Georgia election fight shows that black vote suppression, a southern tradition, still flourishes

Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp has been sued for suppressing minority votes after an anonymous review of the 53,000 vote registrations – most of them filed by African-Americans.

Kemp, who is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, says his actions comply with a 2017 state law that requires voting registration information to match exactly from the Department of Motor Vehicles or Social Security Administration.

The law disproportionately affects black and Latino voters, say the civil rights groups who brought the lawsuit.

As a scholar of African-American history, I recognize an old story in this new electoral controversy.

Georgia, like many southern states, has got rid of black voters ever since the 15th Amendment gave African-American men the right to vote in 1870.

The tactics have simply changed over time.

Democrats' southern strategy

With black populations ranging from 25 percent to nearly 60 percent of southern state populations, black voting power up politics as usual after the Civil War.

During Reconstruction, well over 1,400 African-Americans were elected to local, state and federal offices, 16 of whom served in Congress.

Loyal to President Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation sounded the death knell for slavery, black Americans flocked to the Republican Party. Back then, it was the most liberal of the United States' two mainstream political parties.

Southern Democrats fought back, using both violence and legislation.

White paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan and White Leagues Threatened black candidates, attacked African-American voters, pushed black leaders out of office and toppled Republican governments.

After establishing one-party control over the South, white Democrats in the late 1800s instituted a poll tax, making the passive too expensive to train slaves and their descendants.

"White primaries", excluded blacks from candidates in primary elections.

These attacks proved effective. Between 1896 and 1904, the number of black men in Louisiana plummeted from 130,000 to 1,342.

After North Carolina U.S. Rep. George White retired, in 1901, the South would send no African-Americans to Congress until the 1972 election.

Vote Removal in Jim Crow Mississippi

In the early 20th century, many black Americans voted with their feet, migrating north and west.

Around the same time, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal – which has been instituted in the United States by the United States.

Black Voters in Northern Cities Having Started African American Democrats into Congressional Office.

But they did not give up on the South, pressing the Supreme Court to reaffirm voting rights in the 1944 Smith case. Allwright, which prohibited white-only primaries.

Goal black vote removal deeply entrenched in the South. Several states required new voters to complete literacy tests before they could cast a nerd. In the 1880s, 76 percent of southern blacks were illiterate, versus 21 percent of whites.

Strategies for excluding black voters evolved along with federal law.

In reaction to Brown Board of Education, which in 1954 overturned "separate but equal" segregation laws, Mississippi in the same year modified its poll test. The authoring of the county's registries was determined by the authorizing county registrars to determine the applicant's answer was "reasonable."

Virtually all African-Americans, regardless of education or performance, failed.

Within a year, the number of blacks registered to vote in Mississippi dropped from 22,000 to 12,000 – a mere 2 percent of eligible black voters.

Political violence – including the 1955 attempted assassination of voting rights activist Gus Courts and Murder of George W. Lee – assisted the legal restrictions, showing the cost of black political independence.

Fighting for the vote

Activists were not deterred. The Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, continued to wage grassroots vote registration campaigns and fight for official representation in the Democratic Party.

In 1964, a new political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was founded to welcome "sharecroppers, farmers and ordinary working people."

The Freedom Democratic Party elected to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, hoping to transform the all-white Mississippi delegation.

Trying to broker a deal, National Democratic leaders extended the Mississippi's Freedom Democrats two nonvoting at-large seats at the convention – a minor concession that most white Mississippi party members to walk out in protest.

Freedom Democrats rejected the two seats as tokenism, holding a sit-in on the convention floor in Atlantic City to highlight the lack of black political representation.

Black voters make gains

Over time, the civil rights movement sparked a political shift that dramatically changed the U.S. electorate.

The 24th Amendment outlawed taxes in 1964, abolishing a major barrier to black enfranchisement in the South. Literacy tests, too, were restricted, under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act also establishes federal oversight of voting laws to ensure equal access to elections, particularly in the South.

By the early 21st century, African-Americans constituted a majority of the registered Democrats in South Carolina from South Carolina to Louisiana. They turn out in high numbers and have been key-voters for getting Democrats into office in the conservative-dominated South.

Vote removal today

Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers have made a move to the last century's advances, enacting a vote of voting laws that make it harder to vote.

Claiming they seek to elect fraud, some 20 states have closed early voting or …

Vote identification laws have hidden costs, research shows.

Acquiring birth certificates and taking time off work. That puts it out of reach for many, a kind of 21st-century poll tax.

Georgia, North Carolina and North Dakota, citing their harmful effect on African-American and Native American voters.

But the Supreme Court in 2008 deemed Indiana's voting ID law has validated deterrent to vote fraud.

Perhaps most damaging to black voters was a 2013 Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act.

Shelby County c. Holder ended 48 years of federal oversight of southern voting laws, concluding that the requirement is based on "40-year-old facts that have no logical relation to the present day."

Current events show that voting is not a thing of the past.

From Georgia's vote registration scandal to gerrymandered districts that dilute voting power, millions may be shut out of November's midterms.

Frederick Knight is an associate professor of history at Morehouse College. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.