Senfronia Thompson goes to Washington: US democracy is on the line

Senfronia Thompson flew to Washington DC last month. She didn’t travel to celebrate Independence Day or see the sights. She and her fellow Texas Democrats left their state to block radical, regressive voting restrictions, and to demand federal laws that would protect equal ballot access for all citizens.

At 82, the second-longest-serving female legislator in US history is a living witness to America’s civil rights struggles. The granddaughter of sharecroppers, born in a sundown town, Thompson remembers the literacy tests and the poll taxes. She grew up under segregation, with signs saying “No Dogs, No Negros, No Mexicans”. She saw the beatings, and killings, and dogs set loose on protesters. In her first term in the Texas House a white, male colleague called her his “beautiful Black mistress”. When she complained, she was ostracised. She has fought bigotry her entire life.

Now Thompson and her fellow Texans are battling to preserve basic rights that were believed settled 56 years ago. But the right of all citizens to vote has never been universally accepted in America. After the Fifteenth
Amendment was ratified after the Civil War, Black men could vote and stand for office. They embraced their new prerogatives with vigour. Twenty-two Black men were elected to Congress until the rise of Jim Crow laws stripped their access. In the first half of the 20th century, only four Black men followed them.

What changed?

White southerners imposed property and literacy requirements to disenfranchise Black citizens. They invented “grandfather clauses” to exempt white voters from these exclusions, permitting citizens to vote if their grandfathers could — grandfathers who voted when slavery was still in force. To take one example, Louisiana had 130,000 registered Black voters in 1898, comprising 44% of the electorate. By 1904 this tally had been slashed to 1342. This pattern was repeated widely, restoring white rule for decades.

Now Republicans are it again. Emboldened by the partisan grassroots embrace of Donald Trump’s “big lie”, GOP state representatives have been ramming through laws and procedures that make it harder for certain citizens to vote. They cloak their motives under bogus claims about safeguarding election security. It’s all lies. They know they can’t win free and fair elections with their obsolete agenda if the voters choose their politicians. Trump said as much openly. But they refuse to modernise their attitudes and policies to broaden their appeal. Instead they aim to choose their voters.

If that doesn’t work, they plan to ignore the voters altogether. Along with their retrograde ballot box barriers, after November’s election Republicans have been transferring oversight of elections from neutral arbiters to partisan referees. After all, it doesn’t matter how many people vote if you control the count.

As a final backstop, if all else fails they intend to allow state legislatures to ignore the people’s will and override the results.

What’s happening goes far beyond arcane rules about food and water, exact matching of birth dates, and selective voter identification — albeit these are all draconian. This is a full-scale authoritarian attack designed to entrench minority rule. It’s precisely what Jim Crow achieved after the collapse of reconstruction and withdrawal of federal intervention.

Too many Americans are missing all the signs. They still react as though Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same political coin. They believe this is yet another typical fight that doesn’t affect them day-to-day, so they have tuned out. Republicans are counting on that inattention.

Last week more than 100 state legislators from across the nation joined Thompson and her fellow Texans to rally support from congressional Democrats and the White House to enact voting rights legislation. The US House of Representatives has already approved the For The People Act and the John R Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. These address campaign finance and ethics reform, ban gerrymandering, provide for automatic voter registration, and make election day a federal holiday. But they have hit a roadblock in the Senate.

Democrats are working overtime to get them over the line. Senator Joe Manchin, whose support is essential, supports many of the reforms. He and his colleagues have been negotiating the final legislative package in detail. A compromise proposal endorsed by all Democrats is expected soon.

Behind the scenes, President Joe Biden and his staff have been meeting with state and federal legislators to support their efforts. Biden has also been increasingly vocal in using his bully pulpit to back the measures.

All signs point to the most comprehensive reinforcement of voting rights since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The filibuster, itself a Jim Crow relic, will not be permitted to stand in the way.

Voting is a right, not a privilege. Real democracies make it easy to vote. Only one American political party is committed to this principle.