Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Welcome to this live taping. We are so very excited to be joined this evening by the incredible Professor Carol Anderson. She is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University. And she’s the author of five fabulous books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, and this year’s book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. And Joanne and I figured that if we are going to go with guests, we ought to start with the best. So we picked Carol. Thank you so much for being here with us, Carol.

Carol Anderson:

Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Joanne Freeman:

Likewise, we have been so looking forward to this. What we want to talk about today, in a sense, won’t be surprising, and that is voting rights and voting suppression. Obviously, the events of this past week have made this almost an unavoidable topic. It is always a crucially important topic. But now we’re looking at or reliving through even better, a moment when what’s going to happen with voting rights matters a lot and potentially in an immediate sense.

And I’ll note, I said voting rights and voting suppression because I wanted to start at the outset by making it clear that those are two different things. I think they’re getting blurred together in the conversation right now. We have, as American citizens, voting rights. What we’re looking at right now is attempts to suppress them. So what we’re going to do is what we love to do at Now & Then, and that is give you a little historical context for what we’re talking about for voting rights, voting suppression, and then circle back at the end to talk a little bit about what they tell us about today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

First of all, Joanne, can we start by having you set out for us the idea of why voting is important? And why does it matter so much in our democracy to go ahead and have a voice?

Joanne Freeman:

I guess there are two important things to think about when we’re talking about voting and the founding period and thoughts about voting, and that is, from the very beginning, there were two things in conflict. And I’m going to sum them up in a spiffy way that will make them very easy to remember. The two things in conflict were principles and interests. And by principles, I mean, the ideas that really underlay aspects of the founding, they’re set out in our first founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which I will read because this gives me an excuse to read it.

It says within the declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And here’s the important passage, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That’s the important phrase.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, and I want to stop you there for a minute because that one really jumps out. They’re essentially saying that the only way a government can be legitimate is not because it is hereditary or based in a certain religion or based in a certain tradition, but rather, it has to be justified by the fact people consent to it. That’s such a huge deal.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a huge deal conceptually. But as we’re going to see today, it’s a huge deal to figure out how that works, and whose consent is being asked.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, I was going to say it’s a ducky idea. But how do you actually make it work?

Joanne Freeman:

That’s a very Heather word, ducky. It totally is. It’s something you would say. But yeah, how does it work? And who is it working for and who is it not working for? And that’s the other half of the equation I wanted to throw in about the founding era. And that’s the interests half. So on the one hand, you have these principles, the idea of consent of the governed, which is an idea that matters profoundly. On the other hand, from the very beginning, you have interests, interests of all kinds, interests even from the White male, largely elite folk who were creating the government and whose vote were the ones that counted at that point. Different people, different interests, and their actions are shaping and sometimes repressing whose consent is being asked for and how that consent is being acquired.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So when you say the word interests, I hear a group of people who want certain things that benefit them alone, and that that principle of the consent of the governed is excellent. But if you feel like the governed are going to disagree with what your interest wants, you’ve got a conflict between this idea of the consent of the governed and your interest.

Joanne Freeman:

And it points to something that’s pretty fundamental about our government, which is there are a lot of slippery areas within the constitution and the founding of our government, the whole idea of federalism, what the states have, what does the national government control, all of that is deliberate slipperiness for a variety of reasons to enable this to get the constitution to get passed so it wouldn’t terrify and overwhelm people with it being hypernational, but that slipperiness that on some occasions lets the constitution and the government function so well. On other occasions, that’s a vulnerability. And that leaves a lot of space for things to be taken advantage of by people who have their own interests.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So we get this concept of the idea that we have the consent of the governed, and so the framers of the constitution go out and they go around the country and they hand ballots to every man, every woman across the country. And we are real good there with everybody consenting, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Carol’s face. It’s priceless.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Carol, you should know that I tease Joanne a lot. So I thought I’d set her off with that, and I knew I’d set you off.

Carol Anderson:

Right. And I lost my poker face at 31.

Joanne Freeman:

I think poker faces are out of the question here. I think you can toss the poker face out the door for the next hour.

Carol Anderson:

It’s gone. It’s gone.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So, literally, how does that work? Because the whole idea is, do we have the consent of the governed? And then whom do they let vote?

Joanne Freeman:

People who have a certain amount of property, White men who have a certain amount of property. The idea being, if you’re literally invested in your community, if you have a certain amount of wealth, you’re not going to be controlled by others, that your will be your own. But that is, obviously, White men of property that we’re talking about. Now, it is true that for a brief period in New Jersey, women had the vote. And I was thinking before this about mentioning that and for the Hamilton people out there, everything’s legal in New Jersey.

I know some of you are thinking about that line, but that actually is a great example of the theme we’re talking about. On the one hand, when you look at that, it seems, wow! This looks like some fundamental right being extended. Well, not really. It is true that it was deliberate and that when New Jersey rewrote its Constitution, they deliberately talked about he and she. So it’s not an accident. On the other hand, part of why it happened was because having women vote would help one side or the other side in elections. So it wasn’t a great gift. It was something that served some interests.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m sorry. I just have to ask, why did the women lose the vote, Joanne?

Joanne Freeman:

It was no longer useful for them to vote.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, I’m laughing just because the women tended to vote for the Federalist Party and the Jeffersonians didn’t like him. And whenever I get to have a shot at Thomas Jefferson, I always like to take it.

Joanne Freeman:

I should have thought ahead of time. I should just write on my computer screen Jefferson joke and just wait for you to get to it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Actually, we should …

Joanne Freeman:

And then harrumph because …

Heather Cox Richardson:

We should do a whole show of forcing me to say good things about Jefferson. But let me just ask you one thing before we go on into how this plays out is, do you think it’s fair to say that the White propertied overwhelmingly men in those early years themselves constituted an interest?

Joanne Freeman:

I would say yes. If you’re talking about an interest, as a group of people, a defined group of people with very clear boundaries and very clear boundaries that keep people out and they are doing things to serve themselves and really deliberately and extremely not to serve others in a blatant kind of a way, how could you not say that that’s an interest group? They are a group of people who are serving their interests at the expense of the interests of others.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay, I want to come back to that one for sure.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, I could tell.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I feel like we’re playing Jeopardy here because I’m like, answer questions that I want to know the answer to. So if that’s the case then, so literally, White propertied men vote.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And going forward then, we have this vision of the idea that White propertied men are the centerpiece of American democracy, even though they might actually simply just constitute an interest.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it is true, they might be an interest, but they also control pretty much everything, White men of certain means and actually White men even without means. One of the things that happens in the first half of the 19th century is that the property requirement is lessened so that more people, more White men can get the vote. But the assumption is that that’s the default. White men are the default. That’s the norm. They’re the people in power. And so, we don’t think of that as an interest group at all. But we assume that that’s the us. Because for so long, that has been the us.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Although they don’t actually make up in any way a majority of the people in the country.

Joanne Freeman:

Correct.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay, so that’s really interesting because I think that that changes. And, Carol, you may want to correct me on this. But doesn’t this change during the Civil War and after the Civil War, especially after the war, when the President Andrew Johnson lets in so many former confederates under presidential pardons. So that by the end of 1865, he has pardoned all but about 1500 of the leading confederates. And the Congress has to do a calculation, and they have to say, okay, before the Civil War, in fact, white propertied men were the ideal citizens.

They were exactly who should have been constituting the voting base of the country. But there’s a little problem, because they’re the exact people who tried to destroy the country. And so, if they’re going to vote, we need to go ahead and broaden the voting base so that we actually can get a series of voters who care enough about the country to, oh, I don’t know, preserve it. And so, we get the 14th Amendment of the Constitution that says, yes, indeed, we’re going to overturn the decision of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, where the Supreme Court said that Black Americans couldn’t be citizens.

We’re going to say, of course, they are citizens. And then when they vote in 1868, and the state of Georgia goes ahead and tosses out all its Black state legislators saying that the state constitution says that you can’t hold an office if you’re African American. Then we get the 15th Amendment to the Constitution saying, yes, you can do that. Yes, in fact, African Americans can hold office, can vote and the congressional debates said that that also implied that you could hold office as well. And it gives the federal government power to enforce those two amendments to the constitution.

Carol Anderson:

Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So we’re good, we’re done. The podcast is over.

Carol Anderson:

Oh. No, we’re not done. We are so not done. In other words, we are done. Because what happens, and you notice when I talk about in White Rage, is that you’ve got this massive backlash against this access to political power for Black men. And it’s an incredible political power. And Congress, the Radical Republicans had put that power in the hands of Black folks because they thought, look, we can’t have our army there in the south the entire time.

But if politicians have to be responsive to the needs of the electorate, and that electorate includes Black people, then Black people will be able to protect themselves because of the power of the vote. Well, it’s not like White men who were running for office didn’t realize this. And you have this massive backlash happening. You have incredible violence raining down on the Black community for trying to vote. You also have the US Supreme Court weighing in, undermining and undercutting the 14th and 15th Amendments with a series of decisions that are just absolutely horrific and not based in reality.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So walk us through how that vote gets suppressed, because the 14th and 15th Amendments, especially the 15th say, the Black lack people can vote, right?

Carol Anderson:

Yeah, so the 15th Amendment says the state shall not abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. And so, what you then see is that you have the Southern Democrats looking up saying, okay, fine, we don’t want Black folks to vote, but we can’t write a law saying we don’t want Black folks to vote. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to use the legacies of slavery as the access to the ballot box. And that’s how we’re going to stop Black people from voting. And we’re going to make it all sound reasonable and legitimate.

And so, you have this language about we’ve got this massive rampant voter fraud, we’ve got to clean up corruption at the ballot box. So we’ve got to change our voting laws to make sure that we enhance that. And the way that we do that is with the poll tax, because democracy is expensive. Having all of these elections, you have to have people taking the ballots, you have to have people counting the ballots, that costs. And if you really believed in democracy, you would be willing to pay a small fee in order to ensure that that democracy works smoothly.

So you see how it flips the script and it puts the operation of free and fair elections on the backs of the individual and not on the state itself. But also, what seems so innocuous, this poll tax, this small nominal fee, because of slavery, the endemic poverty in the black community is profound, and what that small nominal fee meant, like for Mississippi came to 2% to 6% of a Mississippi farm families annual income. Imagine paying 2% to 6% of your annual income to be able to vote.

Again, it sounds reasonable on a surface. Underneath it, it is just like a nasty snarling bag of worms. It is just, eek. The same with the literacy test, again, sounding reasonable. We believe that a good electorate knows our values, knows our laws. And so, we don’t think it’s too much to ask to have them read and interpret a section of our Constitution, so they know what our founding principles are. Well, when you have systematically denied education and literacy for hundreds of years to Black people and then you have after the Civil War, you have significantly underfunded Black education.

The issue of literacy means that you’re going right at one of the key legacies of slavery. And so, saying, well, we don’t think it’s too much to ask when the state is not providing real literacy to its citizenry, it is a lot to ask. And so, then you get this kind of the manipulation of the literacy test as well, so that whites would only have to read a small passage, a real simple one, almost like reading the 10 commandments, thou shalt not kill. Whereas African Americans would have to read a large passage of the Constitution.

I mean, it just … Or they would get the question, how many bubbles in a bar of soap? So when you have the status asking you an unanswerable question, and that an answerable question is your access to the ballot box, it is massive voter suppression, massive disenfranchisement.

Joanne Freeman:

So it’s a mask of patriotism and purity being draped over your bag of worms, right?

Carol Anderson:

Yes, yes, yes.

Joanne Freeman:

And it’s hard, that mask, look how pure and patriotic it looks, how dare you say fill in the blank? And thus, there’s victimization attached to that too, that if you do something to that mask, you’re potentially victimizing the people who put it there.

Carol Anderson:

There was the sense of being they could not believe that they were being challenged on this. And you had the complicity of the US Supreme Court in the 1898 Williams decision that said that the poll tax and the literacy test did not violate the 15th Amendment because everybody had to pay the poll tax and everybody had to read. So how could this be a violation of the 15th Amendment? When in fact, it was. Yes, Heather.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So can I ask you, did poor White farmers have to pay the poll tax or did they get waivers?

Carol Anderson:

Ah, so what they did for poor whites, and this was South Carolina’s ingenious piece, so in order to get poor whites, because poor whites were absolutely sure that what the rich bourbon class was trying to do was to disenfranchise them as well. And so, they said, no, no, no, we’re going to have the grandfather clause for you. So the grandfather clause says, if your grandfather could vote before 1867, you too have the vote.

Now, because the enslaved could not vote and Black people basically could not vote prior to 1867, which was the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that said Black men can vote, that was the cut off that said, this is about allowing whites, poor whites, to be able to vote. And it gave them the out that if their grandfather had voted, they really didn’t have to do the poll tax. And they really didn’t have to do the literacy tests, because they were part of the few, the proud whites.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So in 1890, tell us about the … Okay, don’t have to go any further than that. But I do want to develop the idea in part here that the laws themselves are not technically … No, not even … They’re not based in race. They look like they are completely reasonable, attempts to keep the country pure. And I mean pure in terms of those principles Joanne was talking about, and yet the effect …

Joanne Freeman:

They’re carried out racially.

Carol Anderson:

Yeah, right. It is by the pricking of my thumb something wicked this way comes. So when you look at the Mississippi plan of 1890 where the state of Mississippi was revising its constitution to disfranchise its Black population. This is about ending corruption. Our elections haven’t been free and fair because we have this corruption happening, we have this fraud happening. Now, JJ Chrisman who was a judge and one of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Mississippi, he said, “Look, we haven’t had a free and fair election since 1875 because we have been stuffing the ballot box, we have been committing violence, we’ve been committing all kinds of fraud just to keep white folks in power.

It has done so much damage that we are looking at moral rot right now.” So the message is not to stop this mess. But the message is, if we remove Black people from the electorate, then whites won’t have to cheat anymore and we can have free and fair elections. And so, that becomes the framework for this massive disenfranchisement that is happening in the Mississippi plan of 1890.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I want to throw in here that the idea of corruption is not … It is occasionally, but it’s not usually the idea that somebody is taking a bribe. It’s the idea that if you let Black people vote or in the North, poor immigrants, what they’re going to do is they’re going to vote for leaders who are going to put in place policies that cost tax dollars. And the idea is that because they’re poor themselves, they won’t have to pay those taxes. And because they won’t have to pay those taxes, that this is essentially a redistribution of wealth, that is socialism.

So it’s a corrupt system in which an interest, one of Joanne’s interests, is using the government in order to go ahead and get itself something from everybody else. So that corruption is not literally about bribery, although they’ve sometimes accused people of bribery, it is literally a corruption of democracy. Because those people, the people on the ground are going to vote for leaders who are going to promise some schools and hospitals and roads and all kinds of things they’re going to have to be paid for by tax levies, which are going to be paid for by people of wealth. So there is, after 1890, an attempt really to stop the voting, not only among Black people in the south, but also among immigrants in the north.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s one example of something that I think all three of us think about and write about, and that is, and we’ve talked about it before here on Now & Then, the importance of words and how they’re used and what they’re useful for. Corruption is a loaded word. It’s a shorthand word. And it can be really effective. It is long term effective in American politics in one way or another, all the way back to the dawn of the Republic. But it’s a useful word. It goes back to what we were talking about before, Carol, about this mask of patriotism and purity. It’s part of the mask, but it’s being used in a really distinctive way.

Carol Anderson:

Absolutely. And it’s being used, as Heather was laying out, to define, basically, the unwashed masses, those who would make claims upon the resources of this nation as if they have no right to the resources of this nation. One of the things that was driving the Mississippi plan of 1890 was that you had more registered African Americans than you had registered whites in Mississippi to vote, and that poor blacks and poor whites were joining together. This is the era of the third party, of the populists, of the Farmers’ Alliance.

And they were joining together and they were electing representatives who weren’t about, how wealthy can I get? They were about, how do we make the system more fair? How do we begin to lower the power of the railroads in the way that the railroads and the banks are strangling the financial wherewithal of poor farmers? How do we fix this system so that it is more equitable? And it was that that scared, and I’m going to use the scholarly term here, bejeebers, out of the political class in Mississippi and they worked …

Joanne Freeman:

I was looking for a pen so I can write down bejeeber.

Carol Anderson:

Right. And so, they were … I mean, it was like a Scooby Doo moment. I mean, it was, rrrrr, Shaggy. How do we stop this? And the Mississippi plan of 1890 was the way to do it. And then when the Supreme Court said that the poll tax and the literacy tests were just fine and did not violate the Constitution, you saw this thing metastasize throughout the south. And you saw this massive disenfranchisement in this era of Jim Crow.

Joanne Freeman:

Summing up of what you’re talking about here, if we were going to create a recipe of voter suppression in this period, you talked about poll taxes, you talked about literacy tests. Let’s list the many ways in which in this period voting was suppressed for Black people.

Carol Anderson:

Hoo. So, yes, poll taxes, literacy tests, you had the good character clause, where you had to have respectable whites in the community vouch for you as you try to register to vote. You had the understanding clause, which said that not only could you read the Constitution, but you could interpret it to the liking of the registrar. So you have a couple of things happening there. So that one in the south, over 50% of Black adults over the age of 25 had less than five years of Jim Crow education by the time we get to 1940.

More than 50% of states like Louisiana and South Carolina, it was over 60% of Black adults with less than five years of Jim Crow education. Imagine telling them to read and interpret as if they had a Harvard J.D., the Constitution. But that was the standard that was being set here. You also had just the violence, the violence that was raining down on Black people as they tried to vote. You had towns wiped out like a koi Florida, where Black people tried to vote in 1920 after the 19th Amendment.

And Black women were trying to register to vote to be able to cast their vote because women now have the ballot, women now have the right to vote. Ah-uh. Black women did not have that right. So you had these measures and you had the White primary because it was the solid democratic South. Whoever won the Democratic primary was going to be the one who was going to win the general election. So with the White primary, you had language that said, only whites could vote in the Democratic primary.

And so, this was a way, again, of carving out the electorate so that you could get this this small base of folks who believed in your interests are the only ones voting for you. And it would just replicate itself. And so, the senators and those congressmen, because of the seniority rules, move themselves up the ladder in Congress and become the chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of the Judiciary Committee. So they’re sitting on top of the legislation trying to come through to have the federal government have the power to break these laws that are strangling the right to vote.

Joanne Freeman:

And the extra added bonus of that recipe of all of those things that you listed is taken together. They’re just going to make people be afraid to vote.

Carol Anderson:

Yes, yes. I mean …

Joanne Freeman:

That the violence and all of the restrictions, the bullying, right? Last week on Now & Then, we talked about bullying as politics. What that’s about is fear.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s safer to stay home.

Carol Anderson:

It’s safer to stay home. So we had a case in 1946, in Taylor County, Georgia, where a Black veteran who had fought in World War II came home to vote in that really contentious election, where Eugene Talmadge was running on reinstating the White primary, where the Supreme Court had just knocked it down in 1944. Maceo Snipes went to go vote and there was a sign over the door that says something to the effect of the first Black person to vote, the first Negro that votes, that will be the last thing he ever does. And so, Maceo voted. And when he came home a few days later, he faced a firing squad, that just riddled him with bullets. And he was the only Black person to vote in Taylor County in 1946. I mean, the fear is real.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So, Carol, what breaks that?

Carol Anderson:

What breaks it are several things that converged. One was, when you’re fighting the Second World War, which is a war against Aryan supremacy and a war for the Atlantic Charter, for human rights, you begin to get what is a zeitgeist flowing through the system that there is something fundamentally wrong with this. And this is where you see the south digging in, grapping itself in the flag harder, because they know they’re coming up against this language, that there’s something really wrong with White supremacy as an operating code for a civilized government.

And so, this is why they’re like anticommunist, anticommunist, anticommunist, we are the real patriots. And that language though of the wrongness of White supremacy. Then you get the civil rights movement. You get African Americans and their allies who are just like, not today, Satan. And they mobilize, they organize, they take on the full brutality of Jim Crow. And they use a strategy of nonviolence, which is a way to undermine and undercut that narrative of Black people as being violent, as being criminal, as being dangerous.

Because when the cameras are rolling, what you see are Black people taking the blows for just trying to be American citizens, for just trying to vote. You think about the violence that erupted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965, in Selma, Alabama, and that imagery of the tear gas of the horses, of the whips, of the beatings, people being knocked out and unconscious. And you had ABC’s movie of the week, which was Judgment at Nuremberg, being cut in with the footage from Bloody Sunday.

It was that kind of trauma where people are going, because this is also the Cold War, where the US is going, we’re the leader of the free world. This is not what the leader of the free world looks like. This is not how the leader of the free world is supposed to roll, when it is undermining the basic right to vote. And so, you have this convergence happening at this time that breaks it open, and we end up with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Right after that, it’s partly the what happens in Selma that gets Johnson to come out publicly and call for it, and it’s passed on a bipartisan basis.

Carol Anderson:

Yes, yes. I mean, but this is also the time as you know, Heather, where we have moderate civil rights leaning Republicans in the Republican Party.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what happens?

Carol Anderson:

You mean, what happens to …

Heather Cox Richardson:

Actually, we’re done, right? Everything turns out well and we all go home right now.

Joanne Freeman:

You just love Heather. She just loves to be like, okay, before waiting for the next step.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But what’s so frustrating, honestly, and obviously, we want Carol to really lay out where we are right now. But there’s so many times in our history where we’ve almost gotten it right, we’ve been going in the right freaking direction and …

Joanne Freeman:

The principles, they live.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The principles.

Joanne Freeman:

They’re still there.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The principles of democracy and then your expletive interests come back in, Joanne. They …

Joanne Freeman:

My interest. Man, just got ownership was something I don’t want.

Carol Anderson:

Wooh!

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think it’s a really important distinction, though, that idea that we have these principles that matter so much, and yet we’re that freaking close in 1965.

Carol Anderson:

So close, so close.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And look where we are, we are now literally in a place where half of our political system refuses to get behind the idea that we all should vote, have the right to vote. It is mind boggling. That’s in the space of 50 years.

Carol Anderson:

And when you also think about the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, was really on a truly bipartisan basis where it was 98 to 0 in the US Senate. Can you imagine getting a 98 to 0 in the US Senate on voting rights in 2021?

Joanne Freeman:

We’re not allowed to talk about it now.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was just such a no brainer then. And like Joanne says, now we can’t even talk about it. So how did we get here, Carol?

Carol Anderson:

We got here through a series of political decisions based on demographics, and based on racism, based on the southern strategy. And that Southern strategy really did the dog whistle thing of law and order, welfare queens, Willie Horton. And part of what happened with the Southern strategy of the Republicans wooing the Southern Democrats in, because the Southern Democrats are like, “Lord, we cannot be in a party that believes that Black people have rights. We just cannot be in a party that believes that Black people have rights. What are we going to do?”

And so, the answer was to make you part of the marginal fringe. But instead this mainstream party, the Republicans wooed the Southern Democrats and say, “We’ve got a home for you.” Because they thought with the South, they would get more representatives in Congress and could push forward a conservative legislative agenda.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s the extreme conservative Democrats like Strom Thurmond.

Carol Anderson:

Yes, yes. And when you woo that into your party, that toxin takes over, and it pushed out the moderate Republicans. And it moved the Republican so far to the right that as the demographics of America changed, as America became more liberal, that party could not resonate with that broader liberal demographic. And so, if you’re not going to change your policies, if you’re going to remain highly xenophobic, if you’re going to remain highly anti-civil rights, highly anti-women, then …

Joanne Freeman:

Focus on your interests.

Carol Anderson:

Hello. Hello.

Joanne Freeman:

And thus, anti all of those other things.

Carol Anderson:

Right. And so, the thing is, is that if you’re not going to have policies that can resonate with that electorate, with the consent of those who are going to be governed, if you don’t have policies that can resonate with them, then what you do is you figure out how to move them away from the ballot box. And I think the key moment was actually in the election of Barack Obama. When a Black man got into the White House, Lord have mercy. I mean, oh my god. It was like Fred Sanford or Sanford And Son clutching his heart, “Lizbeth, what are we going to do?

What are we going to do?” And what are we going to do was you saw it in … After 2010, you started seeing state legislatures coming up with these voter ID laws that sounded reasonable, as reasonable as the poll tax, but were as equally insidious and racially targeted. Then you have the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that got it the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. And what that did was it was Katy bar the door.

These states hit the door wide open with all of these voter suppression laws, voter ID laws, shutting down polling places overwhelmingly in minority communities, massive voter roll purchase. Where the Brennan Center noted that from 2016 to 2018, something like 16 to 17 million people were purged off of the voter rolls and disproportionately in those states that were under the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act.

And so, as you remove people from the polls, as you shut down access to the ballot box, what it’s designed to do is to instill this sense that the system is so rigged, my vote won’t matter, or that I’m going to have to expend an enormous amount of capital, one, to get an ID or to stand in line like we did here in Georgia for 11 hours to be able to vote.

Joanne Freeman:

Let me ask you a question, Carol, because I see this a lot out in public discourse. You see people saying, this is Jim Crow again, and other people saying, this is not Jim Crow again. What’s your thought on that question?

Carol Anderson:

Oh, this is Jim Crow. 2.0. This is James Crow, Esquire.

So part of what happens is that with Jim Crow, we think of it solely in terms of the violence. We don’t think about it in terms of the legislation, those laws that were written race neutrally, but were actually racially targeted. So when you look at the law like the poll tax, you won’t see a saying, we don’t want Black folks to vote. Just like when you look at the voter ID law, again, it looks so reasonable, until you realize that what states have done is that they’ve gone through the list to figure out what kinds of IDs African Americans have and don’t have, and then make access to the ballot box, the ones that they disproportionately do not have.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So here we go. Here’s a statistic on that. In Texas, for example, you can vote using a handgun license, but you cannot use a student ID from a state university. More than 80% of handgun licenses issued to Texans in 2018 went to White Texans, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that most of those were probably men. Well, more than half of the students in the University of Texas system are racial or ethnic minorities.

Carol Anderson:

Boom.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So there’s a great example of a place where an ID … I hear this all the time, what’s wrong with an ID? Of course, we should have an ID. But then you can see how that ID law can be used to go ahead and skew toward one direction or another. 11% of US citizens, that means more than 21 million Americans, do not have government issued photo identification. And that’s up to 25% of African American citizens of voting age, while only 8% of White Americans don’t have government issued photo ID. So within that whole neutral ID, is embedded the ability to do exactly what Carol was talking about.

Joanne Freeman:

But here’s the thing about that, in a sense, this conversation is a perfect way of showing that. The facts and figures that you’re showing there, Heather, you can’t deny precisely what’s going on. They’re also invisible to most people. Because all they see is, of course, we need a voting ID. Not only how can you say that we don’t need a particular voter ID, but now comes a sort of claim that, well, the people on the left, they don’t want anyone have any voting idea at all. It doesn’t matter, which is not what anyone is saying.

But all of these facts and figures that make the point of what’s happening here, so clear, people don’t have them. But they see is the mask, what we see is the mask, and the mask becomes the center of discourse. The mask becomes what’s thrown out into the public sphere and then what people end up responding to, and it’s a real dilemma. How do you get the message across about what’s really going on?

Carol Anderson:

Right. Because part of that mask is they’re saying, we are protecting democracy. We have got all of this massive rampant voter fraud. And so, all we’re asking is for you to show an ID in order to prove you are who you are. So it sounds so reasonable. But underneath there, one, let’s deal with the lie of massive rampant voter fraud. Justin Levitt, a California law professor did a study. He found from 2000 to 2014, there were 31 cases of voter impersonation fraud, out of 1 billion votes. That’s Carl Saganish billion votes. 31 cases, so like two a year.

That is the foundation for massive rampant voter fraud. And you see the way, like with the big lie, how this massive rampant voter fraud is identified as being in these corrupting cities. It’s in Philadelphia, it’s in Atlanta, it’s in Detroit, it’s in Milwaukee, cities where you have sizable Black or minority populations. So again, just like in the previous era, it is linking this corruption with those who are unworthy. It is linking this corruption with blackness. It is linking this threat to democracy with Black people. So if we can remove Black people from the ballot box, then we will have a true and pure, purified democracy.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s hard to follow that except to say, talking about it and exposing it is part of what we need to be doing. Which is part of why you’re here, Carol, and thank you so much for being part of this conversation. It has been beyond a pleasure to have you here. We’ve been so looking forward to this. And this topic is so important to talk about it. I can’t say how thrilled I am that you are here to take part in it.

Carol Anderson:

Thank you so much for having me. Like I said, talking to two of my favorite people on Earth, this was just wonderful. Just wonderful.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, we definitely have to keep doing this because it’s such a joy. Thank you so much for being here.

Carol Anderson:

Thank you. Bye-bye.