Once again, I'm wiping away tears over an Obama-related video, this time one directed at my dad, a long-time union member in Pennsylvania and great-grandson of the first U.S. Secretary of Labor
.I haunt fivethirtyeight.com
to see if Nate & Sean have updated the likelihood that Obama will win tomorrow - at this writing, 98.1 percent. This is the first time I've been deeply affected by a presidential election. I've been voting since 1990; this is my fifth presidential race. I'm usually too cynical, too aware of the ways in which any U.S. president is bound by the Breton Woods agreements, duties to Israel, and the military industrial complex to create the deep change that would create humane systems in the United States and, through leadership, around the globe. I haven't lost that perspective, but I'm overwhelmed by the historical importance of a black man named Barack Hussein Obama on the brink of a decisive victory in tomorrow's presidential election.
At this moment, I want to recall the Constitution's three provisions regarding slaves and slavery:
- A slave was counted as 3/5 of a white citizen for apportionment of members of the House of Representatives.
- The slave trade could not be banned for 20 years, until 1809.
- Fugitive slaves had to be returned to their masters.
Barack Obama is not a descendent of slaves, but his life is marked and notable because of the context in which he has lived - the context of historical, institutional and interpersonal racism.
In the 1850s, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet travelled from slave states to free states, and he sued for freedom, arguing that he lived in a free state, he should be free. The Supreme Court denied him his citizenship and that of every person of African ancestry. The court held that by granting him his freedom, his owner would be deprived of his rightful property.
After the Civil War and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, Dred Scott was vindicated, and all slaves were freed and became citizens. For a few years, things seemed a little different - there were blacks in Congress and in state legislatures - but Reconstruction ended in the ropes of lynch mobs, the flames and bullets of domestic terrorists, and the text of laws designed to prevent black men from using their right to vote.
Then the Supreme Court gutted the "privileges and immunities" protections of the 14th Amendment in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), holding that the phrase only protected federal citizenship rights, not state citizenship rights. Even though the case was about butchers in New Orleans, the implications of the reasoning easily led to the denial of the right to vote. Voting is a federal right administered by the states and if the 14th Amendment's protections didn't apply, the states could make whatever laws they wanted restricting that right.
Then, in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, the court gutted Congress' ability to enforce the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in by ruling that Congress had overstepped its authority in the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The Act had made discrimination in public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, trains, etc.) illegal. This foreshadowed the doctrine of "separate but equal" established in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. The court held that Louisiana could pass laws dictating that "colored" and white people had to sit in separate railroad cars, that there was no difference in the cars; it's just what people prefer!
These cases set the institutional framework for continuous denial of effective citizenship rights for blacks in the South. Those who attempted to vote or register to vote in the South were subjected to literacy tests that were administered differently depending on race, poll taxes, grandfather laws, and other disenfranchisement methods. Some of these measures were held constitutional by the courts, others were struck down, but the result was the same - blacks in the South were disenfranchised.
At the same time, these cases provided the grounds for segregation and restrictions on movement in the public sphere known as Jim Crow laws. It wasn't until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that the fiction of "separate but equal" was finally overruled and it took several years for that decision to be implemented.
Barack Obama was born in 1961. After Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech in Washington, D.C., in 1963. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended the rule of Jim Crow and segregation. In 1965, President Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights Act which provided the federal government with strong tools to oversee the processes of voting in the South. Because of the Supreme Court's gutting of 14th Amendment enforcement protections, Congress used its Commerce Clause powers to justify its passage. The court was along for the ride, however, and upheld the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, in which it held that the motel could no longer be segregated even though it was privately owned.
It sounds like everything got solved back in the '60s, right? We don't have to worry about people being disenfranchised anymore... until you look at Florida in 2000 when voter registration lists were "cleansed" of people who were suspected of being felons. Or in Ohio in 2004 where Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell refused to accept voter registration forms printed in the newspaper. Or the wildly disparate funding for elections across states. Or the lack of sufficient voting machines that disproportionately affects urban, minority populations.
We have tomorrow.
- note - this is a hastily prepared opinionated piece, please don't hold me to a particularly strong standard of review! **
I won't nitpick your post, but I just wanted to say that I think you're right that due to current circumstances the widespread change being promised may just not be possible.