-Voter suppression never went away.
It evolved.
-They say to me, "Well, we thought we had done away
with poll taxes.
We thought we had done away with intimidation".
We have all kinds of obstacles been placed in our way.
It's the same game, with a different name.
-To understand how we got here, historian Carol Anderson says,
we first need to understand white rage.
-White rage is not how we often think about it.
We often think of rage as being this kind of violent
backlash or uproar.
We know that there's something wrong with violence
that takes down a child.
We know that something is wrong with the violence
that six dogs on nonviolent protesters in Birmingham.
We know something's wrong with that.
But the kinds of quiet policies that led to that moment,
it takes us a long time to recognize
that the policies themselves are predicated
on white supremacy and exclusion.
-Anderson says the trigger for white rage is Black advancement.
For each advancement Blacks made for voting rights,
there was an opposite reaction of white rage.
-That was the case in Mississippi after the passage
of the Fifteenth Amendment,
which gave the right to vote to freed Black men.
-'Cause Mississippi said, "How do we write a law
saying we don't want Black people to vote
without writing a law that says explicitly,
'We don't want Black people to vote'"?
Because the Fifteenth Amendment said you can't write a law
that's that explicit.
What Mississippi did was Mississippi said,
"We will take the societally imposed conditions
on African Americans
and use those conditions as the access to the ballot box".
-Mississippi passed a new state constitution that required
every citizen to pay a poll tax, pass a literacy test,
and, in some cases meet a property requirement.
At the time, Black people were less
than 30 years out of slavery,
when they earned no money and were blocked from reading.
The Mississippi Plan of 1890
was applied equally to Black and white voters,
but white men could get around the barriers
with so-called grandfather clauses.
If they or relative had voted before the Civil War ended,
they could skip the poll tax or literacy test.
A Mississippi governor later
admitted the provisions had no other purpose
than to eliminate Blacks from politics.
That's how a blueprint to circumvent
the Fifteenth Amendment was created
and other states followed Mississippi's lead.
In the Jim Crow era,
Black voters were often met by violence.
Civil rights workers who helped other African Americans
to vote were shot, lynched,
or violently harassed by vigilantes and police.
And, even though the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920
to give women the right to vote, by 1940,
only 3% of eligible African Americans in the South
were registered to vote.
-The civil rights movement is one of those moments
in American history
where the US feels a depth of pride because it overcame.
It overcame something as villainous as Jim Crow.
And it took a lot of bodies,
it took this kind of moral power of the nonviolent movement.
It took grassroots organization and mobilized it.
It took Martin Luther King.
This hard-earned legislative victory of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
-The Voting Rights Act was hailed as the defining
civil rights legislation of its time.
It was especially important because it had an enforcement
mechanism the Fifteenth Amendment lacked.
Under Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA,
states with a history of discriminatory voting laws
now needed federal approval or preclearance
to change their election laws.
This gave the Justice Department and federal courts in DC power
to block discriminatory election laws.
Its impact was profound.
In Mississippi, alone, voter turnout among Blacks
increased from 6% in 1964 to 59% in 1969.
By then, President Lyndon B Johnson
had established anti-poverty programs to curb inequality.
He created Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and poor
and enacted education and housing reforms.
By 1966, 85% of whites said
"the pace of civil rights progress was too fast".
And, by the 1968 presidential election,
white resentment had coalesced into the Southern strategy.
-The Southern strategy: bringing Democrats
and disaffected whites into the Republican Party.
-The Southern strategy bolstered racist policies and practices
without using racist language.
Anderson says this applied to voter suppression as well.
-Voter suppression, is really based on the Mississippi Plan
of 1890, where you can't say,
"We don't want Black people to vote," but that's the intent.
That's been a key element in the policy of,
now, the Republican Party.
I would say another key element
in policy was uttered by Paul Weyrich.
-They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote.
Elections are not won by a majority of people.
They never have been, from the beginning of our country,
and they are not now.
As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections,
quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.
-To understand the language of voter fraud and voter
suppression that's going on now, that's the framework.
That our leverage, our power,
increases when the voting populace is constrained.
-When President Ford signed the reauthorization
of the Voting Rights Act in 1975,
the scope of the bill was expanded to protect Latino,
Native American, and Asian voters
by requiring bilingual elections.
Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act
in 1982, 1992, and 2006.
The 2006 renewal included 15,000 pages of evidence
of ongoing discrimination in voting.
Congress said there was progress
in eliminating first-generation barriers to voting,
but that second-generation barriers had persisted.
-Yes, we have made some progress.
We have come a distance.
We are no longer met with bullwhips, fire hoses,
and violence when we attempt to register and vote.
But the sad fact is, the sad truth is,
discrimination still exists!
-Second-generation barriers were laws
that diluted the political power of minorities at the polls
and included things like racial gerrymandering,
poll closures, voter ID laws,
and cutting down early voting and same-day voter registration.
On a bipartisan basis, the Voting Rights Act
was reauthorized for 25 years.
Two years later, in 2008,
America elected its first Black president.
-The election of Barack Obama is one in the latest string
of the advancement of Black folk
that leads to this incredible white rage.
-In 2010, conservative Tea Party candidates
swelled within the Republican Party.
From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions
were introduced in 49 states,
many of which were struck down by the Department of Justice.
Anderson says the election, and then reelection,
of America's first Black president
was a factor behind the voting restrictions.
-His advancement was the penultimate advancement
and, therefore, was the penultimate affront.
I'm not surprised, then, that, in his second term,
the US Supreme Court ruled, in Shelby County v Holder,
that the Voting Rights Act, particularly Section 4,
which is what they call the preclearance provision,
US Supreme Court gutted that.
-The Shelby ruling released nine states and several counties
from federal oversight and preclearance
in changing their election laws.
-Southern states reacted swiftly.
-Two hours after the Shelby County v Holder decision,
Texas implemented its racist voter ID law.
-Two months later, North Carolina enacted HB589,
a bill that required strict photo ID requirements,
eliminated same-day voter registration,
and limited early voting.
The US Court of Appeals later struck down the law,
saying that it targeted African Americans
with almost surgical precision.
Since the Shelby ruling, at least 23 states have enacted
newly restrictive statewide voter laws,
such as voter roll purges, poll closures,
and strict voter ID laws.
This November, the Republican National Committee
and Trump campaign are planning to fly to polling locations,
with poll watchers, claiming to stop widespread voter fraud.
A key Trump advisor is heard describing
the multimillion dollar plan in this leaked audio.
-Right, traditionally, it's always been Republicans
suppressing votes in places.
Let's start protecting our voters, right?
We know where they are now.
We know where they are.
They're all in one part of the state.
And their voters are all in one part of the state.
So let's start playing offense a little bit.
And that's what you're gonna see in 2020.
It's gonna be markedly different.
It's gonna be a much bigger program,
much more aggressive program, much better-funded program.
And we're gonna need all the help we can get.
-Since the passing of Congressman John Lewis,
the Senate has come under pressure to approve
a bill to restore Voting Rights
Act protections struck down by the Supreme Court.
When the bill passed the House in 2019,
54 years after Lewis walked across the Edmund Pettus
Bridge in Selma, he said this.
-The vote is the most powerful, nonviolent instrument or tool
we have in a democratic society
and people should be able to use it.
-We understand that the right to vote
is foundational and bedrock in democracy.
People are asking themselves, "How did we get here"?
-Voter suppression never went away.
It evolved.
Left unchecked, it will continue to spread.