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Have you ever wondered if you would have stood on the side of African Americans during the civil rights movement? In 1965, civil rights activists from Selma, Alabama, marched into their state capital to seek their constitutional suffrage when they were greeted by MPs on horseback swinging clubs and rubber hoses wrapped in barbed wire. ABC news anchor Frank Reynolds interrupted the broadcast to show the brutality in Selma. These images shocked American consciences and prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to speak to Congress and the nation on “the dignity of man and the fate of democracy.” LBJ successfully pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. It is a good thing that Fox News wasn’t there then, otherwise viewers would never have seen this “Bloody Sunday” footage and it would have convinced them that it was just a “peaceful protest”, similar to the failed Jan 6 violent coup by supporters of former President Donald Trump. In 2013, Conservative Supreme Court justices gutted a crucial section of the electoral law. Republicans would later steal two seats in the Supreme Court from the Democrats, then the court decimated the law. Many of the GOP’s seizure-of-power tactics, including the controversial tsunami of voter suppression laws, would have been prohibited if the electoral law were still intact. For example, a 2019 study by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights reported that 1,688 statewide polling stations closed following the initial gutting of the voting rights law. Texas has closed the most – 750. This results in long lines at the polling stations, which mainly serve black and Latin American voters. These voters often wait more than seven hours, and now Georgia Republicans have made it illegal to give food and water to people in line. In the 2020 presidential election, Harris County officials made it easier for their diverse populations to vote. They implemented 24-hour and drive-through voting centers. The Texas Republicans lost their lawsuit to discard 127,000 drive-through votes, but now they want to ban these two popular and safe choices. One of the GOP’s most insidious tactics is partisan gerrymandering. This is a redistribution tactic that allows politicians to choose their voters instead of choosing them from the voters. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas MP recently admitted, “We are coming, and Republicans control most of this process in most of the states in the country. That alone should get us a majority back. ”Also, Republicans across the country are looking for ways to gain more control over local electoral mechanisms, and Georgia Republicans are testing the water to take over running elections in Democratic strongholds. These GOP legal tactics, which include “political insurrection,” may not sound as treacherous as they really are. If it can be implemented, our democracy seems to work, but it is quietly and legally manipulated by partisan actors. Americans can stop Republican anti-democratic tactics. First we need to restore the suffrage law, and then pass the bill for the people that extends voting rights, curtails dark money in politics, and bans partisan gerrymandering. When I learned that civil rights activist Rev. William Barber of The Poor People’s Campaign and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke were marching 42 miles from Georgetown to Austin in the spirit of Selma March, I knew I would go. They called it the Moral March for Democracy. The late civil rights activist John Lewis almost died on Bloody Sunday, but he never stopped fighting for the right to vote in a non-violent way. He encouraged us to “get in trouble.” Fortunately, activists do not face this brutality today. The Republicans will block both bills, so we need more “good anger” to pressure President Joe Biden and Congress to end the filibuster and pass them to save our democracy. Ashbrook is a contributing columnist for the advertiser. She is a retired school teacher and can be reached at [email protected]
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