Opinion | 'This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes' - The New York Times - 0 views
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‘This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes’
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“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,”
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I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.
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The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was first introduced in January 1870 by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and ardent opponent of slavery and race discrimination.
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as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.
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arnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction.
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A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight, in Congress, over the Civil Rights Act of 1875
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The first Black members of the House of Representatives, some of them former slaves, were prominent in this battle
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Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting,
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“no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment” of “common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.”
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Their opponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights and social rights that would allow the government to
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And as their fellow Republicans struggled to pass the civil rights bill, these lawmakers used the debate to devise what Francois calls a “counter narrative to white supremacy” that repudiated Black inferiority in favor of a “vision of human equality.”
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“It is not social rights we desire,” Representative John R. Lynch of Mississippi, a former slave, said. “What we ask is protection in the enjoyment of public rights.
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I want to say we do not come here begging for our rights. We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship. We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.
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The civil rights bill passed Congress in February 1875, nearly a year after Sumner’s death. It did so without the schools clause.
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His speech is also part and parcel of a Black tradition of calling on the government to fulfill the nation’s professed values
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The question, as always, is whether Congress will actually act to secure democracy for all of its citizens and whether we’ll withstand the inevitable backlash if it does.