Georgia’s voter suppression laws betray the promise of Reconstruction
By Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson” (W. W. Norton). His website is go.umd.edu/robertslevine.
In a recent interview, Georgia’s Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) blamed his state’s new voting rights restrictions on the shadow cast by former president Donald Trump and his acolyte Rudolph W. Giuliani. Their false claims of election fraud, he said, spread misinformation and created the momentum for the restrictions that became law. Duncan may be correct about the precipitating cause, but Georgia has a longer history of suppressing access to the ballot. And this history reveals a fundamental truth. The new election laws were created almost exclusively by White people with a calculated design to deprive Black Georgians of their fundamental right of citizenship: the vote.
No one can help us to understand the stakes of the debate over voting rights in Georgia better than the great civil rights leader Frederick Douglass.
For Douglass, the Civil War was fought not only to end slavery, but also, as he regularly declared, to ensure that Black people have “equal rights before the law.” In the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, Douglass increasingly focused on Black people’s right to vote. His best known Civil War speech, “The Mission of the War,” maintained that the successful outcome of the war would “invest the black man everywhere with the right to vote and be voted for.”
In a nation in which Black men were denied the vote in most states, even in the North, Midwest and West, this was a radical agenda. In fact, after the Civil War, Lincoln had declared that only selected Black people — “the very intelligent” and those who served in the Union Army — should be allowed to vote. His reactionary successor, Andrew Johnson, also initially said he could support some forms of limited Black suffrage.
But increasingly Johnson sought to suppress the Black vote — and Douglass pushed back. At a White House meeting with Johnson in February 1866, Douglass demanded that the president place “in our hand the ballot with which to save ourselves.” Johnson remained resistant, so Douglass urged the Radical Republicans in Congress to use legislation to ensure that right. To some extent he was pleased with the Republicans’ creation of the 14th Amendment, which brought citizenship to African Americans, but he was angered that the amendment left the matter of voting to the individual states. In an essay published in the 1867 Atlantic Monthly, Douglass excoriated the Republicans, calling the 14th Amendment an “unfortunate blunder” that sustained “an emasculated citizenship” for African Americans. True Reconstruction, he said, could not occur without the empowerment of Black people through “the elective franchise.”
Douglass’s efforts and those of other African American activists paid off with the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which prohibited the federal government and each state from denying or abridging citizens’ right to vote based on their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Douglass hailed the amendment’s ratification, and proclaimed: “The black man is free, the black man is a citizen, the black man is enfranchised, and this by the organic law of the land.”
To read the complete article, click below.
