Rights Movement, reading Movement history, and getting to know Movement veterans has made me much more sharply cognizant of what they fought for, the risks they took, and the gains they made for America. This awareness makes witness of the Bush administration's assault on low-income people and people of color disturbing to a degree that I could not have anticipated. My liberal sensibilities were certainly offended by programmatic racism before, but in the last year it has had a radicalizing effect on me. My father's own sense of his life's purpose was deeply wrapped up in the social transformation he and so many others made sacrifice upon sacrifice to achieve. As I have watched their successes unravel, I have found my own sense of purpose becoming much more closely aligned with my father's.

The process of aligning my purposes with my father's does not actually begin with the Southern Freedom Movement. The process began in 1991, when I made my first attempt to understand my father's relationship with Frankie Newton, the mostly forgotten jazz trumpet player, whose career peaked in around 1939, during the period when his band backed Billie Holiday at the Cafe Society in New York. If you know the original 1939 Commodore recording of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit", then you've heard Frankie. That's him on the melodramatic trumpet intro. If you also know Billie's 1939 version of "I've Gotta Right To Sing The Blues," from the same Commodore recording session, and you can remember the sophisticated interplay between the trumpet and Billie's voice (especially in the final verse), then you already have an inkling of Frankie's artistry.

I've written before about how circa 1944 my father, then a teenage aspiring jazz clarinet player, ran away from home in Brighton, MA to Frankie Newton's apartment on East 17th Street in Manhattan, just off Union Square. Frankie was an African American, political radical, who hung out with other artist-intellectuals like Paul Robeson, Beauford Delaney, Henry Miller, Canada Lee, and William Saroyan. On the trumpet, Frankie was a great and subtle stylist, a master of mutes and moods, who attracted a cult following of aficionados, critics, and musicians. It's hard to say what would have happened to my father if Frankie hadn't taken him in. During that year or so when they were roommates, Frankie introduced my father to life in the Communist Party and he taught my father to read James Joyce and John Donne and how to look at the paintings of Picasso and Matisse. And he taught my father volumes about what it means to be Black in America. Frankie was outspoken about race matters, often protesting injustice to his own detriment, losing gigs and being marginalized in the music profession. Being in Frankie's milieu got my dad his job at Jerry Newman's record store, selling records to likes of Pee Wee Russell and Cozy Cole and befriending them, and led to my dad's first union jobs, organizing tobacco workers across racial lines in North Carolina and textile workers in Massachusetts.

Frankie Newton died in 1954 at age 48, by then alcoholic and shut out of professional music. In those last years of his life, Newton painted and was politically active, and he was married to a white Jewish leftist, Ethel Klein. They lived in the West Village on Barrow Street, across from the Greenwich House settlement house, which had (and still has) a music school where Newton sometimes taught music to low-income city kids. Frankie died a poor man, under-recorded and largely forgotten by jazz history. To my father Frankie was one of the great heroes of jazz, as well as a stand-in parent, a brother, a mentor, a friend.

My oldest sister was born two and half years after Frankie died. Dad named her Francine, after Frankie. If Dad got your ear about Frankie, there was an urgency with which he had to communicate Frankie's importance, as an artist and as a human being. By the time I was in my twenties, my father was one of the few people alive who had such intimate knowledge of this national treasure whose life had not been documented, whose music had been stolen and undervalued.

1991 was the year I graduated from college. Home for the summer, before I moved out to Oregon for a while, I sat my father down with his Frankie Newton records and asked him to educate me. We made a mix tape of the tracks, and I taped him as he expounded on the music and reminisced about Frankie. I took the tapes with me when I moved out west, but I did not dwell on the music or what I'd learned. A year or two later, my first cousin Alan tracked down a British cd that collected most of Frankie's major recordings and sent copies to me and to Dad. But that was about it for me and Frankie Newton until 1997 when my father was dying of cancer.

My father died on Election Day, November 4, 1997. I had been driving from Boston to Albany, New York every other weekend to be there with him in the last months and support my mother who was his primary care giver. I was there the weekend before he died, but drove back to Boston on Sunday the 2nd, not knowing that was the last time I'd see him living. On Saturday night, we listened to Miles’ Sketches of Spain. “Music is the staff of life,” he said. On Sunday afternoon, I came into the sick room to be with him before I had to go back to Boston. As usual, he was in pain. I asked him if he wanted to hear some music. “I don’t know,” he said. I put on the Frankie Newton cd that Alan had found for us in England. My two sisters were there, too. We tried making conversation, hoping the blend of our voices and the music would lift him out of depression. But when The Blues My Baby Gave To Me [mp3] came on, we weren't allowed talk: that was Frank's masterpiece.

---
Photo: Frankie Newton & Sidney Bechet at Port of Harlem Jazzmen session for Blue Note, June 8, 1939 (Charles Peterson)

Josh, who wrote the article in this post, is my oldest friend—since age 3, when we went to play group together. The article was originally published by the Albuquerque Tribune in late October, 2004.--BG

Bad chemistry

Our chemical plants could be ready-made bombs for terrorists, but the Senate isn't budging on legislation to ensure better security

COMMENTARY

By Josh Sher

Since Sept. 11, 2001, chemical plants have been recognized as significant potential targets for a terrorist attack. Why is this? There are at least three reasons.

First, even commonplace chemicals can pose significant health risks. As an example, chlorine gas, which was used as a chemical weapon during World War I, can burn a human's respiratory tract.

Second, many chemical facilities are located in urban areas or near water supplies and store potentially dangerous chemicals on site. In 2002, Greenpeace put a map on the Internet that predicted highly toxic chlorine gas would cover much of New York City, if a particular chemical plant in New Jersey were attacked.

Finally, many chemical plants have minimal security. For instance, in a July 14, 2002, report, the New York Daily News found no security at the Matheson Tri-Gas facility in East Rutherford, N.J. Why would terrorists need to sneak a weapon of mass destruction into the United States, when such a weapon is just sitting around unprotected in the United States already? A well-placed bomb in one of these chemical facilities could potentially kill millions of people.

In recognition of the severity of this issue, two bills were placed before the U.S. Senate in early 2003, addressing the risks posed by attacks on chemical facilities: Senate Bill S157, sponsored by New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine, and Senate Bill S994, sponsored by Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe.

Both bills require vulnerability assessments at chemical facilities that contain potentially harmful chemicals, but there are significant differences between the bills.

S157 requires chemical companies to submit their assessments to the Environmental Protection Agency for review, so if a plan is insufficient for the current threat level, the EPA will notify the facility of this and, if necessary, take appropriate actions to correct the problem. Further, S157 gives the EPA an oversight role in determining which chemicals are potentially harmful and calls for the companies to reduce on-site storage of the chemicals.

The Republican bill, S994, has greatly reduced requirements on the chemical industry. The Department of Homeland Security is given the oversight role for the risk assessment process, but there are no requirements for submitting the assessments to the government for review, and there are no requirements for reducing on-site storage of dangerous chemicals.

An ideal bill would provide both a carrot and a stick for the chemical industry.

The stick should be a formal requirement to perform a comprehensive terrorism risk assessment, which includes an assessment of the safety risks to the general population from attacks/accidents at each facility and an assessment of the adequacy of the current security. The carrot should be government grants given to chemical facilities that produced thorough assessments, which could be used either for securing these facilities or, even better, for switching to less-dangerous chemicals.

Sadly, the Republican Senate leadership has taken no action on either bill. S157 has been pending without action for 18 months, and the Senate has not scheduled a vote on S994, which made it out of committee more than a year ago. Chemical plants, meanwhile, have taken minimal actions to improve security, while waiting for direction from the government.

The Bush administration has not taken a position on the chemical security bills.

At present, a disproportionate amount of federal Homeland Security money is being spent on airports, while other areas such as chemical facilities or ports are given meager resources. Further, terrorists have demonstrated the capability to use existing infrastructure as a weapon.

While it important to deny the terrorists access to planes, it is also important to deny them access to large quantities of dangerous chemicals.

The present situation is like securing a house by triple-locking the front door, while leaving the back door wide open and leaving matches and gasoline lying around. It's cheaper and more effective to single-lock both doors and remove the matches and the gasoline.

Sher is a senior scientist working on terrorism risk assessment for ARES Corp. in Albuquerque.

(via Professor Kim.)

[O]n Jan. 12, 2004, Soto-Ramirez was found dead, hanging in Ward 54. Army buddies who visited him in the days before his death said Soto-Ramirez was increasingly angry and despondent. "He was real upset with the treatment he was getting," said René Negron, a former Walter Reed psychiatric patient and a friend of Soto-Ramirez's. "He said: 'These people are giving me the runaround ... These people think I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy, Negron. I'm getting more crazy being up here.'

"Those people in Ward 54 were responsible for him. Their responsibility was to have a 24-hour watch on him," Negron said in a telephone interview from his home in Puerto Rico. While Soto-Ramirez's death was by his own hand, Negron and other soldiers say the hospital shares the blame.

In fact, repeated interviews over the course of one year with 14 soldiers who have been treated in Walter Reed's inpatient and outpatient psychiatric wards, and a review of medical records and Army documents, suggest that the Army's top hospital is failing to properly care for many soldiers traumatized by the Iraq war. As the Soto-Ramirez case suggests, inadequate suicide watch is one concern. But the problems run deeper. Psychiatric techniques employed at Walter Reed appear outmoded and ineffective compared with state-of-the-art care as described by civilian doctors. For example, Walter Reed favors group therapy over one-on-one counseling; and the group therapy is mostly administered by a rotating cast of medical students and residents, not full-fledged doctors or veterans. The troops also complain that the Army relies too much on pills; few of the soldiers took all the medication given to them by the hospital.

Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers' mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require the Army to pay disability for years.) Soto-Ramirez's medical records reveal the economical mindset of an Army doctor who evaluated him. "Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD," wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed.

"The Army does not want to get into the mental-health game in a real way to really help people," said Col. Travis Beeson, who was flown to Walter Reed for psychiatric help during a second tour with one of the Army's special operations units in Iraq. "They want to Band-Aid it. They want you out of there as fast as possible, and they don't want to pay for it." Indeed, some psychiatric patients at Walter Reed are given the option of signing a form releasing them from the hospital as long as they give up any future disability payments from the Army. One soldier from Pennsylvania, who was shot five times in the chest and saved by body armor, told me he would do anything to get out of Walter Reed, even relinquish disability pay. "I'll sign anything as soon as I can get my hands on it," he told me several days before being released from the hospital. "I loved the Army. I was obsessed with it. The Army was my life. Fuck them now."

(Whole thing.)

Oh, in case you're wondering why this post got tagged with the race and racism category, Mr. Soto-Ramirez was Puerto Rican. Latinos and African Americans are heavily over represented in our armed forces, especially in combat units:

 Brain Gifford, a researcher with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley, told AP reporters, “"That this may be related to Latinos' participation in the Marine Corps, which would increase their exposure to high-intensity combat situations, or perhaps it is due to Hispanics' overrepresentation in the lower ranks.”

Last year, the Inter Press Service printed an article stating that Hispanic soldiers fighting in Iraq were dying at higher rates, and were being lured into dangerous positions when recruited by the Armed Forces.

As American causalities in Iraq steadily increase, so does the apprehension in many of the nation’s Latino communities. The concern is that their children are dying at incredibly high numbers and that they are being lured into dangerous services by the Armed Forces. Overall, the community is worried that Hispanic men and women are being unjustly exposed to risky situations and sent to the front lines. One of the first U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq, Jose Gutierrez, was an orphan from Guatemala and not even a citizen at the time of his death.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos make up 9.5 percent of the active enlistees in the armed forces; they are over-represented in the most dangerous assignments, such as infantry, gun crews, and seamanship, and make up over 17.5 percent of the front lines.

(Whole thing.)

Further reading:
Conflict with Iraq: Study shows 20 percent of war deaths are blacks
Military Luring Black and Latino Youth With Hip-hop
Troops' Citizenship

You can read a transcript of Civil Rights Movement veterans talking about Mississippi and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website. The transcript includes a section on the 1965 Congressional challenge.

The primary source document that I posted is from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History Sovereignty Commission Online. For those unacquainted with it, the Sovereignty Commission was the state of Mississippi's very own secret police spying operation, which was actively maintained by the state from 1957 to 1973, to oppose the Civil Rights Movement. The Congressional challenge document was collected as part of the Commission's intelligence efforts. Here's a little background by Yasuhiro Katagiri, who has written a book about the Commission:

While Mississippi had already become the birthplace of the Citizens’ Council in private spheres, with the swearing in of James P. Coleman as the fifty-second governor of the state, an overwhelming mood of defiance to the federal government dominated the 1956 state legislative session, which witnessed the introduction of a parade of bills and resolutions designed to protect Mississippi’s racial customs and its sovereignty. Among them, the legislature expressed its determination to defend Mississippi against the “illegal encroachment” of the federal government by adopting the so-called “interposition resolution.”

With the defiance of the federal government at its height and inspired by the issuance of the interposition resolution, Mississippi lawmakers then turned to creating a tax-supported implementation agency of the resolves expressed in the resolution. Thus, on March 29, 1956, with the blessing of Governor Coleman, the state created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as part of the executive branch of its government “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi.” With the governor as its chair, the Sovereignty Commission was composed of twelve members: the governor, the lieutenant governor, the House Speaker, the attorney general, two state senators, three state representatives, and three citizens.

Despite the fact that the Sovereignty Commission was soon to be identified as Mississippi’s “segregation watchdog agency,” neither the word “segregation” nor the word “integration” appeared in the carefully crafted bill creating the new state agency. But to be sure, federal “encroachment” was a periphrasis implying “forced racial integration,” and “to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi” from that “encroachment” was a sophisticated roundabout expression of the state’s determination to preserve and protect the racial segregation in Mississippi. With the aura of sophistication and respectability emanating from the word “sovereignty,” the state agency, for all practical purposes, was expected to maintain segregation and to wreck the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights organizations in Mississippi.

Since its inception in 1956 until its practical demise in the late 1960s, the Sovereignty Commission had consisted of two main departments, one concerned with public relations and the other with investigation. Under the Coleman administration, by the fall of 1957, more than 200,000 pamphlets and other forms of direct mail had been sent to newspaper editors, television stations, and state lawmakers above the Mason-Dixon Line by the state agency to “educate” the nation on Mississippi’s race relations. Meanwhile, the Sovereignty Commission deployed its paid and unpaid black informants throughout the state to keep the NAACP and the Mississippi Progressive Voters’ League under surveillance. Thanks to the eyes and ears of these informants and its own investigators, by the summer of 1959, the Sovereignty Commission had accumulated over 4,000 index cards and several hundred investigative files containing a hodgepodge of allegations, rumors, and bizarre details, many of them baseless, revealing the hysterical state of Mississippi’s white leaders.

(Whole thing.)

The Challengers

 Annie Divine                  Victoria Gray Adams               Fannie Lou Hamer

The Challenge

[click to continue…]

Available here as streaming video.

You can also download the .rm source file to view the video in a standalone realplayer.

Since the 2000 presidential election, there has been increased awareness of the disenfranchisement of ex-felons, which affects African Americans disproportionately. This was one of those issues that helped a lot of people see just how much racism has been at play in current electoral controversies. Whenever you think you're observing racism at play, it's good to start asking historical questions. The answers will often speak volumes about the current situation. Some initial digging about the historical roots of felony disenfranchisement is enough to make it clear that this form of disenfranchisement is right up there with things like voter intimidation as living vestiges of America's shameful Jim Crow system.

At the end of the Civil War, however, lawmakers found new uses for felony disenfranchisement laws. The newly adopted Fifteenth Amendment allowed African Americans to vote – in theory. In practice, Southern whites soon began to rewrite their state constitutions to remove African Americans from politics. Declaring proudly and explicitly their goal of white supremacy, these lawmakers used a variety of legal schemes to disempower African Americans, including literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and all-white primaries. Most of these laws have been called out as racist and unconstitutional, and have been wiped from the books. Felony disenfranchisement laws are the notable exception.

Mississippi’s 1890 constitutional convention was among the first to use felon disenfranchisement laws against African Americans. Until then, Mississippi law disenfranchised those guilty of any crime. In 1890, however, the law was narrowed to exclude only those convicted of certain offenses – crimes of which African Americans were more often convicted than whites. The Mississippi Supreme Court in 1896 enumerated these crimes, confirming that the new constitution targeted those “convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy.”

Other states followed suit. Many newly disenfranchisable offenses, such as bigamy and vagrancy, were common among African Americans simply because of the dislocations of slavery and Reconstruction. Indeed, the laws were carefully designed by white men who understood how to apply criminal law in a discriminatory way: the Alabama judge who wrote that state’s new disenfranchisement language had decades of experience in a predominantly African-American district, and estimated that certain misdemeanor charges could be used to disqualify two-thirds of black voters.

“What is it we want to do?” asked John B. Knox, president of the Alabama convention of 1901. “Why, it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.” (Emphasis added)

Any discussion of remedy is, therefore, a discussion about whether we have the political will to undo institutionalized racism and fight its adherents.

So what about the Three-Fifths Clause? Well I was over at the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI) website and discovered that felony disenfranchisement has some other dimensions that have not been part of the current discussions on election reform. NVRI has joined the Prison Policy Initiative in filing an amicus brief in Muntaqim v. Coombe, a case challenging New York's prisoner disenfranchisement laws under the Voting Rights Act.

A combination of policies regarding the census, political redistricting and felon disenfranchisement are discriminating against racial minorities in New York state. The state denies incarcerated prisoners the right to vote, yet counts prisoners as residents of prisons where they are incarcerated when drawing its state legislative districts. This practice dilutes minority voting strength by enhancing the voting power of upstate rural prison districts, at the expense of the urban minority communities where most prisoners retain their legal residence. . . .

The brief explains how New York's policy of crediting prison towns with the presence of disenfranchised prisoners for purposes of redistricting enhances the voting strength of white communities that host prisons while diluting the representation afforded to urban communities of color. Representatives of these rural upstate districts make little pretense of treating prisoners as actual constituents.

State Senator Dale Volker, a conservative Republican who represents one such district, has acknowledged in an interview that he would sooner seek votes from the cows in his districts than from the prison inmates because "they would be more likely to vote for me." If prisoners were counted as residents of the communities where they resided prior to incarceration, rather than as residents of prison towns, a number of urban communities of color would in all likelihood be entitled to greater representation in the legislature. Several predominantly white upstate legislative districts would not have sufficient population to justify a representative were it not for the disenfranchised prisoners.

The brief points out that New York's assignment of disenfranchised prisoners to upstate rural districts for purposes of redistricting bears a striking resemblance to the original "Three-Fifths" clause of the United States Constitution, which allowed the South to obtain enhanced representation in Congress by counting disenfranchised slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment. (Emphasis added.)

This disturbing combination of felony disenfranchisement law and census policy is not unique to New York State. So far, the Prison Policy Initiative has issued reports on the effects of such policies in fifteen states: Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Montana. Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas.

The comparison between the function of the US prison system and our older, more explicitly racist laws should be enough to give readers pause. In honor of Black History Month, however, I will follow this post with two more to make a three part series. In Part 2, I will look further at the history of US racism to show what the structural purposes are behind many racist laws and policies. In Part 3, in light of the historical context in Part 2, I will look further at some of the implications and effects of miscounting prisoners. A brief review of the institutionalization of American racist ideology will show that though the implementation has changed, the basic structures upon which America was built remain very well intact.

Further Reading:
Prisoners of the Census
The Sentencing Project

A powerful little web film.

By Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina

In early February, the N.C. Supreme Court outlawed all the ballots cast on Election Day by voters at a polling place outside their home precinct. Out-of-precinct voting began in North Carolina as part of a national effort to provide secure and accessible voting opportunities. The Court's disappointing decision moves us backwards, further away from fulfilling the promise of "one person, one vote."

At a minimum, the Supreme Court has just disenfranchised more than 11,000 citizens who followed the rules and cast provisional ballots. Many of them weren't notified where to vote because of the backlog in processing a record number of new registrations. On the other hand, more than one million North Carolinians cast out-of-precinct ballots during the early voting period in 2004. Inexplicably, the Supreme Court allows those votes to count but rejects those cast out-of-precinct on Election Day.

The Court's decision is simply wrong when it says the State Board of Elections counted these "improper" votes in an "unauthorized," "unilateral" manner. Legislative leaders of both major parties knew that the 2003 state law authorizing provisional ballots would allow out-of-precinct and partial-ballot voting in the voter's "jurisdiction" (i.e., county). NCGS 163-166.11(3) and (5) indicate ballots shall be counted "in whole or in part" after a determination of "all ballot items on which . . . the individual was eligible under State or federal law to vote."

After the 2003 law passed, the State Board of Elections staff developed regulations to administer the provisional voting process fairly and efficiently. Those regulations, including how to handle out-of-precinct voting, were approved by the Republican and Democratic members of the Board and by the U.S. Justice Department, which must pre-clear election changes in compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act.

As the Court notes, North Carolina's statutes speak about "the precinct" as central to the voting process. The new law does create conflicting language in the statutes. But rather than disenfranchise voters, we should insist that state law be amended to define clearly a fail-safe method for fraud-free, out-of-precinct, same-county voting similar to the early voting process. The language in the state constitution requiring a person to vote in their "precinct, ward or other election district" should also be clarified to make it plain that "other election district" means "county."

Given today's technology and mobility, the precinct has become an obsolete administrative unit for casting a ballot, as the popularity of early voting demonstrates. The Court's decision is wrong when it says there is "no way" to allow out-of-precinct voting "without overwhelming delays, mass confusion, and the potential for fraud." In fact, there was no evidence in the record that out-of-precinct balloting caused "mass confusion" or similar problems in North Carolina.

The Court uses speculation and fear of chaos to justify a decision it did not need to make. The justices seems not to understand the mechanics of securing the integrity of the voting system, nor do they recognize how the out-of-precinct voting tool is especially helpful to voters who recently registered or moved within the county, who don't have the freedom to take off several hours from work, or who don't have easy access to transportation. Out-of-precinct voting especially helps working class, young, and minority voters. Our research shows that black voters cast more than one third of the state's out-of-precinct ballots, while less than one fifth of all votes in November's election came from African Americans.

To now throw out all these votes, to spurn these voters who obeyed the rules, sends a terrible message. The State Board of Elections, encouraged by the Democratic Party, made a major mistake when it didn't fix the problem of 4,438 lost votes in Carteret County. Now the state Supreme Court, encouraged by the Republican Party, has disenfranchised another group of voters. In a state where barely half the adults register and vote, we should be applauding citizens who follow the rules and vote, not finding ways to dismiss their efforts.

(Source, emphasis added.)

A History of Discrimination

Felony disenfranchisement laws date back to the earliest days of the U.S. republic, and to Europe before that. Early European disenfranchisement laws seem to have been limited to the most serious crimes, and were implemented by judges in individual cases. As American states drew up their constitutions, many of them incorporated some form of disenfranchisement laws into their statutes.

At the end of the Civil War, however, lawmakers found new uses for felony disenfranchisement laws. The newly adopted Fifteenth Amendment allowed African Americans to vote – in theory. In practice, Southern whites soon began to rewrite their state constitutions to remove African Americans from politics. Declaring proudly and explicitly their goal of white supremacy, these lawmakers used a variety of legal schemes to disempower African Americans, including literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and all-white primaries. Most of these laws have been called out as racist and unconstitutional, and have been wiped from the books. Felony disenfranchisement laws are the notable exception.

Mississippi’s 1890 constitutional convention was among the first to use felon disenfranchisement laws against African Americans. Until then, Mississippi law disenfranchised those guilty of any crime. In 1890, however, the law was narrowed to exclude only those convicted of certain offenses – crimes of which African Americans were more often convicted than whites. The Mississippi Supreme Court in 1896 enumerated these crimes, confirming that the new constitution targeted those “convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy.”

Other states followed suit. Many newly disenfranchisable offenses, such as bigamy and vagrancy, were common among African Americans simply because of the dislocations of slavery and Reconstruction. Indeed, the laws were carefully designed by white men who understood how to apply criminal law in a discriminatory way: the Alabama judge who wrote that state’s new disenfranchisement language had decades of experience in a predominantly African-American district, and estimated that certain misdemeanor charges could be used to disqualify two-thirds of black voters.

“What is it we want to do?” asked John B. Knox, president of the Alabama convention of 1901. “Why, it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.” (Emphasis added)

The laws worked. A historian later hired by Alabama state registrars found that by January 1903, the revised constitution “had disfranchised approximately ten times as many blacks as whites,” many for non-prison offenses.[3]

Such schemes would soon be approved by the highest courts in the land. In 1896, the Mississippi Supreme Court endorsed with devastating clarity the discriminatory intent of disenfranchisement laws after Reconstruction. The Mississippi constitutional convention of 1890, wrote the court,

… swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain particularities of habit, of temperament and of character, which clearly distinguished it, as a race, from that of the whites – a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone . . . . Burglary, theft, arson, and obtaining money under false pretenses were declared to be disqualifications, while robbery and murder, and other crimes in which violence was the principal ingredient, were not.

This understanding was not confined to the South. In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court implicity endorsed Mississippi’s discriminatory disenfranchisment laws in Williams v. Mississippi, a case that legalized all-white juries. Disenfranchisement laws were challenged again in the Supreme Court in 1974. The Court’s decision in that case, Richardson v. Ramirez, not only upheld the laws, but also made future legal challenges harder. It took until the 1985 case Hunter v. Underwood, brought by two men who lost their voting rights in Alabama due to a “crime of moral turpitude” – writing bad checks – for the Court to agree that racism was an explicit purpose of felony disenfranchisement laws. But the Hunter decision only struck down those laws motivated by racist intent – and only the most explicit, purposeful intent. Laws with less overt racist effects, like today’s felony disenfranchisement laws, have been left standing.

Notes:
[3] These state schemes to deny the vote to black residents were not confined to the South. Plaintiffs in Hayden v. Pataki allege that in a series of constitutional conventions convened in New York beginning in 1821, delegates adopted voter disqualification provisions that denied the vote to residents convicted of “infamous crimes” in order to disenfranchise blacks. Hayden v. Pataki, ooCiv. (S.D.N.Y.) (Pl.Compl).

(From a Demos report by Steven Carbó, Ludovic Blain, and Ellen Braune, Democracy Denied: The Racial History and Impact of Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States [pdf 360KB])

Moderator Jorge Mursuli (People for the American Way): Good evening. I'd like to thank all of you for being here this evening and just sort of like to start by saying that we may not get the attention… election reform issues may not get the attention that we got before the election but it certainly doesn’t make it any less important… and so we’re very, very grateful for those of you that are here, we’re very eager to listen to your testimony and we should have a very fruitful evening.

We’ve been conducting… the partnership of the NAACP and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under the Law, People for the American Way Foundation has been conducting these hearings throughout the state. The purpose of these hearings is to gather information to help mold our election reform agenda in partnership with all of our partner organizations. And we haven’t started here. This is an additional step in a long line of steps that reflect our commitment to election reform.

Most of you know that the partners around Election Protection this past election were in all of the states all over the country. As a matter of fact, People from the American Way Foundation had over 25,000 volunteers around the country in precincts trying to learn what we could do to ensure that people’s vote was counted and that people actually got an opportunity to vote. We then produced, in collaboration with our partners, a report called “Shattering the Myth” that sort of quantified and qualified all the things that we experienced across the country. And that, of course, is available to anyone who wants it at the front desk. It really sort of gives you an overview of the kind of things we experienced.

Today what we’re doing, like we did in other cities around the state – we’re giving an opportunity to those folks that possibly may not have had an opportunity to present a formal complaint and we wanted to sort of dot our i’s and cross our t’s as we sort of develop a legislative agenda. And as we sort of look for leaders around the state to help us correct the problems that still exist.

Now many of you heard and possibly experienced the fact that things were a lot better this year than they were in 2000. Well, there was certainly nowhere to go but up I suppose. But we’re happy, we’re not looking for the problems, as a matter of fact we’re looking for the solutions. And our hope is that now that the partisan rhetoric is turned off we can really focus on ensuring that legislation in the state of Florida reflects the kinds of solutions that folks like yourself need in order to have your vote count in the future. And the truth of the matter is… it’s... I think I can say it’s People For’s position and I suspect it’s the position of the many organizations that are represented here today… is that, you know, when one person’s vote isn’t counted, to us that’s enough. There isn’t a magic number, one, a thousand, a hundred thousand… I don’t know what that number is. I know that when one person’s vote doesn’t count that’s enough because it’s not about someone else – tomorrow it could be your vote.

So we’re very happy that you’re here. Before we introduce our panelists I just want to recognize a couple of people in the room that we very much appreciate that they’re here…

Moderator recognizes some members of the audience:
Selden Carter, national representative of AFL-CIO
Emilio Vazquez, regional director for Senator Bill Nelson
Ronald A. Brisey (spelling?), representing Representative Philip Brutus (Florida state representative)
Milton Collins, Deputy Supervisor of Elections, Miami-Dade County
Ida Corman (spelling?) Assistant Supervisor of Elections, Miami-Dade County
Arthur Anderson, Supervisor of Elections, Palm Beach County
Edina Sorrell and Jeff Tarter (spelling?) with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections
Marsha Barnham (spelling?), League of Women Voters of Broward County
Mary Mann (spelling?), United Teachers of Dade (organization hosting the hearing)
Monica Russo, SEIU

Moderator introduces panelists:
Courtnay Strickland, ACLU-Florida
Ana Cela Harris, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under the Law
Andy Rivera, the Advancement Project
Jill Hanson, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
Adora Obi Nweze, National Board of Directors, NAACP
Edeline Clermont, SEIU
Reggie Mitchell, Florida Legal Director, Election Protection
[click to continue…]

I'm finding this story about the resignation of California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley very difficult to interpret. That the pressure to resign came from Republican forces, including the Gropenator himself, makes me extremely suspicious. Also setting off alarms is that part of what is at issue is that Shelley allocated Help America Vote Act funds towards voter education for minority communities known for low voter participation in his state. Yet in 2003, Shelley was sued by a number of voting rights organizations, including the NAACP, for not replacing punchcard voting machines with other technology. The 2003 case was in the context of the recall election that got the Gropenator into office, so there may have been something else going on there—tactics, perhaps, to postpone the recall. Maybe there are some informed Californians out there who have been following Shelley's career from the start and can help out here.

This call to action from Kip Humphrey, of 51Capital March, may well be the clear answer, but I'm interested in nuance and in more information. Readers? I am afraid that what ever may really be at issue with Shelley, the end result will be precisely what is predicted, below.

SAVE CALIFORNIA, ITS THE NEW BATTLEGROUND STATE

FIRST: They went after Gray Davis and took over the governorship with Arnold.
SECOND: They went after Kevin Shelley and have forced him to resign.
THIRD: They will install an RNC thug as Secretary of State and will control California's voting system
FOURTH: They will mandate e-voting without paper (the bill is ready, the campaign begun)
FIFTH: California will become a red state

GAME OVER. If we don't save California's electoral system from take-over, the battle for our votes will be irreparably set back.

EMERGENCY ACTIONS:

1. Call Kevin Shelley 916-653-7244 Urge Him to Rescind his Resignation (His resignation doesn't take effect until March 1st).

2. SEND MONEY to KEVIN SHELLEY'S DEFENSE FUND: He has expended a great deal of his personal funds so that he can continue to fight for fair elections. If we lose him, we could lose California. If you want to help donate to Kevin Shelley's legal defense fund, you can send donations to his accountants at:

Olson, Hagel & Fishburn
555 Capitol Mall, Suite 1425
Sacramento, CA 95814
(916) 442-2952

Make checks out to Legal Defense Fund.

3. Email California State Legislators. Demand they resist the take-over of California's election system. Insist on paper ballots for Californians.

We are setting up http://www.banthemachine.com for a campaign to save California. Suggestions are entirely welcome. Please use the site to organize, mobilize, and fight the campaign to save California's voting system from take-over.

THIS IS A CAUSE FOR ALL OF US! WE ALL MUST ACT QUICKLY AND IN COORDINATION.

Kip Humphrey
51 Capital March

UPDATE: Image from Election Fraud 2004, on-line Power Point presentation.

(Via Velvet Revolution.)

Never forget what happened on November 2nd, 2004... Here's a video to help...              We've updated the short video compiled by a few Velvet Revolutionaries from Democratic Underground.              It is our hope that this video may serve as the definitive record of what happened in American during the 2004 Presidential Election. It documents -- in a few short minutes -- how your American right to a free, fair and transparent electoral system has been taken from you by the cynical and un-democratic powers-that-be.              This sort of thing should never happen in the world's most important democracy. And yet -- again in 2004 -- it did. Enough is enough.              It's time for the people to take both our country and our democracy back. If you still have any questions about that, please take a look at this video:               Streaming RealPlayer (broadband version) Streaming RealPlayer (dial-up version)               Windows Media Player (broadband version) Windows Media Player (dial-up version)               Quicktime (broadband version) Quicktime (dial-up version)

Americans have died for the Right to Vote. November 2nd, 2004 will serve as a continuing reminder that we still have a long way to go in this country before every American has that right.        Please watch the video...And then pass this link...       http://www.VelvetRevolution.us#020505 ...to everyone you know so they can remember (or learn) as well!              The mainstream media will not be doing it. Democracy in America is now up to you!              (Thanks to Dzika, Faye and all the patriotic and democracy-loving Velvet Revolutionaries of DemocraticUnderground.com for compiling this video to help us all remember!)

Where does one begin? Do note the expression on Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s face.
Maybe that says it all... --BG

Bush tells CBC he's 'unfamiliar' with Voting Rights Act

by Roland S. Martin, Chicago Defender
January 27, 2005

President George W. Bush met with the Congressional Black Caucus Wednesday for the first time as a group in nearly four years, but what CBC members said stood out the most was the president's declaration that he was "unfamiliar" with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in the history of the United States.

At the conclusion of yesterday's 40-minute meeting, Bush - who attended along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - was asked by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-2nd) whether he would support the re-authorization of a portion of the Voting Rights Act that must be approved every 25 years (It will come up for consideration next year).

"I don't know anything about the 1965 Voting Rights Act," Jackson recalled the president saying in an interview with the Chicago Defender.

He said that a hurried Bush went on to say that "when the legislation comes before me, I'll take a look at it, but I don't know about it to comment any more than that, but we will look at it when it comes to us."

"It was so unbelievable to me that as soon as I walked out, I got Frank (Watkins, Jackson's top legislative aide) on the telephone, put (Congresswomen) Maxine (Waters, D-Calif.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), so that I could confirm what he just said is what I heard," Jackson said.

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-1st) said he recalled the president saying he was "unfamiliar" with the Voting Rights Act.

"I was surprised and astounded," Rush told the Defender.

Rep. Danny Davis (D-7th) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) could not be reached for comment.

White House spokesman Allen Abney did not specifically address Bush's statement of being unfamiliar with the Voting Rights Act, but said that "there is a section of the Act that is up for re-authorization in 2006, and the president is firmly committed to protecting voting rights. He indicated today that he would be looking closely at the Act as it comes up for re-authorization and certainly take their concerns into consideration."

According to the description on the Department of Justice's website, the Voting Rights Act is "generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress."

The bill guaranteed that African Americans and any other group would not be denied the right to vote, and put in place provisions to ensure that voting rights would not be trampled on by local and state officials.

Bush's meeting with the CBC was the second of two days of meetings with Black leaders. On Tuesday, he met with more than two dozen pastoral and business leaders, all supporters of the president's policies. A couple of weeks ago Bush sat down with Kweisi Mfume, who had recently announced his resignation as president and CEO of the NAACP.

Rush said Wednesday's meeting was different from the others because he has had a fractious relationship with the CBC, and was dealing with "more knowledgeable people around the different issues that affect the African American community."

"In that room you had 43 individuals whose whole life of activity and endeavor have been around trying to upgrade and uplift the life of Black America," Rush said. "We are elected into the Congress and we know the ins and outs of it and we know the machinations that the administration and the Republicans engage in and so, yea, we weren't wild-eyed and in a state of ecstasy just to meet the president. We came to be about business."

As for Bush's mood, Rush said the president was "cordial" but also "as non-responsive today as he was four years ago to the overall agenda."

"He did become animated around the issue of Darfur (Sudan),"Rush said.

As for Rice, Rush said the new secretary of state said "absolutely nothing. She was just there. For what reason, I'm not sure."

Jackson praised CBC Chairman Mel Watt, D-N.C., for focusing on the disparities facing African Americans in six categories, such as economics, social justice and international issues.

He said Bush mostly nodded his head and took notes, but he was adamant about his opposition to statehood for the District of Columbia, a point raised by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the Washington, D.C. area in Congress.

Jackson said Bush thought he was going to bring up the issue again and cut him off, saying, "I'm against statehood. I'm consistent on that and have been consistent on that since I was governor (of Texas)."

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Photo: From left to right, Rep. Carolyn C. Kilpatrick, D-Mich., Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., Rep. Charles B. Rangle, D-NY., and Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., speak to the media outside the West Wing of the White House following their meeting with President Bush, Wednesday in Washington. AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais