“Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.” — Mother Jones
When the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it said “things have changed dramatically” over the last 50 years. They were wrong.
Alabama’s population is roughly 2/3 white and 1/4 black. In 2010, Republicans won total control of its state government. They now hold every major statewide elective office, and supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Not a single one of these Republican officials and legislators is black.
In 2012, they enacted a redistricting plan that concentrated blacks into existing black-controlled (and Democratic-held) legislative districts. That plan is being challenged in the Supreme Court.
Already, a third of the black males in Alabama can’t vote because they’ve been convicted of a crime. Now, they’re taking steps to disenfranchise the remaining black voters. First, they passed a voter ID law requiring a driver’s license to vote. Then they closed the driver’s license offices in the black counties. Read that story here. And just to make sure poor blacks can’t vote, they also raised the driver’s license fee by 50%. Read that story here.
These are the fruits of Republican presidents appointing Republican judges who then uphold Republican laws saying, in effect, that only Republicans have the rights of citizens in the Republican-controlled parts of our country. Here we are, 50 years later, and the civil rights struggles have to be fought all over again.
Photos: Black voting in Alabama will soon be a thing of the past.
