“Don t speak of your Protestant minister, Nor of his church without meaning or faith, For the foundation stone of his temple Was the bollocks of Henry VIII Brendan Behan”
“Arkansas, for example, raised only 5 percent of [its] total school budget by the poll tax, a tax that [kept] a good 80 percent of [the state s] adult citizens from voting.”
“As late as November 9, 1963, Texas saw the enormous value of the poll tax and voted to maintain this tool of disfranchisement because removing the poll tax requirement...would allow minorities to flood the polls.”
“Another powerful tool to stop African Americans from having any political voice was the white primary. Key to the white primary effectiveness was the fact that from Reconstruction until 1968 the South was a one-party system—only Democrats needed apply, so despised was the party of Lincoln. Several of the states, therefore, began to discern that one way to skirt around the Fifteenth Amendment was to tinker with the primary election, during which the Democratic candidate was chosen.”
“What the states could not accomplish by law, they were more than willing to achieve by violence. The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.”
“Whites had already posted a sign on the black church in Taylor County, Georgia: The first Negro to vote will never vote again. Snipes was not deterred. In July 1946, he cast his ballot in Taylor County s primary. In fact, he was the only black person to do so; and with that act of democratic bravery, Maceo Snipes signed his death warrant. A few days later four white men showed up at Snipes s house and demanded that he step outside. As he stood on the porch, they pointed their guns at him and began firing. Snipes staggered and fell to the ground. They just walked away. His mother ran out of the house and got him to the hospital, but in Jim Crow America, black patients did not have the right to health care. He lay in a room the size of a closet unattended for six hours bleeding, just bleeding. This strong man, this veteran, lingered for two more days, but the damage was too extensive, the medical treatment too slow, and Georgia s hate too deep.”
“The tools of Jim Crow disfranchisement worked all too well. In 1867, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in Mississippi was 66.9 percent; by 1955, it was 4.3 percent.”
“America was paralyzed; on one hand, by the power of the Southern Democrats in Congress, whose inordinate political strength and control of key committees was based on their ability to win reelection after reelection because of massive disfranchisement and racial terror; and on the other, by the missionary-like belief that America was the champion of democracy and freedom in the battle against the Soviet Union, whose death grip on human rights had no limits.”
“Black people will never find justice, because the law is not created to favor them, but is created to enslave them.”
“The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.”
“In short, Virginia ensured that there would be schooling for whites but not blacks; and after that, the state changed its laws so that those who were illiterate would not be able to vote.”
“[Jeff] Sessions was someone who thinks that the VRA ought not to have ever been in existence because, for him, it was an intrusive piece of legislation. Thus, in a move that flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head, his investigation targeted only counties where African Americans had won office.”
“Most of us only teach our children not to admit to prejudice. A parent training a child not to say certain things that are overtly racist is teaching the child self-censorship rather than how to examine the deeply embedded racial messages we all absorb. Ideally, we would teach our children how to recognize and challenge prejudice, rather than deny it.”
“Racist ideas clouded the discrimination , rationalized the racial disparities, defined the enslaved, as opposed to the enslavers, as the problem people.”
“But in the weeks after the conflict, he joined with abolitionists in transforming John Brown in the eyes of antislavery northerners from a madman to a “martyr”. Countless Americans came to admire his David-like courage to strike at the mighty and hated Goliath-like slave power. The disdain for violent Black revolutionaries lurked in the shadows of the praises for John Brown, however. Black slave rebels never became martyrs and remained madmen and madwomen. Never before had the leader of a major slave uprising been so praised. Not since Bacon’s Rebellion had the leader of a major antislavery uprising been White.”
“At present we are facing two pandemics in the United States. The first is the coronavirus and the other is racism.”
“Black people all over the South were saying this to Union officials: Do not abolish slavery and leave us landless. Do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom. They distinguished between abolishing slavery and freeing people. You can only set us free by providing us with land to “till...by our own labor,” they declared. In offering postwar policy, Black people were rewriting what it meant to be free. And, in antiracist fashion, they were rejecting integration as a race relations strategy that involved Blacks showing Whites their equal humanity. They were rejecting uplift suasion - rejecting the job of working to undo the racist ideas of Whites by not performing stereotypes. Racist ideas, they were saying, were only in the eyes of the beholder, and only the beholders of racist ideas were responsible for their release.”