The Through Line: 1880, 1965, 2013
Professor Richardson reveals the historical narrative underlying the facts beneath the indictment of former President Trump; her post for today is linked below. I’ve read several lengthy accounts of this narrative, notably those written by David Blight and Eric Foner in recent books, but this one gets it all down in concise and clear terms. Please share it far and wide.
James Garfield, who was the target of an assassin’s bullet on July 2, 1881, was all that stood between the idea of democracy that animated the Union Army and the slave power with its stubborn refusal to restructure based on three new Amendments designed to protect the civil rights of freed slaves, especially the right to vote. With his death the door to the Ku Klux Klan and the supremacy of White men at the ballot box opened wider.
On March 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson spoke to Congress “for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy” in his successful attempt to enact the Voting Rights Act, which had an immediate impact on registration and voting among Black people in the former Confederate states.
In June, 2013, the Supreme Court decided to overturn a crucial element in the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. Soon after the landmark ruling, Texas led by Republican state Attorney General Greg Abbot declared Texas would implement its voter ID law. The nine states, former Confederate states, which had been required to submit any plans to change election laws for federal approval, were free to deny Black voters the ballot box once again as if James Garfield had not been assassinated and Martin Luther King had not marched in Selma.
President Donald John Trump, elected in 2016 just three years after the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, is under indictment for attempting to overthrow the Black vote in those states sympathetic to the ancestors of the slave power, and his supporters are working mightily to rewrite history (see Florida). Professor Richardson’s post is credible, clear, and concise. As a reading teacher I’m having trouble coming up with an instructional strategy that might effectively produce a competent reading of it among the MAGA cult. But independent voters might take a lesson from it. Share it. Circulate it.