The ballot is our bullet
21st August 2019 · 0 Comments
The vote is and always has been the most powerful weapon Blacks have had to level America’s political playing field and to ensure that we remain free and our constitutional rights are guaranteed. In Malcolm X’s controversial speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” the civil rights leader likened the power of the vote to that of a bullet and his analyses rings true today.
“Those 22 million victims are waking up… They’re becoming politically mature….Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and Black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in the White House and who’s going to be in the doghouse,” Malcolm X said of Blacks in the U.S.
“They have a system that’s known as gerrymandering, whatever that means. It means when Negroes become too heavily concentrated in a certain area, and begin to gain too much political power, the white man comes along and changes the district lines,” said Malcolm X, while pointing to the political trickery that we are still dealing with in 2019.
Malcolm X described how potent a weapon the ballot could be, if it was exercised with care:
“So, you’re dealing with a man whose bias and prejudice are making him lose his mind, his intelligence, every day. He’s frightened. He looks around and sees what’s taking place on this earth, and he sees that the pendulum of time is swinging in your direction. The dark people are waking up. They’re losing their fear of the white man.”
Today, once again, we must use our ballots instead of bullets. Blacks and other people of color’s lives are in danger; being threatened by white supremacists on Capitol Hill and in the Oval Office, who are cheering on mass shooters and injecting white supremacy ideology into the mainstream of America’s collective consciousness. Donald Trump, the racist-in-chief, is leading this dangerous movement to keep America’s money and political power in the hands of whites, while eroding constitutional protections for people of color.
And, as usual, whites who wield political power across the U.S. and in Louisiana are salivating over how they will gerrymander district lines (redistricting) to dilute the vote of people of color after the 2020 Census. The only way to stop them is by answering the Census and with the ballot.
It’s time to clean house, time to wipe the racists out of office. To do that we must be informed, and we must rise, vote and be counted, if we are to remain free.
Fortunately for us in Louisiana, we still have civil rights leaders sounding the alarm and offering a plan for us to fight the powers that be. On Wednesday, August 21, at Nora Navra Library, from 5 – 7:45 p.m., voting and civil rights experts Carl Galmon, Ted Quant and Viola Washington will present a discussion on redistricting and the 2020 Census.
As the publisher of The Louisiana Weekly, Renette Dejoie-Hall often says, ‘You have to know where we’ve been to know where we’re going.’
So, let’s have a Sankofa moment for clarity:
The Louisiana Constitution of 1861 reflected Louisiana’s secession from the Union on January 26, 1861. During that time, New Orleans was the site of the capitol of Louisiana. On July 30, 1866, the perpetrators of the New Orleans Riot, white ex-Confederates and white supremacists, including police and firemen, attacked mostly Blacks, who were attending a reconvened Louisiana Constitutional Convention, after the legislature’s enactment of the Black Codes and its refusal to give Black men the vote.
The Louisiana Constitution of 1868 eradicated the Black Codes of 1865 and gave Black men full citizenship with equal and political rights, state funded public schools that prohibited segregated schools and equal treatment on public transportation.
The period between 1868 and 1877 was marked with incidents of murder of freedmen, including the First Battle of the Cabildo and the Colfax Massacre (1873). The Colfax Massacre led to charges heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which supported federal restrictions on the civil freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights of the Constitution and the Louisiana Constitution. The high Court’s ruling denied African-American citizens rights under the 14th Amendment and the right to bear arms.
The Coushatta Massacre and the Battle of Liberty Place (1874) and the Second Battle of the Cabildo (1877). In 1879, the state capitol was moved to Baton Rouge. By 1890, Jim Crow laws replaced the black codes and, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court (comprised of all white men) upheld racial segregation (discrimination) in Plessy v. Ferguson’s so-called “separate but equal” decision.
In Louisiana, whites were so desperate to keep Blacks from voting that a group of white male legislators had the audacity to codify white supremacy into the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention. Not only did they legalize the non-unanimous jury, which was just overturned last year, but they unabashedly used the word “supremacy” at least eight times in the convention proceeding. Emboldened by the KKK and getting away with wanton murders and lynching of Blacks, the opening and closing remarks indoctrinated their hatred of Blacks and their bloodthirsty ways into the Constitution.
Ernest Kruttschnitt, president of the convention, gave the opening remarks, in which he concluded: “May this hall, where thirty-two years ago, the negro first entered upon the unequal contest for supremacy, and which has been reddened with his blood, now witness the evolution of our organic law which will establish the relations between the races and upon an everlasting foundation of right and justice.”
Thomas Semmes, chair of the Judiciary Committee said “… We met here to establish the supremacy of the white race… Our mission was, in the first place, to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done and what has our ordinance on suffrage, the constitutional means by which we propose to maintain that ascendency, done? We have established throughout the State white manhood suffrage.”
To establish white political dominance, they created poll taxes and instilled fear among Blacks who were threatened with death and violence, if they attempted to vote. Fast forward to 2010 when federal officials announced that Louisiana would lose a seat in Congress and one of its nine electoral votes because of the results of the 2010 U.S. Census. Louisiana had eight House seats through most of the 20th century, but it lost one seat after the 1990 census and lost another in 2010. Now we’re down to six Congressmen (five whites and one Black).
As for the nation, we are seeing the desperation and craziness of white men who fear a Black planet, like Trump and the Republicans, who are blatantly and in-our-faces, cheating in electoral politics to retain power over the economic and political affairs of this nation.
In May 2019, the truth emerged about the trickery used by white Republicans to violate the voting rights of people of color, specifically, and Americans, in general. In 2016, Russian hackers successfully tapped into the voter registration files of two Florida counties. Trump-endorsed Ron DeSantis who celebrated his suspect win in the race for governor, where he narrowly beat Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. A recent report by the U.S. Inspector General announced that the electoral systems of all 50 states were hacked into. And most recently, at a tech convention, demonstrators showed how easy it is to hack into voting systems.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was also subjected to one Republican’s dirty electoral tricks. Her opponent and now Governor Brian Kemp, was the secretary of state during the election and was responsible for counting the votes. He oversaw a staff that rejected 5,000 absentee ballots in Georgia or two percent of the absentee ballots in the 2016 election.
Stolen elections are not new, the U.S. Supreme Court awarded George W. Bush a second term, after suspicious vote counts in Florida and Ohio, but the hacking and cybertheft of our elections are the latest tactics in the white supremacists’ tool kit.
For all the above reasons and for the racism on steroids we are witnessing, it is time that we all take a stand, if we want to retain our constitutional rights and the right for fair representation and due process.
Carl Galmon has said that Louisiana has the most gerrymandered districts in the United States. After the 2020 Census, the Louisiana Legislature’s majority white male Republican officeholders will redraw the state’s congressional districts, House and Senate districts, plus districts for the Public Service Commission, state education board, Supreme Court and some other courts.
We have seen, through our trip through Louisiana history, that white Louisiana will stop at nothing to disenfranchise Blacks here, including not allowing expanded voting hours nor allowing for Sunday voting, moving polling places, not putting enough polling sites and having Baton Rouge officials come to New Orleans to oversee our voting process.
But there is something we all can do. We can unify and tell those who are running for elected office that we will not stand for or vote for anyone on Oct 12 and November 12, 2019, who is not going to see to it that district lines are drawn fairly, that Black voters have the polling sites they need to conveniently cast their ballots, and we will not vote for anyone who refuses to protect our constitutional rights.
We can call our City Councilpersons and demand more polling sites, attend the August 21 event at Nora Navra Library, attend candidate forums, and call our state legislators and tell them we are watching them and will vote them out, if they don’t meet our demands for fairness and justice.
This article originally published in the August 19, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
