Black History Month: The 2022 Elections and the History of the “Black Vote”
Welcome to Black History Month 2023, with Diversity Explained. This is the third article in a series of four that will dive into fascinating stories of Black excellence in American history. Each week I’ll reflect on different dimensions of Black life – politics, business, the arts – and explore critical figures in their development.
Georgia is still on my mind…
Last year, the nation watched as yet another runoff election took place in Georgia. Voters reported their weariness at the incessant campaigning in their state, not to mention the constant news coverage of their elections.
For me, it was also wearying: yet another reminder that our most basic democratic freedoms continue to be unevenly distributed across the United States. While Black communities have faced voter discrimination since the country’s founding, it’s still astounding to me how robust voter suppression remains.
Influencing voters is not, as notable scholars have long pointed out, by any means a partisan undertaking. In a two-party system like ours, it’s inevitable that either side will employ multiple strategies to improve or reduce turnout, sway voters at the last minute, or directly suppress the other side’s votes.
But when it comes to the so-called “Black vote,” politicians and pundits have always been especially reductive and manipulative. Ever since we were enfranchised in 1870, Black voters have been treated as a monolithic bloc, whose support either party could secure if they branded themselves champions of racial equality. As a result, the “Black vote” has become a trope of American political theater, reducing our community’s political interests to the singular issue of race. In the last century, this has allowed the Black vote to become an easy target of both Democratic pandering and Republican suppression.
This continues to influence contemporary elections in undemocratic ways. In Georgia, the changes to the voting process between 2020 – when the state voted President Biden in – and 2022 – when Rev. Raphael Warnock (D) successfully defended his Senate seat – show that voter suppression tactics overwhelmingly targeted Georgia’s major cities. The populations in these urban and suburban areas have the highest proportion of historically marginalized communities, who in the past tended to vote Democrat.
Source: New York Times
NPR has shown that new state regulations severely limited Georgians’ dropbox access in these major urban areas in the runup to the 2022 election. In the four counties that contain Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs, the number of dropboxes decreased from 107 to 25 after the 2020 election:
Source: NPR
This may not seem especially malicious, but for citizens juggling jobs, families, and personal lives, one of the greatest obstacles to voting is convenience. Reducing that convenience is a surefire way to reduce turnout, especially in more congested urban and suburban areas.
Obviously the dropbox and other suppression tactics were insufficient. But making voting inconvenient in urban areas is only one way of suppressing the “Black vote.” There are more direct ways, such as unreasonably strict voter ID laws and felon disenfranchisement. This is the legacy of an even stricter system of Black (and immigrant) voter suppression that historically took the form of poll taxes, literacy tests, and byzantine voter registration systems.
As Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in her introduction to the 1619 Project, Black communities have played a major role as “perfecters” of American democracy. Nothing in the United States Constitution originally protected voters’ rights, which were originally granted exclusively to white men who owned property. It was through the battle for Civil Rights, Black enfranchisement, and women’s suffrage that this basic democratic right was gradually extended to all Americans.
But these protections are by no means fixed. The Supreme Court has heard 20 cases relating to the Voting Rights Act since it passed in 1965. Voter discrimination is both a function of contemporary politics and historical precedent. Only by understanding its history can we hope to mitigate its inevitable, threatening, and iniquitous presence in our modern democracy.
A short history of the “Black vote”
To understand the current state of the “Black vote,” we have to look at the history of Black enfranchisement.
After the Civil War, the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments marked a bold and visionary pivot in US history. It was not enough for reformers at the time to finally outlaw slavery (except, notably, as punishment for a crime). They also envisioned new forms of constitutional protections for all Americans with the 14th Amendment, which granted equal protection under the law to all (in theory if not in practice).
Then in 1870, the 15th Amendment shook the nation by protecting the right of all eligible men to vote – regardless of race or color or “previous condition of servitude.” In the ensuing years, amidst a program of experimental reforms in education, economic equality, and social justice, Black people were able to participate politically for the first time in this country.
In that period of “Reconstruction,” we elected members of our community into record numbers of state and national positions, creating a level of representation that has yet to beat, according to one scholar of the period. In some states where the formerly enslaved constituted significant proportions of the population – e.g. nearly 50% in Mississippi – it was inevitable that Black voters would support not only the party of political reform (the Radical Republicans) but also their own candidates for representation.
Radical Republicans at the time were eager to discredit their Democratic opposition by accelerating (and publicizing) Black participation in government. That’s how Hiram Revels became the first Black man to occupy a seat in the US Senate. The seat had formerly belonged to Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, who vacated it when Mississippi seceded in 1861. The symbolism was lost on no one.
This exciting period of social reform and political innovation came to a chaotic halt when federal troops pulled out of the South in 1877. Southern states quickly instituted Jim Crow laws and “Black Codes” that disenfranchised our community and segregated public life. One of the most pernicious attacks on the Black vote came in the form of “grandfather clauses,” which excluded otherwise eligible men if their ancestors had been unable to vote prior to 1867.
As a result of disenfranchisement, not to mention the litany of other civil rights abuses between the 1870s and the 1960s, Black political interests tended to coalesce around figures who campaigned for racial equality. All over the US, we continued to exert our right to vote as best we could, despite intimidation, violence, taxes, literacy tests, and all sorts of voter suppression tactics. Throughout this period, we had to focus on candidates and political influencers who would defend our basic constitutional rights.
The women’s suffrage movement was also gathering steam during this period, and produced two opposing camps in the fight for Black suffrage. On one side were suffragists who saw women’s and Black people’s right to vote as intertwined issues and refused to support any legislation that exclusively enfranchised men. On the other were more Machiavellian Abolitionists, who argued that it was time to focus on redressing the evils of slavery. For them, women’s suffrage would have to wait.
This schism eventually led to some white suffragettes collaborating with racist southern Democrats to pass women’s suffrage – their primary mode of persuasion being that enfranchising white women would help protect white supremacy in the South. There were still far more white women in America than Black, they argued, so legally enfranchising Black women would hardly threaten the status quo.
Women’s suffrage passed in 1920 and Black women technically gained the right to vote – though they were still largely suppressed in the South. And the “Black vote” necessarily supported leaders who would keep fighting against this white supremacist system.
In the 1930s, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt would become instrumental in swaying the “Black vote” over to her Democrat husband’s side. The Republican and Democratic parties had spent the preceding Progressive Era switching ideological platforms. Previously reformist Republicans, who championed industry through government expansion, watched as the Democrats began supporting large-scale federal investment in populist social programs. This helped Democrats win the support of voters in the large, newly-founded Western states, who had often been neglected by Republicans in favor of big business back east.
By the time of the Great Depression, FDR’s New Deal cemented this ideological costume change. The Democrats officially became the big-government champions of the people, spearheading a bold program of reform to regulate financial institutions, invest in education and infrastructure, and support the working classes. Eleanor Roosevelt was connected with many Black activists and leaders, and served as a crucial connection between them and the Democratic Party (whose southern leaders the Black community rightfully mistrusted for their history of white supremacy).
Since that period, Black voters have been expected to vote Democrat – the reputed party of social progress, economic equality, and federal protections for all. Democrats became instrumental in furthering the many causes of Civil Rights activists, amongst which was voter equality. But despite the movement’s legal and political victories with that party’s support, many of our community’s more fundamental issues would remain unaddressed by Democrats and Republicans alike.
The triumph of Civil Rights and the uncertain future for the “Black vote”
The result has been several decades worth of continued Democrat-Republican rivalry, against a backdrop of widening economic inequality and enduring racial inequity.
After the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, the federal government introduced protections that made it difficult to suppress or manipulate the Black vote openly. This was the culmination of an incredibly hard-fought battle, led by luminaries like John Lewis and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
At times it had been a violent and even lethal battle. During one of the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, led by John Lewis, state troopers and deputized white men openly attacked demonstrators with police clubs and tear gas. March 7, 1965 became known as Bloody Sunday, and the widespread publicization of these attacks helped tip the scales in favor of the Voting Rights Act that year.
There was much at stake for white supremacist politicians in the South at the time. Nearly half the population of Dallas County, Alabama – home to the city of Selma – was Black, but only 2% were registered to vote. Once they were enfranchised, they would represent a massive disruption to voter and election mechanics.
And above all, that is what politicians value most: clarity over who will vote and in what way. For Democrats, this has meant branding themselves the Party of social equality and working class champions while painting the Republicans as undemocratic vote suppressors. But, perhaps unwittingly, it has also reduced the “Black vote” to a bloc primarily concerned with issues of race.
Black voters everywhere have the right to exist as fully actualized political citizens. We are not a singular, monolithic bloc. As Adolph Reed Jr, a Black professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania points out, the Black American population is larger than the entire population of Canada. Do all Canadians vote the same way or have the same interests? Of course not.
The long, dark history of manipulating Black votes to political elites’ ends is no longer simply a story of oppression and the triumph of civil rights. It is also an example of yet another dimension of American society in which Black Americans are not seen as full citizens – where our political capital is reduced to issues of race, and we are pigeonholed to the point of stereotype.
The truth is we are full citizens, and we are much more than mere pawns in Democrats’ or Republicans’ political games. Racism is alive and well in America, and we have to fight against its electoral manifestations whenever they rear their heads (as they have in Georgia). But we also have to recognize that we are not beholden to any party or ideology simply because of America’s shameful history of disenfranchisement.
Like all Americans, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves, stay engaged, and question the leaders who say they represent us – especially when they expect our continued support. Only then do our votes truly express the collective will of enfranchised, independent citizens with full political agency.
Porter Braswell
