racism

150 years ago Susan B. Anthony led a group of women to the polls. Today, the fight continues

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

November 5, 2022

One hundred and fifty years ago today, American women turned out to vote in the presidential election, exercising their right to have a say in their government by choosing either Democratic candidate Horace Greeley or Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.

Except they didn’t have that right explicitly. They were claiming it.

After the Civil War, lawmakers discussed what a newly reconstructed nation would look like and who would get to decide its parameters. Women who had worked for the survival of the United States government, given their sons and husbands to it, invested their money in it, nursed and sometimes fought for it, believed they had demonstrated their right to have a say in it. When Congress began to discuss the Fourteenth Amendment, overturning the 1857 Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court denying that Black Americans could be citizens and protecting Black Americans from racially discriminatory laws in the South, suffragists demanded that their citizenship be included in that constitutional amendment.

Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment included the word “male” in the Constitution for the first time. The amendment specified that it protected the right of men—not women—to vote with its attempt to pressure states into allowing Black male suffrage by threatening to reduce congressional representation for any state that kept a significant number of men from the polls. It provided that “when the right to vote…is denied to any of the male inhabitants of [a] state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States…, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced [proportionally].”

Outraged that they had been excluded, suffragists set their sights on the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting the right to vote. But when Congress passed it and sent it off to the states for ratification in 1870, the amendment said nothing about women’s suffrage. Indeed, it distinctly avoiding the word “sex” when it established that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Fed up with trying to gain their rights through lawmakers, in 1872, suffragists took matters into their own hands. They decided to vote in the presidential election, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment recognized their citizenship by virtue of its first section, which said: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” They were born in the United States, they pointed out, and therefore, according to the Fourteenth Amendment, were citizens.

In Rochester, New York, suffragist Susan B. Anthony led a group of women to the polls in November and successfully cast her vote for Grant. But Anthony was already famous for her long career as a reformer, making her a perfect figure for officials to use as an example. Three weeks after the election, authorities arrested her for voter fraud. She could not testify at her own trial and the judge wrote his opinion before it began, directing the jury to find her guilty. Anthony was fined $100 but refused to pay it, instead going on a speaking tour of New York in which she declared: “This government is not…a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex….”

Anthony’s case grabbed headlines, but it was the story of Virginia Minor that would change the next hundred years of our history. Minor was a suffragist in St. Louis, Missouri. She and her husband, Francis, had been instrumental in developing and publicizing the idea that women had the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment and that they should force that issue in 1872 by showing up at the polls.

On October 15, 1872, Minor had tried to register to vote in her St. Louis district, but the registrar, Reese Happersett, refused to enroll her on the grounds that she was female. Virginia’s husband sued—as a married woman she had no standing to sue on her own account—and the case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On March 29, 1875, the court handed down the Minor v. Happersett decision.

“There is no doubt that women may be citizens,” it said, but it went on to say that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote. “[T]he constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void,” it wrote.

According to the Supreme Court, state governments, elected by white men, could discriminate against their citizens so long as that discrimination was not on the grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The next year, white supremacists would take control of the South with the argument that Black men should not vote because they were poor and would vote for lawmakers who would promise roads, schools, and hospitals that could only be paid for with tax levies on white men. Such rules accumulated until in 1890, Mississippi codified this state-based system by putting into place a new constitution that limited voting to white men by imposing education requirements to be judged by white officials, lack of criminal record, and proof of tax paying. Soon, state constitutions across the country limited voting with all sorts of requirements that cut Black people out on grounds other than race.

In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” overruled Minor v. Happersett on the issue of women’s suffrage. But the Supreme Court continued to use its guidelines for other restrictions until the 1960s, upholding literacy tests, poll taxes, and other rules designed to keep Black people from voting.

Finally, in 1966, almost 100 years after Virginia Minor sued, the Supreme Court decided that voting was a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

And 50 years later—and 150 years after Anthony cast her vote—those of us who have not been cut out of the right to vote by one or another of the measures states are now imposing on their voters can exercise that right, and determine what our nation will look like, once again.

HCR: Democracy is now at risk

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

June 2, 2021

Today, more than 100 scholars who study democracy issued a letter warning that “our entire democracy is now at risk.” The letter explains that the new election laws in Republican-led states, passed with the justification that they will make elections safer, in fact are turning “several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.”

If we permit the breakdown of democracy, it will be a very long time before we can reverse the damage. As a nation spirals downward, the political scientists, sociologists, and government scholars explain, “violence and corruption typically flourish, and talent and wealth flee to more stable countries, undermining national prosperity. It is not just our venerated institutions and norms that are at risk—it is our future national standing, strength, and ability to compete globally.” 

The scholars called for federal action to protect equal access to voting and to guarantee free and fair elections. Voting rights should not depend on which party runs the state legislature, and votes must be cast and counted equally, regardless of where a citizen lives. They back the reforms in the For the People Act, which protects the right to vote, ends partisan gerrymandering, and curbs the flood of money into elections.

They urged Congress “to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake.”  

“History,” they wrote, “will judge what we do at this moment.” 

But in Tulsa, Oklahoma, today, President Joe Biden noted that the events that transpired in the Greenwood district of that city 100 years ago today were written out of most histories. The Tulsa Massacre destroyed 35 blocks of the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, wiping out 1100 homes and businesses and taking hundreds of Black lives, robbing Black families of generational wealth and the opportunities that come with it.

Biden pointed out that he was the first president to go to Tulsa to acknowledge what happened there on May 31 and June 1, 1921. But, he said, “We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened or doesn’t impact us today, because it does.” He drew a direct line from the terrorism at Greenwood to the terrorism in August 2017 at Charlottesville, Virginia, to the January 6 insurrection. Citing the intelligence community, he reminded listeners that “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not Isis. Not al-Qaeda. White supremacists.”  

Victims’ trauma endures, too, and it eventually demands a reckoning when “what many people hadn’t seen before, or simply refused to see, cannot be ignored any longer.” Today, Americans are recognizing “that for too long, we’ve allowed a narrowed, cramped view of the promise of this nation to fester, the view that America is a zero-sum game, where there’s only one winner. If you succeed, I fail. If you get ahead, I fall behind. If you get a job, I lose mine. And maybe worst of all, if I hold you down, I lift myself up. Instead of if you do well, we all do well.” Biden promised to invest in Black communities extensively to unlock creativity and innovation. 

Then the president took on the elephant in the room: voting. On Saturday, Biden took a stand against the state voter suppression laws being passed in Republican-dominated legislatures that, as he said, attack “the sacred right to vote.” They are “part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year—and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans.” They are “wrong and un-American.” 

Biden called on Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the voting protections the Supreme Court stripped out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. He called on “all Americans, of every party and persuasion, to stand up for our democracy and to protect the right to vote and the integrity of our elections.

In Tulsa today, Biden called the Republican efforts to restrict voting a “truly unprecedented assault on our democracy.” He urged voting rights groups to redouble their efforts to register and educate voters, and then he put pressure on Democratic senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), who continue to say they will not challenge the Republican use of the filibuster to stop passage of voting rights bills. Biden promised to fight “like heck with every tool in my disposal” to get the For the People and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed. 

He has asked Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the effort. Today, she released a statement placing today’s fight for voting rights in the context of our history. “[M]any have worked—and many have died—to ensure that all Americans can cast a ballot and have their vote counted,” she said. “Today, that hard-won progress is under assault.” She promised to work with voting rights organizations, community organizations, the private sector, and Congress to strengthen voting rights. 

“The work ahead of us is to make voting accessible to all American voters, and to make sure every vote is counted through a free, fair, and transparent process,” she said. “This is the work of democracy.”

HCR: Find the courage to step on the train

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

May 23, 2021

Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography three times, but to protect the people who helped him run away from enslavement, he did not explain how he had managed to get away until the last version.

Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1838. In his twenty years of life, he had had a series of masters, some kind, some harsh, and one who almost killed him. But by 1838, he was a skilled worker in the local shipyards, earning good money for his master and enjoying a measure of freedom, as well as protection. He had good friends in the area and had fallen in love with the woman who would become his wife.

It was enslavement, but within that existence, it was a pretty good position. His peers in the cotton fields of the Deep South were beaten like animals, their deaths by violence unremarkable. Douglass himself had come close to being “sold down the river”—a term that referred to the slave convoys that traveled down the Mississippi River from older, worn out lands in the East to fresh, raw lands in Mississippi and Louisiana—and he knew that being forced to labor on a plantation in the Deep South would kill him.

His relatively safe position would have been enough for a lot of people. They would have thanked God for their blessings and stayed put. In 1838, Frederick Douglass was no different than they were: an unknown slave, hoping to get through each day. Like them, he might have accepted his conditions and disappeared into the past, leaving the status quo unchanged.

But he refused.

His scheme for escaping to freedom was ridiculously easy. In the days of slavery, free black sailors carried documents with them to prove to southern authorities that they were free, so they could move from northern and foreign ports to southern ports without being detained. These were the days before photos, so officials described the man listed on the free papers as they saw him: his color, distinguishing marks, scars. Douglass worked in shipyards, and had met a sailor whose free papers might cover Douglass… if the white official who looked at them didn’t look too closely. Risking his own freedom, that sailor lent Douglass his papers.

To escape from slavery, all Douglass had to do was board a train. That’s it: he just had to step on a train. If he were lucky, and the railroad conductor didn’t catch him, and no one recognized him and called him out, he could be free. But if he were caught, he would be sold down river, almost certainly to his death.

To me, Douglass’s decision to step aboard that train is everything. How many of us would have taken that risk, especially knowing that even in the best case, success would mean trying to build a new life, far away from everyone we had ever known? Douglass’s step was such a little one, such an easy one… except that it meant the difference between life and death, the difference between a forgotten, enslaved shipyard worker and the great Frederick Douglass, who went on to become a powerful voice for American liberty.

Tomorrow, my students will graduate, and every year, students ask me if I have any advice for them as they leave college or university, advice I wish I had had at their age. The answer is yes, after all these years of living and of studying history, I have one piece of advice:

When the day comes that you have to choose between what is just good enough and what is right… find the courage to step on the train.

HCR: GOP denies January 6 insurrection; Criminal charges forthcoming for Trump

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

May 20, 2021

The news grabbing the headlines today is the congressional fight over the creation of a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the events surrounding the January 6 insurrection.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made demands of the Democrats that he evidently expected Democrats to refuse, enabling him to object to the commission by claiming it was partisan. But the Democrats agreed to his conditions, forcing him to object in such a way that it was clear he is simply covering for the former president and, likely, for himself, because he does not want to have to testify to what he observed or participated in in the days around that event (including, for example, the hostile phone call with Trump when McCarthy was inside the besieged Capitol).

McCarthy and the Republican whip, Steven Scalise (R-LA), whose job is to get Republican members to vote along the lines leadership requires, set out to get Republican representatives to oppose the creation of the commission. But when the House voted on the bill this afternoon, 35 Republicans broke ranks to join the Democrats and vote to create  the commission. The defections were a sign that McCarthy and the Trump caucus do not entirely own the House Republicans yet; 35 Republicans would like to know what the heck happened on January 6. One hundred and seventy-five Republicans want to sweep the whole event under the rug. The final vote on the bill to create the commission was 252-175.

Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH) spoke for those of us who are gobsmacked that anyone could say we do not need to investigate the most profound attack on our democracy in our history. He thanked the Republicans supporting the creation of the independent commission and then turned on the rest. “Benghazi. You guys chased the former secretary of state all over the country, spent millions of dollars. We have people scaling the Capitol, hitting the Capitol police with lead pipes across the head, and we can’t get bipartisanship. What else has to happen in this country? Cops: this is a slap in the face to every rank-and-file cop in the United States. If we’re going to take on China, if we’re going to rebuild the country, if we’re going to reverse climate change, we need two political parties in this country that are both living in reality—and you ain’t one of them.”

The bill now goes to the Senate, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has announced he will not support it. After Trump’s second impeachment trial, McConnell said that he hadn’t voted to convict Trump because the former president would face punishment later. Now he has attacked the bipartisan commission as partisan and said, “It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could actually lay on top of existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress,” implying that there has been an investigation already—there has not—and that the fact we don’t know what such a commission would uncover means we have no need to uncover it.

All of this matters because the January 6 insurrection was an attack on our democracy, and the Republican Party has concluded that they do not want us to know what happened. A number of Republicans have said they believe that “Antifa” was behind the riot; if they really thought that were the case, wouldn’t they want an investigation?

The only logical conclusion is that they are afraid of what an investigation will uncover. And, in fact, that’s precisely what Republican senators are saying: they do not want an investigation to color the 2020 election. Today Senate Republican whip John Thune (R-SD) said that the findings of any investigation “could be weaponized politically and drug into next year” (although the bipartisan agreement requires the investigation to be over by the end of 2021). After years of weaponizing investigations—Benghazi, Secretary of State Clinton’s emails, Hunter Biden—the Republicans are facing an investigation, based in reality, that likely will reflect badly on them. They want no part of it.

But it is going to be very difficult to stuff back into the bottle the genie of interest in what the heck went on during the Trump administration. Yesterday’s announcement by New York Attorney General Letitia James that her office’s investigation into the Trump Organization has become a criminal investigation sparked fireworks from the former president. Today he issued a long, rambling statement that rehashed all his complaints about, well, everything, but the centerpiece was James’s announcement. It was weird and unhinged, even for him, and suggested that he is very worried that there will be criminal charges forthcoming.

And today a filing from the Department of Justice showed that, under Biden, the department has found the parents of 54 more children, from whom they were separated at our southern border by the Trump administration in an attempt to stop refugees from entering the country. The previous administration separated at least 2800 children from their parents. Shortly after he took office, Biden created a task force in the Department of Homeland Security to reunite families. The parents of 391 migrant children have still not been found.