[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how funny this episode will be.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, I got you, I'm so sorry.
[SPEAKER_04]: All my best Jim Crow Joe, I've been sitting for this one day.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.
[SPEAKER_03]: On this episode of 5-4, Peter, Reannon, and Michael are diving into the 100-year history behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a history littered with arguments that will sound somewhat familiar to anyone tracking far-right talking points in 2026.
[SPEAKER_03]: Should really be talking about this, but there are a lot of people who are voting in this country who should not have that right.
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't deserve it.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the first installment of a special two-part series anticipating what is likely to be a bad year for voting in America.
[SPEAKER_03]: With a Supreme Court set to hear a case that could undermine one of the most important voting laws in the nation's history.
[SPEAKER_03]: but the origins of that law and the decades of voter suppression that made it necessary.
[SPEAKER_03]: Should remind anyone feeling hopeless about the future, that while progress on voting rights is not inevitable, neither is the retrenchment of an electoral system, which reactionaries decide who does and does not qualify for a voice.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
[SPEAKER_04]: Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze a Supreme Court cases that have abolished our civil rights.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, we're going to abolish ice.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Peter.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm here with Riannon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, everybody.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Michael, we're going to win.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that sentiment for the beginning of 2026.
[SPEAKER_04]: The only positive metaphor I'll be doing for the new year, though, you know.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's a running gag we have where every time we take a week off, something bad happens.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I actually don't think that it's a joke anymore.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's a thing that happens when we're not recording.
[SPEAKER_04]: like the universe gets off balance a little bit.
[SPEAKER_04]: We had Venezuela and then the ice shooting in our two weeks off and it feels like these things can't be a coincidence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right.
[SPEAKER_04]: So this is a special episode, the first of two about the rise and fall of the
[SPEAKER_04]: The undermining and dismantling of the voting rights act has been a major project of the Supreme Court under John Roberts and in this term, there's a case that's likely to undo the last remaining major piece of the law.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we want to tell the story of the Voting Rights Act from the beginning.
[SPEAKER_04]: We also want to talk about the arc of history and how rights are one and lost.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think the second Trump administration has a lot of us thinking about what the natural arc of history is and questioning the belief that things just sort of generally get better over time that we're moving into a better world.
[SPEAKER_04]: Democratic ideals that could reach the newly freed black population in America, that struggle led to violence and repression in the south for a century, and it built eventually into the mid-century civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're going to talk about that history today and then next episode we're going to talk about the conservative legal movements effort to undo the fruits of all that struggle.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, and if you're listening to this podcast, there's a good chance you have not lived a single day of your life without the voting rights act and the silver rights act and the gains of the silver rights movement shaping the world you live in, you know, we do have a few older listeners for sure, but they were very young.
[SPEAKER_02]: So most of us don't know what it was like.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we do think it's important for you to understand when conservatives are trying to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not building the same world we live in now, but it's just a little harder for black people to vote, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you want to understand the world they're trying to build the first place to look is the world as it was before the Voting Rights Act.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we want to tell this story where you can see what the world was like back then.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can see what the struggle to build that world, that repressive world with a permanent underclass was like.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can see
[SPEAKER_02]: How even in times of progressive ascendancy there were reactionary gains and you can see how even in times of, you know, reactionary victory there were progressive gains and you can see how this fight has been going on for 150 years and will continue on well past the time of this publication of this episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: And hopefully, you know, it will leave you feeling a little armed for that fight ahead and optimistic about our ability to do something not positive.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, let's start roughly at the close of the civil war, in very broad terms, after the civil war, there are these twin political problems.
[SPEAKER_04]: One is what do you do with the southern states?
[SPEAKER_04]: And the other, again, in the broadest terms, is what do you do about the political rights of black people after the abolition of slavery?
[SPEAKER_04]: And this wasn't like a done deal.
[SPEAKER_04]: It wasn't inevitable that black people were going to get equal legal rights at this point, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: The president is Andrew Johnson, who's like an avowed open white supremacist, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Then you have like on the other end the radical republic.
[SPEAKER_04]: Republicans who are advocating for constitutional amendments that would enshrine a quality into the law.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like, there are competing camps here.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not just sort of like, well, we all agree, let's do voting rights equal rights and then move forward.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to Peter's point, like you already had lots of this like push and pull going on, even during this of a word self, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And in its immediate aftermath.
[SPEAKER_02]: So like,
[SPEAKER_02]: Recently freed black union soldiers found themselves being paid less than their white soldier counterparts and so they organized for equal pay, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: This was all bound up in this time around broader questions of what it would mean to be free.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what does it mean to free the slaves?
[SPEAKER_02]: Does it just mean an end to chattel slavery?
[SPEAKER_02]: Does abolition mean something more than that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Does it include
[SPEAKER_02]: The right to own land and to work it, right to your own benefit does it include political participation through the vote Does it include the right to get married?
[SPEAKER_02]: You know because there was so much sexualized violence and stealing of children of enslaved peoples and so marriage was a big flash point around that So there's this political contestation about what does abolition mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: What does it mean to free someone?
[SPEAKER_00]: and what does legally quality mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think like this legally quality thing is like we're talking about a constant push and pull throughout these episodes and throughout the history of you know the Voting Rights Act, a big push and pull thematically throughout I think this history is about the definition of legally quality.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, and the flip side is also that, like, wasn't just the victors who were at work in this time, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, the forces reaction were already at work, crafting things like the black codes and the south, which, you know, were like, vagrancy laws that criminalized black mobility and self-employment, keeping them confined to plantations, like slaves.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know Mississippi freed people couldn't rent land in urban areas in South Carolina if freed people were not involved in Surveil or agricultural labor they had to pay special tax and punishment allowed for like whipping for non-compliance There were laws against and ticing black labor with better conditions and wages Prohibitions Enticing though I don't want to see you in ticing black labor
[SPEAKER_02]: do not offer my, you know, black farmer better wages.
[SPEAKER_02]: There were prohibitions against the international marriage.
[SPEAKER_02]: Black children were apprenticed without theirs or their parents consent, which is just a nice way of saying they were kidnapped and forced into a labor.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not a clear, like before the civil war, everything was bad and after the civil war things were good for a period.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was this push and pull that
[SPEAKER_02]: continued throughout this period and going forward of, you know, forces for emancipation, versus forces of reaction.
[SPEAKER_04]: So where this all leads is the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, which enshrined equal protection into the law and prevent racial discrimination in voting.
[SPEAKER_04]: You have a bunch of laws passed both in conjunction with and subsequent to those amendments.
[SPEAKER_04]: You have the Reconstruction Acts, which established military occupation of the southern states and had requirements for readmission into the union, including suffrage for black men.
[SPEAKER_04]: You have the Enforcement Acts, which helped protect voting rights by doing things like providing oversight for elections and providing legal remedies for people who are targets of violence and intimidation.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the result of all of this is a massive increase in the franchise for black men during this era.
[SPEAKER_04]: Nationwide, the percentage of black men eligible to vote goes from about 0.5 in 1866.
[SPEAKER_04]: to 80 in 1868.
[SPEAKER_04]: To a year.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's not just eligibility, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Black voters are very engaged.
[SPEAKER_04]: So in some southern states, Black registration rates exceed 90%.
[SPEAKER_04]: More than 700,000 black men vote for the first time in the 1868 presidential election.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think the total number of black people at this point is something like five million, maybe even a little less.
[SPEAKER_04]: In,
[SPEAKER_04]: Alabama and Georgia, Black voters constitute about 40% of the electorate.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're talking about real political power here.
[SPEAKER_04]: Over the Reconstruction period, which is the decade or so following the Civil War, somewhere between 1500 and 2000 Black Americans are elected into public office at all levels.
[SPEAKER_04]: The first Black Senator, High Room Rebels, is elected in Mississippi in 1870.
[SPEAKER_04]: Another Blanch Bruce, who was a former slave, was elected in the same state in 1875.
[SPEAKER_04]: The first Black State Supreme Court Justice is elected in South Carolina.
[SPEAKER_04]: between 1870 and 1900, there are 22 black Americans in Congress.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're just talking about like this massive step forward in a very short period of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and that massive step forward is only made possible by the political will and political power being exerted through reconstruction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about reconstruction acts, the reconstruction amendments, the constitution is amended, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Multiple times during this time period, the accountability and enforcement of federal law over the South.
[SPEAKER_00]: These rules about southern states, what they have to do to rejoin the union.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, well, that's one of the big themes of like every successful step forward in civil rights embraces the discipline of the southern states.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's no other way to put it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in the history of this country, yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: It acknowledges that the southern states are anti-librity in these very specific regards and takes steps to put them in check.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's something you see during reconstruction.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's something you'll see in the civil rights era as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and ultimately reconstruction, though, is a failed effort, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The gains that are being made are dismantled.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, you can, like, pinpoint, okay, reconstruction is dead with the compromise of 1877.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a presidential election in 1876, and the quote-unquote compromise is about who gets the presidency.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you have two presidential nominees.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Republican nominee is from Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the Democrat is New York Governor Samuel Tillden.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there are two problems in the presidential election of 1876 for who wins the election.
[SPEAKER_00]: One problem is that pesky, electoral college, it's been giving us issues for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other problem is widespread
[SPEAKER_00]: cheating, widespread ballot stuffing, and widespread certainly in the south violence at the polls to try to keep newly enfranchised, former slaves and black people from voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what happens is in the electoral college there are 20 disputed electoral votes,
[SPEAKER_00]: and without figuring out who those 20 electoral votes go to, rather freeed behays or Samuel Tildin, neither nominee has enough votes to win the electoral college.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Congress creates this electoral commission to figure this shit out like we need a president, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the electoral commission that's put together ends up voting on straight party lines 8-7 to award those disputed electoral votes to the Republican, rather for Bays, which gives him the presidential win.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not so much that this electoral commission like investigated the disputed electoral votes from like Louisiana and Florida and deduced which candidate the
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, what you see is the push and pull that we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: This actually is an agreement, informal negotiated over time, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is an agreement about federal governance and reconstruction.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really just expressed by Hayes being handed the election.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's so much more than that, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: To get to a peaceful inauguration of one of these candidates.
[SPEAKER_00]: To get to a Republican president,
[SPEAKER_00]: that the Southern Democrats would not outright reject and like have a whole other rebellion over, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The compromise of 1877 is struck, whereby those Southern Democrats, the white supremacists, would acknowledge the Republican haze as president, but in return,
[SPEAKER_00]: they would get some massive concessions by the United States and ultimately reconstruction is over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those concessions most importantly, two of them, the removal of federal troops from the south at this time in 1877 federal troops remained in Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida,
[SPEAKER_00]: Those federal troops still there holding accountable the south to rejoining the union, to abiding by the reconstruction amendments, to abolishing slavery, really, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The other concession that is agreed to, so that Brotherford B. Hayes can be president, is that the U.S. federal government agrees essentially, and the north agrees essentially,
[SPEAKER_00]: to give southern states the right to deal with African-American citizens in whatever way they like without, quote, northern interference, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the end of reconstruction sort of symbolically, and if you want to put it on a time period, it is the election of Brotherford B. Hayes in this compromise.
[SPEAKER_00]: This gives the promise of reconstruction up.
[SPEAKER_00]: for like a calm resolution to a presidential election and it leads really to white supremacist taking control of the South.
[SPEAKER_00]: It leads to a powerful Southern Democrat voting block for decades, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Solid South where you know Southern white supremacist political powers really consolidated in the Democratic Party.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the south on the ground, this compromise and the end of reconstruction results in white supremacists taking over fully and enacting policies specifically designed to deny black citizens their rights.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, it's not just an abstract connection, like part of Brotherhood, behaves being seated is also a several Democratic Southern governors being seated, right, in the same election.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's very clear, like the South is going to be under essentially Confederate control.
[SPEAKER_02]: These are unreconstructed Confederate sympathizers who are taking control of the South in exchange for the federal government.
[SPEAKER_02]: being controlled by a Republican party that's no longer committed to the project of racial equality, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: This is sort of the beginning of the seeds of the modern Republican party where you see them more like indebted to the capital, the finance years of the civil war, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That part of their coalition, and you have this sort of liberal economic agenda, but not paired with any sort of democratic agenda.
[SPEAKER_02]: The grey and the colony built on cheap labor mostly from black people, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so some people like to call this period with a redemption period because the southerners consider themselves redeemers redeeming the old South, the pre-civil war South.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we've used that term before in the podcast, but we don't want to give them too much credit fuck.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's an oxymoron, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: There's nothing redeeming about this, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And to that point, like it was the base of the pillar of their political movement.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything else relied on the violence.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was brutal.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of modern sort of pop culture depictions, or like the modern imagination, you might imagine lynchings being like some black people who are rundown and a news put around their neck.
[SPEAKER_02]: that isn't really fully accurate.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what's going to follow is, you know, some things I came across in my research for this episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I wanted to just give you a content warning here.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's going to follow is graphic depictions of violence, some sexual violence as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: If that's not something, you're really emotionally prepared for right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: You should skip ahead about one minute.
[SPEAKER_02]: some of the research came across for this episode included accounts of black men being beaten and castrated black men found dead and hanging with the castrated generals in their mouths black men with dozens of broken bones who were burned alive held at gunpoint and made to rape young girls in front of the girl's parents
[SPEAKER_02]: stories about men being hung, and then when their wives who were made to watch cried out, hot branding iron shoved in the wife's mouth, women having their tongues cut off, their fingers cut off, their hands cut off, their breasts cut off, sexual violence, rape, kidnapping of children.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's what the Southern violence looked like in this time, and it started in reconstruction, and it just got worse.
[SPEAKER_02]: their redemption period is being allowed to do this right and the violence was in random is also important to note like targeted elected officials it targeted political leaders including white Republicans sometimes faith leaders teachers business leaders and when it was random you know sort of by like who it targeted more indiscriminate it wasn't always
[SPEAKER_02]: leading up to and during elections being used to discourage people from voting, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: People who had fought for the right to vote wouldn't want to go out in fear of being murdered, being tortured and murdered.
[SPEAKER_02]: In addition to the violence and on top of the violence, there's economic subjugation, progressive taxation was abolished, the central boards of education aid to the port disabled were done away with stuff that had been like part of like the Friedman's Bureau was gone.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're not familiar with the Friedman's Bureau, it was a federal agency established
[SPEAKER_02]: after the civil war that operated mainly in the south to aid the transition for formerly enslaved people to becoming free and equal members of society would help sort of rationing food, giving out clothing, but also settling labor disputes or people would come to them because they thought they were getting railroaded by local law enforcement and help getting the federal government
[SPEAKER_02]: in local issues when recently freed people were having their rights tripled.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was an important part of the beginning of reconstruction, and it was really part of the foundation of the welfare state, the beginning of the social safety net in this country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, a sign of like real institutional effort put behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reconstruction.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not just ending child slavery, but helping the formerly enslaved become full functioning members of society.
[SPEAKER_04]: Do you guys remember when Clarence Thomas said that the Friedman's Bureau did not have like a racial component?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes, I think about that all the time, but so that ended up getting eliminated and the free school system was dismantled.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jerry Mandarin happened at the local level making it impossible for Blacksteven, hold municipal power.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were vagrancy laws that essentially reprise the black codes we discussed earlier, lean laws giving the first right to owners for crops from sharecroppers, which created essentially debt pee in itch.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are draconian criminal laws which created the convict lease labor system, which essentially just recapitulated slavery, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You get arrested for stealing a horse because you're riding your own horse.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, you're in prison, which means you are in the 13th Amendment exception to slavery, and you could be least out for, you know, nothing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then on top of that was the effort to politically disenfranchised people.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you have the violence, you have the economic subjugation, and then you have the political subjugation.
[SPEAKER_02]: which often took the form of voting restrictions like literacy tests, the first literacy test was actually the secret ballot, which is kind of wild, but before the secret ballot, people could just bring pre-filled ballots, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And parties could hand out like a slate ballot.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, after the secret ballot, you had to be able to read and fill in and write who you wanted and that functioned as a literacy test.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a quick question about the secret ballot that I've never thought of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is the implementation of secret ballots like part of enforcing race equality?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that was legitimately done as a literacy test to disenfranchise black people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, in the south.
[SPEAKER_02]: Another thing they did was they would split up the ballots for state, you know, federal and municipal elections and have different boxes and then wouldn't tell people which boxes which they just have had written.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you'd have to be able to read to know which box to put your ballot in and if you put it into the wrong one, it wasn't counted.
[SPEAKER_04]: Should I read the literacy test from Louisiana?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there were the actual literacy test themselves, which, yes, we need to discuss.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think a lot of people here like literacy tests and think, oh, this is sort of a way to discriminate against
[SPEAKER_04]: people who have less access to education, right, which is true to some degree, but it undersells what the literacy tests were trying to accomplish.
[SPEAKER_04]: Many of these literacy tests were designed to be so confusing that any of them could be tossed out on some sort of whim if the person giving the test wanted to.
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's this famous one out of Louisiana and I'm going to read you some of the questions, all right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Number one, draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence.
[SPEAKER_04]: So presumably that means it's numbered, number one.
[SPEAKER_04]: So draw a line around the one.
[SPEAKER_02]: So circle the one, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess so.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or but the trick, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're thinking like they're trying to be tricked, is draw a line around maybe the word a number or right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like this.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's, it's, it's a, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: two draw a line under the last word in this line.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, three cross out the longest word in this line.
[SPEAKER_04]: four draw a line around the shortest word in this line five circle the first comma first letter of the alphabet in this line circle the first letter of the alphabet in this line so this is interesting because this is where they introduce the word circle so they are differentiating between drawing a line around and circle
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, yeah, it's just inserting so many different metrics, so many details on which you can be deemed quote unquote illiterate and therefore not eligible to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: And by the way, this goes on for 30 questions.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I just read you the first five and they're all like this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I like six, especially, I mean, in like
[SPEAKER_02]: It says, in the space below, draw three circles, one inside parentheses and gulfed by the other, because this literally, like, you could draw three nested circles, or you could draw one circle and then next to it, two nested circles.
[SPEAKER_02]: Both of those could possibly answer this question accurately.
[SPEAKER_02]: will be counted correctly.
[SPEAKER_02]: The way these are used is like if you draw three nested circles, the white administrator of the test will tell the black man, no, that was wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're Swiss to draw one circle by itself and then one nested in another.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas if you draw one circle by itself and one nested in another, they'll say, no, that's wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's Swiss to draw three nested circles, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that's the way these tests work.
[SPEAKER_00]: only a lawyer could have written this by the way.
[SPEAKER_04]: This feels to me like an IQ test formulated by someone with an IQ of 80.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_04]: You're just like, what is this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Also the point being right that whoever literate or illiterate white or black taking this test, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The point here is that you could be assessed as having past it or assessed as having failed it depending on who the administrator is and what the intentions of the administrator of that test are in Deming who is eligible to vote.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have the mass use across the south of literacy tests.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have poll taxes as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have mass disenfranchisement and exclusion of black people from voting, black men at this time from voting and you know, we just made the point about like anybody could fail this literacy test.
[SPEAKER_00]: and some white people, certainly illiterate at the time, would not have passed these tests, the way that many Southern states got around that, as bypassing grandfather clauses, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that if you were a white voter, even if maybe you couldn't pay a poll tax, or even if maybe you wouldn't be able to pass a literacy test, well, if your granddaddy could have voted, or if you lived in an area,
[SPEAKER_00]: where white people historically had been allowed to vote and black people hadn't, while you were, quote unquote, grandfathered in, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have this math campaign of excluding black men from the vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another way to do this is through the implementation and in fact, codification putting it into law of a system of whites only primary voting, primary elections.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, Southern Democrats, at this time, they're maintaining a one-party system in most of the South.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're developing big power in Congress, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're controlling all of the seats that are allocated to their states.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are establishing seniority in the U.S. Congress.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're gaining, you know, like important seats, important chairmanships at the head of congressional committees.
[SPEAKER_00]: and just the snowball is rolling and accumulating.
[SPEAKER_00]: First Southern Democrat white supremacist power, obviously in and across the South but also in the halls of Congress.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for maintaining this one party dominance, they add that they're going to do whites-only primaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so maybe, you know, the 15th amendment says that the vote can't be taken away on the basis of race, but for primary systems, you know, states and the parties themselves have basically like full control over setting up the rules for who votes in primarys and so Texas, Georgia, several other states across the south.
[SPEAKER_00]: create literal white primary systems where only whites can vote in the primaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: Either in the sort of like local election board rules or Texas is an example and we'll talk about the legal battle in Texas over this.
[SPEAKER_00]: The state of Texas passes a law, the Texas statute, it's called at the time, that says no black person will vote in a democratic party,
[SPEAKER_04]: This is something that I think a lot of people might not think about too much now because the primary system feels like an integrated part of the overall election system.
[SPEAKER_04]: But there is a sort of field of thought.
[SPEAKER_04]: legally.
[SPEAKER_04]: That still exists today that primaries are basically a party concern, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: That the voting rights of the primary voter are either very narrow or even non-existent because this is really about whatever the party wants and the party is an institution that can decide how it wants to deal with its own process.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is how you get caucuses, right, which are like nothing at all
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and so around this time as well, like this codification is happening not just in state legislation, but a lot of the south they start having entirely new constitutions and constitutionalizing this sort of system of disenfranchisement.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I believe, 1890, Mississippi was the first constitutional convention that adopted a literacy qualification into its state constitution and that literacy test had an exception for, you know, someone who could understand any section of the state constitution read to him or give a reasonable
[SPEAKER_02]: black test taker, you know how they are going to answer that question.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this becomes like a model for the region in the next few years.
[SPEAKER_02]: You see them in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
[SPEAKER_02]: It becomes, you know, the way that along with poll taxes that black people are kept disenfranchised in the South.
[SPEAKER_04]: you're not going to read the bubbles in a bar of soap question.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted to mention that according to this one source we have questions to figure out whether someone is quote unquote literate enough to vote included something like how many bubbles are in a bar of soap.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a question asked how many how many of us in a bar of soap.
[SPEAKER_04]: Reach out if you know the answer folks.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know that classic like I don't know a disseminated around like everybody talked about it when I was in college like if you Interview for a job at Google One of the questions they asked is how does ping pong balls fit on an airplane?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know and it's not about actual number.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about watching you figure out.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's about your process It was the same
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's comparable to because I do feel like the solution to the Google interview process is state violence against Google just like the federal government should
[SPEAKER_04]: the new state constitutions, these sort of like piecemeal pieces of legislation designed to keep black people out of the polling place.
[SPEAKER_04]: All of this undoes the progress in the black franchise that was made during reconstruction.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to read from a document published by the National Park Service on this topic, quote,
[SPEAKER_04]: The combination of poll taxes, secret ballots, literacy, understanding tests, grandfather clauses, and the bias manipulation of registration procedures achieved the goal of disenfranchising the overwhelming number of African Americans.
[SPEAKER_04]: Once Louisiana adopted its new constitution in 1898, the number of black voters plummeted from 130,000 to 5,000.
[SPEAKER_04]: In Virginia, the number dropped from 147,000 to 21,000.
[SPEAKER_04]: The Constitutional Convention in Mississippi cut black enrollment from approximately 147,000 to around 8600.
[SPEAKER_04]: In 1906, five years after Alabama designed its exclusionary suffrage proposals, only 2% of the black voting age population remained on the registration books.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, remember that I mentioned there were two black senators elected in the 1870s.
[SPEAKER_04]: There would not be another black senator elected until 1967.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, one reason we want to talk about this, in addition to just sort of giving you the history,
[SPEAKER_04]: is because I do think that the way you learn about this in like elementary school and middle school and high school is like a little bit truncated to the point where you can sort of get the impression that there was just sort of like a march forward right and like yeah like there were hiccups right but that generally speaking slavery ends and then you hit this sort of like
[SPEAKER_04]: this phase where it's sort of like slavery's over, but racism is still bad, and then you hit the civil rights era, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And it sort of skips over how important this reconstruction era was, because it's not just that you have this intermediary phase between the abolition of slavery and the civil rights era,
[SPEAKER_04]: of relative political equality that was very short-lived before it was aggressively cracked down on by white interests in the south.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's sort of like the definitive aspect of the post-Civil War era, right, that there was this brief moment where things were getting drastically better very quickly and then it's undone.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's important to realize if this conflict, some of the stuff sounds familiar, it should.
[SPEAKER_02]: The shape of political conflict in 1870, 1880, 1890, in a lot of ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: preface political conflict in the 1940s, 1950s, 1990s, 2010s, like it's the same thing over and over.
[SPEAKER_02]: The ideological heirs of the Confederacy fighting for hierarchical society built on cheap, disenfranchised labor.
[SPEAKER_02]: backed by violence versus people who believe in emancipatory politics and freedom and equality.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a conflict that has played out over and over in American history.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this is just one skirmish or two skirmishes in an ongoing battle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, what we're talking about during this time is really the ideological and the sociological and political foundations for the reactionary movement that we see today, you know, and even semantically like what states are talking about during this time is states rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: what the implementation of brand new state constitutions during this time to be racist, right, is at this time in a discourse about states rights and state power, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, today when conservatives are talking about, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: big government and there are tensions around like federal supremacy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just saying like you see what is happening to the voting rights act today and I was happening around voting today is all founded back from during this time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and like, I mean, it's just as one example, the Friedman's Bureau was the federal government's way of sort of implementing a lot of reconstruction stuff in the south.
[SPEAKER_02]: It did a lot of like economic support, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And in response, you had southerners essentially calling Friedblack formerly enslaved people welfare queens.
[SPEAKER_02]: The foundation of the welfare state started after the civil war in attempting to lift up recently freed people and there was immediate reaction being like, oh, these people are relying on the government, they're lazy layabouts, you don't do a real war.
[SPEAKER_02]: The same shit you hear today, the same shit you can see in political ads from the 80s, the same shit people were saying in the
[SPEAKER_02]: During reconstruction, like the roots of so much American political conflict was right here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we are a Supreme Court podcast and perhaps it's worth talking about what the Supreme Court is doing in this era.
[SPEAKER_04]: We're going to go through it pretty quickly, but they go on a generational run of bad cases over the span of like 40 years.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's
[SPEAKER_04]: Actually, crazy makes the Roberts court look like a fine compilation of justices.
[SPEAKER_04]: We're talking about a court that basically allows this at every turn and facilitates it at every turn.
[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, I'll let you guys take it away.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, there's a couple, I want to talk about a bliu in cruch shank, bliu vus.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to get bogged down in the details because it might be worth doing a whole episode on this case.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the gist is Kentucky had a law preventing black people from testifying against white people in trial.
[SPEAKER_02]: And two white men murdered most of a large black family with axes, leaving only the two young daughters alive.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the question was whether a federal court could take jurisdiction over the case under an early reconstruction law designed to enforce the 14th Amendment.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Supreme Court said no, because of some textual bullshit that like this case wasn't affecting the two daughters, because they weren't like the dead people or the people being prosecuted, they were just giving
[SPEAKER_02]: One of these girls, by the way, wasn't just a survivor in the sense that they didn't kill her.
[SPEAKER_02]: She got a fucking axe to the head, and she just survived her wounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she's lived through that.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other case, even worse, USB-Cruc Shank comes out of criminal convictions related to the Colfax massacre that killed dozens of black Americans, the Supreme Court reversed the convictions.
[SPEAKER_02]: a declining to incorporate the first and second amendment against the states saying they only limited the federal government.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's substantially weakened the reach of the 14th Amendment and held that its prohibitions didn't extend to individual actors only to the states.
[SPEAKER_02]: This left recently freed people and white Republicans and other unionists in the South at the mercy of increasingly Confederate dominated law enforcement courts and legislatures.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I said the violence was the foundation.
[SPEAKER_02]: This was like, well, go fucking nuts with the violence because you're not going to get any consequences for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the worst cases in Supreme Court history.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's also U.S. V. Reese, which invalidated a conviction against an official who refused to register a black man to vote.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was tried under a law implementing the 15th Amendment and this case gutted that law and the amendment itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also adding to this shitstorm, terrible run of Supreme Court cases at this time, are the civil rights cases of 1883.
[SPEAKER_00]: I learned about these in Conwall, if you don't talk about civil rights cases, yeah, this is a big one.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have likely talked about them in law school if you're in law school.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is five cases that held that the 13th and 14th amendments.
[SPEAKER_00]: do not allow Congress to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So Peter mentioned up top there were Reconstruction Acts, one of them, the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a big Reconstruction legislation that
[SPEAKER_00]: basically entitled everyone access to public accommodations, public transportation, et cetera, regardless of race.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there can't be race discrimination in who can take the train and who can sit where at the movie theater, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the law that's an issue here.
[SPEAKER_00]: The court struck down.
[SPEAKER_00]: that legislation strikes down the civil rights act of 1875 in the civil rights cases of 1883 says that the 13th amendment quote merely abolishes slavery.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the 14th amendment doesn't give Congress the power to legislate like this because, well, these are private actors doing the discrimination.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are individuals.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are business owners, just making rules for their business.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not state action.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so Congress has no power to outlaw that.
[SPEAKER_00]: One important dissent John Marshall Harlan in the civil rights cases of 1883, he says, quote, The substance and spirit of the recent amendments of the Constitution have been sacrificed in this case he's saying by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's saying,
[SPEAKER_00]: And the result of this decision or these decisions, it's five cases, widespread racial segregation in housing, in employment, in public life, is greenlit, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Jim Crow is ushered in post-reconstruction because squarely because, right, the civil rights cases of 1883 allow it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so just one note
[SPEAKER_00]: Just thinking about the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Congress passed this bill, no discrimination in public, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could have had segregation abolished in 1875.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Supreme Court ensures that there's a hundred more years.
[SPEAKER_00]: of fighting and struggle over this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just legally, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not even to say that segregation has been abolished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, so let's go to Plessy V Ferguson.
[SPEAKER_00]: Plessy V Ferguson is the case about you've heard about it separate but equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It gives the green light to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: This case holds that racial segregation laws, literal, like laws,
[SPEAKER_00]: that codify racial segregation don't violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities, the segregated areas and the segregated spaces for each race are equal in quality.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this is the story of Homer Plessy.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a mixed race man in Louisiana.
[SPEAKER_00]: He boarded a whites-only train car.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, Louisiana had the separate car act of 1890, while on the books, codifying segregation, no black people on the white train cars, and in this case really importantly, in terms of legal equality and the definition of legal equality,
[SPEAKER_00]: The Supreme Court says that the 14th Amendment establishes just legal equality between whites and blacks.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does not require the elimination of all, quote, distinctions based on color.
[SPEAKER_00]: So big, long question over the course of history of the United States of America.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does legal equality mean, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: When it's used here to ensure, obviously, inequality,
[SPEAKER_02]: We should also talk about Giles V. Harris.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a case where Alabama was refusing to register a black people to vote.
[SPEAKER_02]: So a whole group of about 5,000 black people sued, seeking an injunction from federal courts, requiring the state to register them.
[SPEAKER_02]: The state had a grandfather clause.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then lots of owners and subjective requirements for people not grandfathered in, which, of course, in practice worked to disenfranchise black people.
[SPEAKER_02]: and the Supreme Court said, well, those subjective and owners tests are racially neutral on their face.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're not going to look at how they operate in practice.
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be, yeah, we don't want to micromanage the states.
[SPEAKER_04]: We did an episode on this one, but all-time dumb as shit, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and then you in there.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's also a gin v- United States, which interestingly is an example of, like,
[SPEAKER_02]: Even when the Supreme Court wasn't being terrible, they weren't really fixing things.
[SPEAKER_02]: This was a case that actually struck down grandfather clauses.
[SPEAKER_02]: So here, similarly, grandfather clause worked to the effect that illiterate whites were able to vote, but not illiterate blacks whose grandfather's had almost all been slaves and barred from voting at the trigger date for the grandfather clause.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Supreme Court was like, look, we get what's going on here, and you can't do this.
[SPEAKER_02]: They struck it down, and then the states went back and just were like, fine, we're just going to disenfranchise like poor white people too.
[SPEAKER_02]: So black state disenfranchised, but also poor whites got some disenfranchisement straits.
[SPEAKER_04]: So this happens in 1915 sort of like later in this era and it highlights a real problem that you see pop up a lot more in the mid century that we'll talk about where even when the courts are cracking down this stuff.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're just sort of playing whack-a-mole with these new voting restrictions, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So they're like, all right, you can't do these grandfather clauses, and so the Southern States are like, okay, so we can't do grandfather clauses, but we can still do literacy tests and poll taxes.
[SPEAKER_04]: We have these other mechanisms for trying to keep blacks from voting,
[SPEAKER_04]: without grandfather clauses, there's more collateral damage of poor whites, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: But so be it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So like the, you have this problem where it takes forever, it's 1915 by the time this is decided by the Supreme Court.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it takes decades to get this shit handled.
[SPEAKER_04]: And even when it is, the problem isn't really solved.
[SPEAKER_04]: This really highlights the need for a scent like big, ambitious, federal legislation, so that courts aren't just like having to step in and say, no, you can't do that.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, you can't do that because it's just not an effective system for preventing the Southern states from doing the shit.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we can talk about another couple of cases in a little series at the Supreme Court.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is after in 1915, this has to do with those white primaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this Supreme Court upholding those, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, the South still has all of these methods, all of these tactics at their disposal for continuing to implement Black disenfranchisement.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, talked about the white primaries a little bit earlier, in 1923, the Texas legislature, which at the time was newly dominated by basically KKK and supporters of the KKK, barred African Americans from voting in Democratic primaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: The law, again, called the Texas statute at the time, said, quote,
[SPEAKER_00]: in a democratic party primary election held in the state of Texas, period.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the NAACP out of El Paso takes up a case to challenge this law and actually this Supreme Court agrees in a limited way, agrees with the plaintiff with the NAACP.
[SPEAKER_00]: They say, yeah, actually under the 14th Amendment, that promises equal protection under the law.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, one note is there is also a 15th amendment question here, under the 15th amendment, you should not be barred from voting on the basis of race.
[SPEAKER_00]: Supreme Court doesn't even talk about the 15th amendment in this go around.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, strikes down this Texas law.
[SPEAKER_00]: Texas comes back.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do they do?
[SPEAKER_00]: They come back and say, okay, we won't have that law.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to amend it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll change it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, that actually we're giving the power.
[SPEAKER_00]: the Democratic Party itself is going to set the rules for its own primaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: The state of Texas won't officially do it by passing legislation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That gets challenged goes up to the Supreme Court.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Supreme Court this time in 1935 upholds the Democratic Party being able
[SPEAKER_00]: to implement whites-only primaries in the state of Texas.
[SPEAKER_00]: That case is called grovy-vetound send, and the Supreme Court there says, well, there's no state action.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we would be regulating private actors.
[SPEAKER_00]: The state of Texas isn't doing this.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right, the democratic party can do whatever it wants, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's got a first amendment right to associate with only white people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's the status quo for like another decade.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's the mid 40s when the Supreme Court finally says in Smith v. All right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, all right.
[SPEAKER_04]: No white primaries, guys.
[SPEAKER_04]: Come on.
[SPEAKER_04]: We all just fought a war together, let's cool it on the white primaries.
[SPEAKER_04]: A couple of other things worth noting from the first half of the 20th century, one is the creation of the NAACP.
[SPEAKER_04]: Organization is founded in 1909, not technically in response to black disenfranchisement it's formed in the wake of the Springfield race riots in Illinois,
[SPEAKER_04]: They immediately start litigating the issue.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're involved in GenV Harris.
[SPEAKER_04]: They leave the charge against the white primary.
[SPEAKER_04]: They very quickly become the most prominent organization on racial voting rights issues.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they're a huge player, of course, in the mid-century when they're involved in Brown v. Board and like a really helped turn the tide against Jim Crow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and, you know, it's worth noting that like the violence I mentioned earlier continues throughout this period, right, through the first half of the 20th century, the Tulsa race massacre was in 1921, which is considered one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, the second KKK pops up in the 1910s.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, the second KKK pops up in the 1910s.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right with birth of the nation and all that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Also lynching postcards, which were what they sound like.
[SPEAKER_02]: People would take photos of lynchings posing with the dead bodies and make little postcards at them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Out of them became so popular that the postmaster general in 1908 had to like issue a rule being like, no, you can't put those in the mail.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't send a little postcard to your friend with a photo of a dead African American on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: but they remain popular into the 40s, and we're like, we're widely circulated in the south.
[SPEAKER_02]: So to commemorate, to show you where there, and someone got lynched, really disgusting stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we should mention, because we are talking about voting rights and, you know, in franchisement or disenfranchisement in the United States, also happening around the turn of the century as a big social movement for women's suffrage, eventually, of course, culminating in the 19th Amendment, which is passed in 1919.
[SPEAKER_00]: It prohibits the US government and states from denying the right to vote to citizens on the basis of sex.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the point here for this episode is pointing out there was a mass movement to get this to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: The 19th Amendment itself in franchise 26 million American women in time for the 1920 US presidential election came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: of a social movement that changed public opinion that pressured government officials that really forced the U.S. government to do something huge, which is amend the U.S. Constitution at the same time, women's suffrage doesn't address the problem with black disenfranchisement, certainly black women, Native American women of color are still not allowed to vote even with the passage of the 19th Amendment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you see simultaneous and parallel movements.
[SPEAKER_00]: You also see a lot of contradictions.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there were white supremacist elements within the suffragettes.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're not diving too deep into it.
[SPEAKER_04]: But it did sort of heighten the tension, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, many suffragettes saying, like, we're fighting for white women's right to vote to not any else's, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, classic.
[SPEAKER_04]: So let's talk a bit about the early civil rights era, like the sort of 1940 to 1960, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: In the FDR era, if a couple of things happen, one is obviously World War II, where black Americans are drafted, they're serving, they're fighting.
[SPEAKER_04]: The other is the new deal, which provides black men especially with access to work that they didn't have before.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, you're seeing more robust and visible participation of black Americans in civic life.
[SPEAKER_04]: And again, that's just sort of a heightening the tension between the existing legal
[SPEAKER_04]: the lived existence of black people in America, and you start to see early civil rights victories.
[SPEAKER_04]: Southern states were still trying to maneuver their laws to keep primaries white, but federal courts finally put a halt to it in the forties.
[SPEAKER_04]: Black voter eligibility in the South starts creeping up towards 12%.
[SPEAKER_04]: In 1940, it's about 3% up to 12.
[SPEAKER_04]: At that point, we're essentially in the full-fledged civil rights era.
[SPEAKER_04]: You get brown v-board in 1954, the Alabama bus boycotts in 55, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which does have some voting protections.
[SPEAKER_04]: All of these increasingly successful challenges to segregation start popping up and small winds on voting rights issues, but it's still with respect to voting rights, this sort of whack-a-mull thing where someone sues about voting restrictions, a court steps in and says, okay, that's illegal, and then the Southern State's brain storm will work around, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 take some steps forward, but it's a little too reliant on local enforcement.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's not enough power granted to the federal government to really take charge in the south.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there's this simmering political tension that starts to boil over in places, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Alabama's state legislature starts to jerry mandra black voters in Tuskegee and they respond with a boycott.
[SPEAKER_04]: In Fayette County, Tennessee, black citizens launch a suffrage campaign that leads to the mass eviction of black sharecroppers in retaliation.
[SPEAKER_04]: Stuff like this is happening all over the
[SPEAKER_04]: It's sort of highlights that there is both a demand and a need for federal legislation, right, for robust federal legislation.
[SPEAKER_04]: Initially, this builds into the Civil Rights Act of 1960, but very similar to the 57 Act.
[SPEAKER_04]: There are protections for voting rights, some federal oversight, but ultimately it's just too weak, too reliant on local enforcement.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that sort of brings us to the voting rights act itself.
[SPEAKER_04]: So the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it comes on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and both of these are really driven forward by these really powerful images of
[SPEAKER_04]: peaceful civil rights protests in the south being responded to violently by southern police, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: The violence in Selma itself takes place just a few months before the passage of the Boating Rights Act.
[SPEAKER_04]: So the 57 Act, the 1960 Act, and they just don't don't get the job done.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that combined with like these very public displays of southern violence towards peaceful protesters creates the political will for these laws.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the Voting Rights Act does a few key things.
[SPEAKER_04]: It allows people to sue for violations of their voting rights to bring private lawsuits.
[SPEAKER_04]: It also establishes what's called preclearance.
[SPEAKER_04]: So if you're a southern state with the history of suppressing the vote, you cannot change your voting rules without approval from the federal government.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, you can't do a new literacy test.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't change the primary rules.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't do a new constitution, exactly.
[SPEAKER_04]: So this solves the whack-a-mole problem.
[SPEAKER_04]: This solves the problem where the southern states are just out there brainstorming races shit to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then you have to deal with it after the fact.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now it's like, no, if you want to change your rules, you have to run it by us first.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're a pestilent little child, and we're going to treat you like one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prophilactic.
[SPEAKER_04]: So there are other provisions that, for example, outlaw literacy tests of moral character, there are required accommodations for disabled voters.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a broad ranging law.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's first of all targeting these tests and practices that Southern states use historically.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then second, it strips those states of the power to freely change their laws.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we've gotten to the point in the episode where the VRA is passed, it is a massive piece of federal legislation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a massively successful piece of legislation in terms of the success of getting it passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're talking about the winds here from a legal perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what the winds have been so far in dismantling this mass system of disenfranchisement that the white
[SPEAKER_00]: put into place and built up since reconstruction.
[SPEAKER_00]: But really want to highlight here that those wins even the sort of case by case one by one and then finally even the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 are downstream in fact the direct products of mass social movements right which we like haven't
[SPEAKER_00]: even gone into in much detail.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, not even going into the legislative history of this, but really just want to highlight like the upheaval, the decades-long organization by the NAACP, by SNIC, by so many organizations, by so much grass roots work, by media work, and direct action, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of that,
[SPEAKER_00]: movement work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say all of that, uprising all of that upheaval, confronting the system of mass violence, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like not just disenfranchisement.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just that you walk to the point and you walk up to your polling place and you're turned away.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about a system of violence that is codified in law and the experience of racial violence, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the implementation of such, again, over the course of decades by reactionary and white supremacist forces across the United States, but especially in the South.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think we want to note because, all right, we've gotten to the point in the episode where the voting rights act has passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Congratulations, everybody, right, but we have this whole other episode coming up next, which is like what has come after the voting rights act.
[SPEAKER_00]: and what has come after is another period which we're about to get into of reactionary and white supremacist response to the voting rights act.
[SPEAKER_00]: And two, all of even the little incremental successes that were attained as a result of this civil rights movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, let's talk about like what opposition looks like, right, or what the status of the opposition to the voting
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there was massive people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there was mass organizing that ultimately leads to a win of the civil rights act in the voting rights act getting passed, but we have to not just define it as a win and everything is solved and everybody agrees and then that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the end of history, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about the arch of history and we're talking about the constant push and pull.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we have to recognize that at the time, not everybody in some rainbow coalition was holding hands in 1965 at the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had those villains, strong sermon, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And, fucking, actually, William Rengwist, who we've talked about, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: All of these players at the time, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who don't just disappear and not just these individuals,
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There are also white supremacist masses, not to say that's a majority population.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean masses in the term of like large segments of the population.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are white supremacist masses.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are people who do not agree with the enfranchisement of black people across the country, but especially in the South.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are, remember, the groups of people, the institutions and the regular people on the ground on the street in their homes every day who are enacting that violence that we've been talking about, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they don't just go away and they're not just convinced, they don't just wake up on the day or the day after the voting rights act is passed, having been convinced to change history continues.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not everything is solved, and again, these ideologies maybe they take different semantic forms and maybe they're presented publicly and in media in different ways and with different vocabulary and words, but it is still there, and this is the struggle that our society continues to be going through.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's worth circling back again to the points in history,
[SPEAKER_04]: where you actually see success during reconstruction and during the civil rights era.
[SPEAKER_04]: In both points in history, there is a recognition by the federal government that the southern states are uniquely illiberal, that they need to be brought to heal, that they cannot be trusted
[SPEAKER_04]: fulfill their obligations under the constitution.
[SPEAKER_04]: Those points in history are the ones where you actually see success, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: The ones where the southern governments are left to their own devices or try to be appeased with half measures, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Those are always prologues to failure.
[SPEAKER_04]: right and I think it needs to be thought of the same way now even if the project has changed.
[SPEAKER_04]: Even if white supremacy in the South is not openly embraced to the extent it was in the 1950s and 60s.
[SPEAKER_04]: You have players within our political system.
[SPEAKER_04]: who are deeply uninterested in liberalism as a project, to quality as a project, just as a project, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you don't recognize them as such and create rules that recognize them as such, then inevitably, whatever you try to cobble together will unravel.
[SPEAKER_02]: And while we're taking these sort of big picture looks at, you know, the last 100, 150 years of history, I want to maybe think back to what Peter said at the opening about the arc of history, I hope listening to this episode is complicated for you, the idea that like history has in arc,
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It certainly doesn't naturally bend towards justice, but I think, you know, the common refrain and left of circles as well, if you apply enough pressure to it, if enough people apply enough pressure to it, then they can bend towards justice.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think we should be complicating even that understanding.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I think this is a story.
[SPEAKER_02]: of history that doesn't have an arc.
[SPEAKER_02]: It has steps forward.
[SPEAKER_02]: It has steps backward.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are periods of great gains in their periods of reaction, but also within those periods, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: In the periods of great gain, there's still terrible racial violence.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the periods of reaction, there's still big gains, like 26 million women getting the right to vote in the middle of intense reactionary period, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I agree.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I say that because
[SPEAKER_02]: I think if you're listening to this podcast, you might believe that we are currently living in a period of reaction.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully it's a short lift to win.
[SPEAKER_02]: But even if you believe that, which I do, you shouldn't be discouraged from thinking that means no good can be done now.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a tremendous amount of good that can be done.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even if femoral victories are still victories, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the Ku Klux Plan was stamped out in the 1870s and it came back,
[SPEAKER_02]: 50 years later.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's 50 years without the Ku Klux clan.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a lot of people not lynched, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's good.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that was a good thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's good that big can be done now.
[SPEAKER_02]: And more than anything, I hope that's what you take from this is to not discouraged by the weight of history and the moment you find yourself in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and we have another episode, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Overgone, for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Listen.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that's a good point, Michael.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing that I wanted to say about this like exertion of force on the arch of history in order to make it bend toward justice, I think that's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also think just to make it like the way I think about it most concretely in my mind is that
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just this affirmative push towards justice, it's a mass push towards enacting a cost on the oppressor for continuing to oppress.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what material gains and material wins are born out of that the oppressor is forced not to because it becomes costly to continue to oppress.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so just like you said, Peter, where the periods of history in which the South was made to heal,
[SPEAKER_00]: social, a people, and, of course, government action and legal action made the cost of this kind of oppression made the cost of racial segregation made the cost of disenfranchisement made the cost of Jim Crow and I'm not talking financial right I'm talking like a reputational I'm talking you know material cost that it becomes untenable and to precarious a system.
[SPEAKER_00]: to continue to uphold.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what dismantling is, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's where the force is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just, you know, on the abstract idea of a force pending the arc of history towards justice, but there's quite a concrete way to look at what the exertion of this force actually does and how those winds are achieved.
[SPEAKER_04]: The other thing I'll add, maybe I'm getting of my skis in this episode, but the other thing I'll add is one of the definitive elements of the civil rights area, and we skipped past it a bit.
[SPEAKER_04]: But the way that you get to 80% support for the voting rights act in Congress, which is where they landed basically,
[SPEAKER_04]: through the efforts of the civil rights movement to show the rest of the country what the South was about.
[SPEAKER_04]: Exposed, yes, exposing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it tells open confidence.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: That was the point of Salma.
[SPEAKER_04]: The freedom rights, right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: You can see parallels right now.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, support for abolishing ice has shot up 25% in the span of two weeks
[SPEAKER_04]: people can see the rotten souls of the ice agents in Minneapolis, just like they saw the rotten souls of the police in Selma.
[SPEAKER_04]: The ability of our body politic to sort of affect these types of changes is often tied to their ability to feel disgust for the reactionary forces in this country.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that's something that can be leveraged and perhaps before we get to the fall of the
[SPEAKER_04]: Perhaps a hopeful point to sit with for a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and the amount of disgust being inescapable for the oppressor and draining resources for the oppressor, that everywhere they go, they have to meet with the disgust, the disgust envelopes them, the disgust burdens them, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it drains their resources, their abilities, their skills, their tactics to have to confront with the public's mass disgust and disapproval of what they're doing,
[SPEAKER_04]: Bring those numbers down to zero agents real quick.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Let me administer them.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't even need to just give a third grade English test in front of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two percent.
[SPEAKER_04]: Just collapsing their numbers.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right, folks, next week, the fall of the Voting Rights Act.
[SPEAKER_04]: We're going to talk about the right wing effort to primarily through the Supreme Court unravel the gains of the Voting Rights Act over the course of 75 years, and talk a bit about where we are today.
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[SPEAKER_04]: Bye y'all.
[SPEAKER_04]: Bye everybody.
[SPEAKER_02]: 5 to 4 is presented by ProLog Projects.
[SPEAKER_02]: This episode was produced by Andrew Parsons.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Wrath of her B.A.s jokes.