Election 2012 Voter Suppression! or "I Got Them Jim Crow Blues"

There are  various Republican-dominated state legislatures from Texas to Pennsylvania engaged in promoting a passel of new laws  designed to disenfranchise as many young, minority-group and working-class voter as possible to ensure continued ascendancy of their party.  The voter identification laws have been challenged at the federal level by Attorney General Eric Holder and will likely face stiff court battles from citizens groups who will not take the disfranchisement of millions (an estimated 700,000 in Pennsylvania alone, and a million voters in Texas, the biggest states involved)  in their respective states lying down.

This goes beyond the sort of healthy rough-and-tumble politics we have had for generations in the United States.  This is a giant step backwards to a time when wealthy groups used racism and gender-hegemony  and xenophobia against immigrant groups to create a solution to a "problem"---the problem of a mature and open democracy. 

 

The "dangerously radical" idea put forth by many of the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian groups in early America was that an expanded voting franchise was the natural outgrowth of the great Enlightenment experiment in perfecting government. But to the elites there was  an inherent flaw--a flaw first grasped upon by elitist forces like the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton in the 1790's.  The "flaw" is that the "common man" is not to be trusted with the public business.

This elitism had to give way as Western Expansion gave more and more power to voting arenas far from the major cities of the eastern seaboard. The Jacksonian Democrats fought for reform of the franchise for all white men-- taking it as politically feasible.   Then came the issue of slavery and freedom and its containment that sent 650,000 men to their graves  and wounded and nearly destroyed a nation. There are many causes cited for the American Civil War, but one of them has to be that a  powerful agrarian-based culture in the South would not yield to the idea that slavery was a pernicious evil and they were on the wrong side of history to wish for its expansion. Eradication had already happened in nations as diverse from each other as Great Britain  and Russia.   

  To block the newly-freed slaves from voting after the war, the "Jim Crow Laws " were instituted.  A quick refresher course in them shows their long-lasting power in many states. 

"The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a “separate but equal” status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades."

from Wikipedia entry "Jim Crow Laws"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

    The established order of institutional racism and laws that extended to voter supression of poor whites with onerous literacy tests at the polls were all predicated by the notion that African-Americans and many upstart poor people of all stripes were easily swayed by "outside agitators"  (northerners, "radicals" of any stripe from liberal to Communist, union organizers, et al.)  Many of these "agitators" were citizens falsely tarnished as "unAmerican" or tarnished as being in league with Moscow or Greenwich Village, whichever suited the slanderer.

  

Voter suppression 1.0  (Old school)  

 

Also targeted were human rights advocacy groups like  the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancent of Colored People (NAACP), dissenting Christian organizations who organized boycotts and demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Rev William Sloane Coffin. One of the men who fought back in the 1950s and 60 against Jim Crow is Congressman John Lewis. He had been badly injured in a police riot by cops during a peaceful march from Montgomery to  Selma Alabama. 

"On March 7, 1965, 525 civil rights activists began a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Just outside Selma, heavily armed police and deputies broke up the march with billy clubs and tear gas, injuring sixty-five people and hospitalizing 17 in a melee that became known as "Bloody Sunday."

That same year President Lyndon Johnson got a Voting Rights Act thorough Congress and signed  the most signifigant piece of Civil Rights legislation for the first time in US history since the years directly after the end of the Civil War.  

Lewis stood his ground again in May of this year over a reintroduction of "states rights" skullduggery, and against a Congressman from his own state of Georgia who wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act.  

 voter suppression debate: t a         

 Most would say these are battles that have been fought and won and the "bad old days" are behind America.  But the straight linear path of progress occasionally gets caught for a spin.   

 

It's clear that Jim Crow 2.0 will not feature men in white robes and flaming torches burning the crops and houses of blacks people and immigrants.  But it is also clear that the aim  of these measures is the same---to protect the conservative status quo from the college students, poor seniors, non-Cuban Latinos (especially those in Texas where new Congressional Districts should help Hispanics gain representation), African Amerians and others  from voting.      

From the Associated Press:

The numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent. Thousands more votes could be in jeopardy for this November, when more states with larger populations are looking to have similar rules in place.

More than two dozen states have some form of ID requirement, and 11 of those passed new rules over the past two years largely at the urging of Republicans who say they want to prevent fraud.

Democrats and voting rights groups fear that ID laws could suppress votes among people who may not typically have a driver’s license, and disproportionately affect the elderly, poor and minorities. While the number of votes is a small percentage of the overall total, they have the potential to sway a close election. Remember that the 2000 presidential race was decided by a 537-vote margin in Florida.

A Republican leader in Pennsylvania said recently that the state’s new ID law would allow Romney to win the state over President Barack Obama.

Another Pennsylvania official estimated that state’s law could impact more than 750,000 voters there. As Mother Jones has recently reported, 11 percent of all adults of voting age currently don’t have a valid photo ID. Of them, blacks make up the largest group.

Adults without a valid photo ID

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

The fight goes on.  

 

 

Bill Moyers Essay: Thomas Jefferson's Betrayal

For decades, journalist, author, broadcaster and former Director of the Peace Corps under President Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, has been one of the best commentators on current affairs and American history. He has done interviews over a wide range of topics from his seminal series of programs on "The Power of Myth" with Professor Joseph Campbell to his round-table discussions on a variety of political, social and spiritual topics that grew out of his Public Broadcasting series, "Bill Moyers Journal".

Here is one of his latest essays, pointing up the success of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence as a benchmark of human liberty against the terrible institution of slavery which degraded and counterpointed the struggle for freedom in the United States for decades. In was a institution that Jefferson himself perpetuated, as did many of the Founding Fathers.

Not all the major Founding Fathers thought as Jefferson did. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton criticized Jefferson and his party for demanding freedom for themselves but not for blacks. Hamilton, a senior officer in the Revolutionary war who served directly under George Washington, urged that black men willing to fight for the revolutionary cause in the Continental Army be granted the right to freedom. As an adult Hamilton was opposed to slavery, but his views
on this, as well as his far-sighted need for a National Bank to boost manufacturing, did not survive the need to unify the 13 former colonies after the war.

"The existence of slavery makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason or experience."--Alexander Hamilton.


Although their views on slavery were not advanced by our standards, men like Hamilton and Franklin saw the contradictions of the peculiar institution and served in manumission groups to try and bring a gradual end to the "peculiar institution".

Bay Area News Pioneer Belva Davis--"Never In My Wildest Dreams"

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60's-70's and early 80's, I used to watch Belva Davis on television. She was  a television news anchor first on CBS Channel 5 (KPIX) and later on the main Public Broadcasting station in the Bay Area, KQED, which she hosted a nightly news program called "A Closer Look" and later a show called "This Week in Northern California."   She and the erudite Rollin Post were my favorite news people on the tube.    

I realized she was unique in being an African-American Woman on the television, but I didn't know  she was the only African American female anchor west of the Mississippi.   Or that her life was so interesting and so remote from the past I imagined.  Thanks to her fortitude and inner power to overcome the racism endemic in a high-profile business she did excellent work in documentaries and interviews and captured a lot of those times--which included riots in Berkeley over the Vietnam War, the rise and violence swirling and surrounding  the Black Panther movement, the Zebra and  Zodiac mass murders of the early 70's, the firing of radical UCLA Professor Angela Davis by the then-Governor Ronald Reagan,  the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974, the mass killings of 900 people in Guyana in November 1978 by the demonic Jim Jones and his People's Temple followers and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and America's first openly-Gay supervisor,  Harvey Milk, at the San Francisco City Hall that  very same month. 

Her memoir tells these stories as well as her own---a child raised by her aunt in Monroe, Louisiana--the same town that Black Panther Huey Newton came from--and her coming to California with her family when jobs in military plants opened up in World War II.  I know a lot of people have never heard of this lady, but I think at least the broad outlines of her life is worth hearing about.   And she's still working.

 Here is a introduction to Ms. Davis from the PBS News Hour .    

Ball of Confusion--The Temptations

Says it like it was, and still tells it much like it is.

The Temptations as a group had their own ball of confusion over personnel changes and artistic disputes, but this is one of their greatest hits with most of the original group on hand. This song was released in 1970 and hit #3 on the US Billboard Charts and #2 on the R&B charts that same year.

"From Wikipedia: Lead vocals by Dennis Edwards, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, and Melvin Franklin
Background vocals by Dennis Edwards, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Otis Williams
Written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong
Produced by Norman Whitfield.

It's Haley Barbour, Y'all! : Half-Governor, Half-Presidential Candidate, All-Racist

I keep thinking that somewhere along the way certain political folks in the Old South and other places will finally get it. What is the "it" I refer to?  Nothing less than the original sin of the United States--racism.

They need to get that it was a bad time in America when racism was institutionalized. That you can't sugar-coat that.  Can't pretend it wasn't hurtful and degrading and viscous and plain wrong on all levels.   

I keep thinking that the strained and pretzel-twisted il-logic of trying to minimize the brutal fact of slavery and later segregation will sink in for all major elected officials who happen to be white-skinned.  But, somehow, every few months somebody prominent makes an ass of himself and this causes me to seriously question how people can continue to think and speak like bigots like its still Jim Crow Days down South and nothing has changed in race relations. 

(to right: Barbour the Not-So Magnificent!)  

Is it some cultural blindness that effects people like Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi?  Read this short portion of a blog in today's "New York Times" and tell me "does this sound like an elected official in 2010"?     The original remarks about the governor's home town of Yazoo City were made to a reporter (Andrew Freguson)  from Britain's "Weekly Standard".  

  "In the magazine’s profile of the second-term governor, Mr. Barbour suggests that the 1960s — when people lost life and limb battling for equal rights for black citizens — were not a terribly big deal in Yazoo City. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. He heard Dr. King speak at the county fairgrounds in 1962 but can’t remember the speech. “We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do,” he said. “We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

Proving I suppose that the sex instinct in young Haley overrode the justice instinct. Not exactly Mr. Empathy is he?  Sure racism wasn't that bad, Haley.  For you!

"And the Citizens Councils were simply right-minded business leaders trying to achieve integration without violence. Thanks to the councils, he said, “we didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

The truth was of course that the "Citizen's Councils" were every bit on the same wave-length as the Klu Klux Klan. To pretend otherwise is to distort history. To show their true colors, here is some background and an example of what The Citizen's Councils were publishing in 1960 (courtesy of the Jackson, Tennessee Newspaper "The Sun", website.) 

**************************

The White Citizens' Council was born in Greenwood, Miss., shortly after the 1954-55 Brown vs. Board of Education decisions were rendered. Sister branches rapidly surfaced throughout Mississippi and other Southern states.

Leading citizens joined. The goal was to maintain segregation.

Tennessee's relatively ineffective version of the citizens' council was called the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, of which Madison County had a chapter. The group placed advertisements in The Sun in the 1960s in support of segregation. One was an editorial from another newspaper that said, "The Negro today is the best treated human being in the United States."

The Madison chapter also held at least one meeting covered by The Sun. According to the story, a Memphis attorney called for prosecuting Jackson's bus company for integrating its buses and called the 1954 school desegregation by the U.S. Supreme Court "a judicial monstrosity."

At the same meeting, according to the article, District Attorney David P. Murray called on the audience to "help maintain our Southern way of life" and added, "Let's fight for it to the bitter end." According to The Sun's story, 200 people attended the meeting, including a circuit judge, an American Legion commander and the sheriff of Haywood County.

Citizens' councils used economic and political pressure to achieve their ends. The election of Ross Barnett as governor of Mississippi, on the promise of defending the state's traditions - which meant white supremacy - was one display of the council's success.

Below are excerpts from a pamphlet from the Association of Citizens' Councils titled "Why Does Your Community Need a Citizens' Council?":

"Maybe your community has had no racial problems! This may be true; however, you may not have a fire, yet you maintain a fire department. You can depend on one thing: The NAACP (National Association for the Agitation of Colored People), aided by alien influences, bloc vote seeking politicians and left-wing do-gooders, will see that you have a problem in the near future.

"The Citizens' Council is the South's answer to the mongrelizers. We will not be integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries.

... We are certainly not ashamed of our traditions, our conservative beliefs, nor our segregated way of life."

Sources: The Jackson Sun; "History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement;" The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture

   

 ***********************************************************************

 

Speaking for myself, as just another member of the mongrel breed  of North American cur, I should state in fairness that Mr. Barbour has gone to his website to apologize for his remarks.  But the fact that he made them in the first place, and the fact that he holds a high position within a major political party, says a lot about how far we still have to go as a nation.

Make no mistake: I am NOT singling out whites in the state of Mississippi or the Old South for that matter. Racism is still coiled up like a rattlesnake in every state in the Union.  But I sincerely hope that the Republican voters of the 2012 Primaries lose this guy in the weeds someplace.

But I'm not sure:  many GOP voters had parents and grandparents who were Democrats before men like Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young and women like Rosa Parks organized the groundwork that led to the modern Civil Rights Era.  Then they became Republicans, feeling that their ultra-conservative traditions were going to be taken away, as if granting rights to another group diminished theirs. It's tortured logic, of course, but some people were willing to kill for it.  

This is America's great sin, North and South, Republican and Democrat.  And that sin lives on, if not in the law at least in the spirit of many hearts and minds. 

 

 Otherwise how could Haley Barbour ever have gone as far as he has?  

Nina Simone--My Baby Just Cares For Me" and "If You Knew"

This song came out first in 1958, and had to wait almost forty years to become a top-ten hit for "The High Priestess of Soul" (Reaching Number #5 in Britain after it was used in a television commercial for Chanel.) 

 I first heard it in 1985, while I was in a hotel packing for a trip home. (It's not often you remember hearing a song for the first time.)   It was so good that when I got home I immediately got a album with this beguiling vocal and arrangement. 

 Nina Simone is a hard artist to categorize---in addition to jazz and blues, she also recorded covers of pop songs like The Animals Number One hit from 1964, "The House of the Rising Sun", The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun"  and The Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody".  

She also recorded social protest songs,  African and American folk music, and a multitude of original compositions. 

Born in North Carolina,  her earliest albums were recorded in New York City, where he began her career despite her mother's objection that she was singing "the devil's music".  She was barred from training at the prestigious Curtis Institute because of her race, but was accepted to The Julliard School of Music in New York City in the mid-1950's.  Her first albums were not as successful, beyond her cover of a "Porgy and Bess" song, so she sold her rights to many of the songs, including "My Baby Just Cares for Me", a 1928 Harry Warren tune written for a Broadway show called "Whopee".  Ironically, the original tune was performed by white  comedian and singer Eddie Cantor, who did the song "corked up" (in black-face, in the minstrel tradition offensive to black Americans.) 

Like many other African-American artists and intellectuals,   Ms. Simone went into voluntary exile to protest racial and other social and foreign policy matters. (First to Barbados and then France in the early Seventies.)  She was later to return to America in the 1990's to receive the accolades and awards she richly deserved.  She was something of an eccentric performer and had an uneasy relationship with some audiences, some people finding her haughty and regal in bearing.  Later in her career she was apparently more friendly and willing to share anecdotes about her life with devoted fans.   

Unfortunately, she never received any money directly from the revival of this song because she (or her manager) had sold her royalties for a few thousand dollars in the early 60's.           

   I love Ms. Simone's vocal here, of course, and the piano bridge in the middle is nothing short of fantastic. The claymation video was produced by  Aardman Animations and directed by Peter Lord.

 .

And here's the lady herself, performing "If You Knew " at Ronnie Scott's in London:

70th Anniversay of the Start of World War Two

Start:	Sep 3, '09 11:00p
End:	Sep 4, '09
Location:	Britain, France, Germany, for starters

Or the restart of the First World War after a 21 years, postponed from October, 1938, by a false sense of "peace in our time" thanks to the myopic PM Chamberlain. (Below: from the 1970s documentary "The World at War", narrated by Laurence Olivier.)

Who Needs al-Queda ? American Nazi On Museum Rampage

An 88-year old neo-Nazi, James Von Brunn, is expected to live after he, according to witnesses and the FBI, murdered a security guard in cold blood.  The younger man was trying to help him through the door when the aged hate-monger shot him in the heart. 

The rise of hate groups in the USA is quite disturbing---a 50 percent increase in the last few years  to over 900 identified hate groups.  As Bob Herbert of the New York Times pointed out in a recent editorial, the election of Barack Obama, and the rise of former "minority groups" in prominence and voting strength and the bad economy will no doubt continue to add to the ranks of the white, male, dumb and dangerous fringe of far-right politics.   

Von Brunn, a blogger who denied the Holocaust and claimed "the best gentiles" were all being murdered as part of some conspiracy, was also a donor to a group called American Friends of the British National Party, a fascist group that recently won a seat in the European Union elections. (The group, thankfully, was reported disbanded in 2001.  Which leaves 900 more groups that could disband and not be missed.)     

World War II: Japanese-American Internment Camps

Download at: http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/internment/ for a larger version. A video about Japanese-Americans interned by the government during World War II. (Over 110,000 men, women and children were effected.)

Louis Armstrong - Potato Head Blues - Hot Jazz

One of the great American music groups came together to record at Chicago Okeh Records in Chicago several times between 1925 and 1928. Louis Armstrong's "Hot Five" and "Hot Seven" recordings were some of the most popular jazz recordings in their time and continue to inspire music lovers.


Armstrong (at the center of the photo below) is credited with being the first great jazz improviser; his stunning trumpet solos seems to be timeless. He got his start in New Orleans of course, growing up in a section of "The Crescent City" so bad it was known as "The Battlefield." Eventually he played the riverboats that came up and down the Mississippi River with friend and mentor King Oliver .King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band also played river boats along the Ohio.

It was in the heartland of America--Richmond, Indiana--that "Satchmo" di his first recordings with the King Oliver Band in 1922-3. Ironically, and dangerously, those first recordings were made in a part of Indiana that was the epicenter of the racist Klu Klux Klan. As it was the only recording studio available to the group they had to sneak into the town and get out by nightfall, with Armstrong and the other group members relying on local friends for their accommodations in that rural section of the state.

Not all whites, of course, were bigots. It was also in nearby Iowa that Armstrong met and befriended a German-American horn man named Bismarck "Bix" Biederbecke. He was also a great improviser, his instrument being the coronet, and their relationship and respect for one another continued until Bix's early death from alcohol poisoning and pneumonia in 1931.


The recordings done by the "Hot Five" group--which also included "West End Blues", "Gut Bucket Blues", "I'm Gonna Get Ya", "Heebie Jeebies", "Basin Street Blues", et al, included the pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, (Louis' second wife) , on piano, with the legendary Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Kid Ory on trombone. This recording was made by the "Hot Seven" group, which added two extra horn men, on May 10, 1927.


Two points of interest about the "blues" song:
The flamboyant stage and screen actress Tallulah Bankhead said that "she played it in her dressing room every day during intermission while she appeared on Broadway for the invigorating effect it gave her."

"In Woody Allen's 1979 film, Manhattan, the Allen character lists Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues" as one of the reasons that life is worth living."

It certainly is to me also.

For more info and music by this group, see the link below:

http://www.redhotjazz.com/hot5.html

Cop Shooting in Bay Area Stirs Racial Divide

It happened on New Year's Eve, just three weeks before the Barack Obama Inaugural; a white police officer drew his gun and shot an already arrested and subdued black man dead in Oakland, California.   

 In this time of apparent progress toward a less racially tense society, this is reminiscent of the Rodney King beating back in Los Angeles in 1992 and other more lethel encounters between police and black suspects in Cincinnati, Detroit and other American cities.  One study indicated a black suspect apprehended or detained by police is eight times more likely to be shot and killed than a white suspect.

   The shooting was caught by bystanders on cell phone cameras who were watching the police dealing with a alleged  disturbance involving several young African-American men.   The victim, 22 year-old Oscar Grant (pictured above), a young father,  was surrounded by a passel of BART Transit Cops from  the train platform and was on the ground when killed.

It has since sparked outrage both in public meetings, on the Internet and the mainstream media, and has led to peaceful protests at Oakland City Hall as well as rioting and breaking windows and liting fires by splinter protesters in  downtown Oakland who went more militant after the demonstration ended.    

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "The unarmed man killed by former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle on an Oakland train platform early New Year's Day put up a brief struggle with officers but had been restrained and had both arms behind him when he was shot in the back, police investigators said."

Mehserle--a two year veteran of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Force--was arrested today, two weeks after the crime,  by the District Attorney in Oakland and Alameda County.  He is being extradited back to California from Nevada.  He faces a murder charge.

  

Although his lawyers have not mounted a defense as yet, the intial reason reportedly given by Mehserle was that he only meant to use his "taser" (or stun gun) on the victim.  Instead, he mistook his automatic pistol for the taser.  The taser weapon issued to BART cops has yellow markings and weighs 8-9 ounces.  The automatic pistol he mistook for the stun gun has no yelllow markings and weighs 22-24 ounces.  

 

Anybody could make a mistake, some might say,but this policeman wasn't trained to be "anybody".  He was trained to be able to use judgement to prevent things like this from happening. He had training for five months in a police academy to know how to react to stress, and he could and should  have been weeded out by his instructors if he failed the psychological battery of tests to determine his stress-coping skills. 

 

 And was not in a life threatening situation: Mehsehle had a suspect on the ground and he was surrounded by fellow officers.  The video tape makes that clear:

 

 

 

Perhaps it is some sign of progress that the man who did the shooting faces murder charges.  But what if this had occured in a less public place than a transit station and no civilian-operated cameras  had been available?  Might this have gone down as a necessary use of force, protected by the old police code of the "Thin Blue Line"?  We will never know, but suffice to say a new Presidential Election result and a new year have not abated old racial tensions for America.