The long racist history of the now-repealed ban of Florida by voters to vote

Historians say the vote also ends a law with such blatant racist roots that a head of state later boasted that the post-war constitution would prevent Florida to be invaded by blacks, using a racial insult to describe them.

"Their intention was quite clear: eliminate as many black voters as possible," Washington Post Darryl Paulson, a professor emeritus of government at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, told Washington Post.

The ban has been remarkably effective even 150 years later. According to an analysis of the Sentencing Project, as of 2016, more than one in five Black Floridians could not vote.

"We can not have a democracy with permanent second class citizens," said Miami Herald Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberty Union.

Florida's ban goes back to the sunny days that followed the capitulation of Robert E. Lee. When southern states, like Florida, joined the Union, many tried to explicitly ban black voters. Florida's first post-war constitution, in 1865, gave the right to vote only to "free white men," according to a report published in 2016 by the Brennan Center for Justice.

White legislators had a tactical reason to fear the newly empowered black voters. While blacks made up about 45 percent of Florida's population after the war, thousands of white residents had lost their vote for their ties to Confederation. In 1867, according to Paulson, there were 15,434 black registered voters in Florida and only 11,148 white voters.

"There was this real fear that blacks would do to Whites what whites had done to them for so long, which was to discriminate deeply," said Paulson.

Even as Congress forced Southern states to submit their amendments to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which liberated slaves and gave them citizenship and the right to vote, Florida lawmakers laid the groundwork for the suppression process. of the voting rights of these black residents. In 1865, the state adopted a set of laws known as the "Black Codes" that increased the penalties for easy charges against liberated blacks, including the assault of a white woman , disobedience and "vagrancy", a crime with such a broad definition no matter who might be charged.

This was the ideal precursor to include a ban on voting on criminals in the 1868 constitution. Legislators have also included a wider ban on voting against anyone found guilty of more minor "black code" crimes, such as the theft.

"The removal of Felony's voting rights was a way to reduce the effect of despised black suffrage that the Conservatives knew had no choice but to accept," writes historian Jerrell Shofner in an editorial article. of the 1868 constitution of Florida.

The law was only one of many measures adopted by the state to keep African Americans out of the polls. In 1889, Florida became the first state to adopt a voting tax, earning $ 2 a year knowing that poor blacks would be disproportionately affected. He then passed laws on literacy and residence rules aimed at eliminating black voters, Paulson said.

These efforts have been incredibly effective. In 1940, only 3% of Black Floridians were registered on the electoral lists. In 1961, in Gadsden County, Florida, there were 12,261 African-Americans of voting age – but only seven were registered, according to the Brennan Center.

Most of these discriminatory rules ended in the civil rights era in the 1960s, but the ban on voting in Florida was stubbornly upheld. In 1968, Florida lawmakers relaxed the rule while maintaining the ban on criminals. When black voters sued the state in court, a US Court of Appeals of the 11th Circuit found that there was "racial animosity" behind the original law, the Brennan Center noted, and had no compelling reason to keep it. But this decision was later overturned by all the courts sitting on the bench.

More recently, Republican Governor Charlie Crist relaxed the rules to allow many criminals to recover their rights, restoring tens of thousands of people to the electoral lists. But Governor Rick Scott erased these reforms in 2011, adding a new five-year waiting period and forcing criminals to appear before a leniency council to plead their case.

This led to such a bizarre system that John Oliver described it as "crazy" in a recent article on "Last week, tonight". "It's perhaps the most stupid thing about Florida, which says something," Oliver said.

While the number of people awaiting hearing increased by more than 10,000, Scott's decisions fit perfectly into the historical pattern of the ban. The Palm Beach Post found that Scott had given back the right to vote to three times as many white men as black men.

Amendment 4, which attracted more than 1.1 million signatures, was voted on Tuesday across the state and was supported by a surprising number of donors, from Freedom Partners funded by Koch Brothers to ACLU. But he has faced opposition from leading GOP candidates, including Scott, who remains ahead of his Senate bid since Wednesday morning, and Florida Governor-elect Ron DeSantis. Both argued that the amendment was too broad, although it excluded anyone found guilty of murder or sexual crimes.

In the end, Amendment 4 easily passed the 60% threshold set by the state, a victory that should be considered a reprimand for decades of racial oppression, said Paulson.

"It has been very embarrassing for Florida to be the leader to prevent people from voting," said Paulson. "The United States must do all that is humanly possible to make voting as accessible as possible to all who wish to vote."