Should Black People Vote? Political Theory on Voting and Representation

Should Black People Vote? Political Theory on Voting and Representation

A look at the troubling history of black voter disenfranchisement and the ongoing efforts to suppress the black vote.

By Darius Spearman (africanelements)

About the author: Darius Spearman is a professor of Black Studies at San Diego City College, where he has been pursuing his love of teaching since 2007. He is the author of several books, including Between The Color Lines: A History of African Americans on the California Frontier Through 1890. You can visit Darius online at africanelements.org

In this episode, a look at black voting and representation. We will review the troubling history of black voter enfranchisement and the ongoing efforts to suppress the black vote. We’ll look at the ebb and flow of voting rights victories and setbacks. Also what are we voting for? To what extent do the choices we have on the ballot actually reflect the interest of black voters? All that begging the obvious question should black people vote?

Table of Contents

00:46 – Introduction
01:23 – Black Male Enfranchisement
02:57 – “Era of Disenfranchisement”
07:52 – Voting Rights Act of 1965
09:32 – Voting Rights Act Dismantled
10:41 – Voting and Political Theory
19:52 – Question of the Day

Related Videos

• Blacks and Reconstruction: The Unfinished Revolution?; https://youtu.be/Lz0lUUaiB9A
• Building Black Power In a White Political System; https://youtu.be/1ffKr4cjLXY
• Crashing The Party: Building Independent Political Power; https://youtu.be/eqqmGIwQzdE

Thank you for watching African Elements. In this episode, a look at black voting and representation. We will review the troubling history of black voter enfranchisement and the ongoing efforts to suppress the black vote. We’ll look at the ebb and flow of voting rights victories and setbacks. Also what are we voting for? To what extent do the choices we have on the ballot actually reflect the interest of black voters? All that begging the obvious question should black people vote? We’ll examine all this and more coming up.

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So, the point at which the United States began to move toward more universal black voting rights begins immediately following the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction. I did a more thorough video on reconstruction and what it actually meant for black folks, so if you’d like a more detailed breakdown on that I’d encourage you to click the link in the description. For this video I’m just gonna focus briefly on Reconstruction as it relates to voting.

So, by the end of the Civil War, there were some northern states where black men were granted the right to vote and even to hold office, but that wasn’t universal even throughout the North. The first steps towards a more universal voting rights came in 1867 with the Reconstruction acts which defined the terms for the defeated Confederacy to re-join the union. Those acts required the former Confederate states to ratify the 14th amendment granting citizenship and equal protection under the law for black Americans as well as voting rights for black men. Additionally, the South was divided into four military districts where union troops were deployed in order to ensure enforcement of the Reconstruction acts. What that meant initially was the enfranchisement of 735,000 black male voters and the first blacks to be elected to the House of Representatives and the US Senate.

Later in 1870 voting rights were codified into the US Constitution with the ratification of 15th amendment which stated that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race color or previous condition of servitude.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for southern states to find ways to circumvent the 15th amendment and its promise of voting rights. As the era of slavery that served as the underpinning of institutionalized white supremacy in the South came to an end, Southerners sought the redemption of institutionalized white supremacy by transforming slavery into black codes, sharecropping, and Jim Crow. As it relates to voting, white Southerners used both legal means to disenfranchise black voters and extralegal means that included economic retaliation, terror, corruption, mayhem and outright murder.

The “legal” means by which Black men were disenfranchised included such mechanisms as poll taxes and literacy tests. These were measures that were exclusively applied to black voters. But what about the 14th amendment? Didn’t that guarantee that the law would be applied equally to both black and white voters? Well… Yes, but the southern redeemers were nothing if not creative. While technically working within the letter of the law, white southerners devised a way to apply the law equally and still ensure that black men were kept from the polls. The solution was the grandfather clause.

Many mistakenly believe that the grandfather clause was a voting qualification – that if your grandfather could vote that qualified you to vote. That’s not quite the way it was applied. In practice, it was actually used as a voting exemption in order to get around the fact that there were plenty of poor whites in the South who were not able to pay a poll tax or pass a literacy test. If that were the case, then by the provisions of the grandfather clause, one could be exempted from having to pass a literacy test if one’s grandfather was able to vote (a caveat that applied to no southern black voter in the era of Reconstruction). Creative… Diabolical, but creative.

In a second wave of disenfranchisement, much of the South instituted white primaries in which whites only were able to participate in the elections that determined which candidates were on the ballot for the general election. It was a way of disenfranchising black voters which by 1920 technically included black women with the ratification of the 19th amendment. White primaries insured that that in the general election black voters would never have a candidate on the ballot that represented them or their interests.

A third wave of disenfranchisement followed that included new measures intended to disenfranchise black voters. Those consisted of vote dilution which could be achieved by either at-large elections, gerrymandering, or through selective incorporation. Holding at-large elections was a way of ensuring that black voters could never be represented in local government. Let’s say you have a city with four city Council seats to represent the population of the city. If you had a section of the city with a majority black population one would expect that you have at least one city Council seat occupied from somebody that represents that section or district. But what if you held an at-large election where the city was not broken down into districts, but held citywide with the top four candidates winning the four city Council seats. In a citywide election you have virtually no chance of electing someone that represents a minority district.

Another way to dilute a black voting block is through gerrymandering. Through gerrymandering, it’s possible to take this one majority black district and by being a bit creative in terms of where in terms of where the lines are drawn create four districts with a black minority.

Or similar gerrymandering I could selectively incorporate an unincorporated area of the town so as to dilute the black voting block.

So as we can see, where there is a will to disenfranchise black voters folks the existing power structure bent on preserving its power will find a way.

As various means of disenfranchising black voters were devised black political organizations have vigorously challenged those attempts, and they were often successful… Until new measures were devised… And then those measures were challenged. Rinse repeat.

One of the first challenges came in 1915 when the NAACP mounted a legal assault on the grandfather clause. In a major victory, the Supreme Court in 1915 declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional. Later the Supreme Court outlawed, the white primary in Smith vs Allwright in 1944. Yet the struggle continued.

The struggle for black voters to be free of literacy tests, poll taxes, arbitrary rules, and raw terror was a bruising one that claimed many lives along the way. It was fought through mass mobilization, direct action, and countless individual acts of courage in the face of state sanctioned violence.

A major milestone in that struggle, though, was the voting rights act of 1965. In addition to outlawing poll taxes and literacy tests, it also included a provision that would prove critical to the voting rights struggle – the preclearance provision.

Section 5 of the voting rights act provided that certain states with a history of voting discrimination had to apply to the US Justice Department or the US District Court before making any changes in election laws or procedures. That gave federal jurisdiction and oversight that was intended to ensure that future rule changes wouldn’t negatively impact or discriminate against a particular class of voters. Although the act required periodic renewal by Congress, it was renewed 1970, and again 1975, and yet again in 1982, when the coverage formula was extended to 25 years. And in 2006 the voting rights act was extended for another 25 years.

During that time, various attempts to establish new discriminatory voting restrictions such as ID requirements had been kept at bay.

In 2003, the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the voting rights act in Shelby County vs Holder when it struck down the preclearance provision and struck down section 4B, which established what jurisdictions are subject to preclearance based on their histories of voter discrimination.

With that oversight out of the way, it took the state of Texas all of two hours to implement a discriminatory voter ID law that required a state issued ID with an expiration date.

In addition to the fact that black folks are disproportionately represented among the nondriving population and are less likely to possess a ID in the form of a driver’s license, the types of IDs that were deemed suitable were clearly aimed at particular demographic. Gun licenses, for example, were considered acceptable identification whereas student ID cards were not.

A similar voter identification law in North Carolina was blocked by the court even after the preclearance provision was struck down when an appeals court court found that the law’s provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Given the intense struggle for voting rights over the decades, It’s worth exploring how might we best leverage the vote. There are basically two types of things that the general public votes on; local initiatives like city measures, and state ballot initiatives,
Or people to represent and legislate on behalf of constituent communities be that city council, mayor, state representative, Congress member, or the president. For the purpose of this video we’re just going to focus on representatives. So, in leveraging your vote you might consider how you are represented.

Of the three basic types of representation most commonly modeled by political scientists, descriptive representation assesses the extent to which the representative body looks like the people in a demographic sense. If it’s important to you that the city council or Congress be representative in terms of people of color women or LGBT folks, then you may be interested in leveraging your vote based on those candidates that you deem need representation demographically. That doesn’t take into account what their political stances are, though. Sure, there may be black folks on the city council, but does that automatically mean that they represent my interest?

Symbolic representation addresses the extent to which people have confidence or trust in their representative. It’s similar to descriptive representation, but it has more to do with one’s feelings about what the representative symbolizes as opposed to what they descriptively look like. The symbols can be arbitrary and not necessarily related to actual policy positions, though. For example, if symbolic representation were important to you, would you be more inclined to vote for a a candidate who also happens to be involved in church leadership as opposed to… say… a person who was formerly incarcerated and has since dedicated their life to community service?

Lastly, substantive representation deals with the extent to which laws passed by the legislature or representative correspond to the policy interests of the people. That doesn’t necessarily take into account what the representative looks like or what they symbolize.
Given that since the Johnson administration black voters have been the most to loyal demographic within the Democratic Party with 80% of the black population voting Democratic, theoretically that should give black folks a degree of leverage within the party based on based on balance of power theory. Theoretically, in any election in which the white vote is fairly evenly divided black voters can and have determined the outcome. In fact, as far back as the Carter administration, no Democratic president has won the majority of the white vote with Pres. Carter gaining 48% of the white vote, Clinton gaining 39% and 44% in his two terms in 1992 and 96 respectively, and Barack Obama garnering 43% and 39% of white voters in his two terms as president. So the last three Democratic presidents were elected on the strength of black voters, but even given that fact, it’s questionable whether whether democratic administrations have manifested in substantive representation.
If substantive representation is important, then one must also question whether to vote at all if the representative doesn’t substantively and represent your interest. Keeping all that in mind, here are a couple of thoughts from recent discussions that address different theories in terms of leveraging one’s vote.

In the first, professor Khalid Alexander of Pillars of the Community discusses the problems associated with voting for someone who doesn’t substantively represent your interests. In the second, Maurice Moe Mitchel, the National Director of the Working Families Party discusses the dilemma of voting for the lesser of two evils. Links to the full discussion are in the description below.

The concept of civic engagement in general, and the idea of building black power and what is Black Power mean, in the context of the white political system. And so, like I said, it’s more of an organic conversation. pillars of the community. This right here, where we’re eating right now is called Community spot. We don’t really have our political education classes. We don’t have any particular viewpoint agenda or ideology, except for shit is complex. Okay. And so we have these conversations, we’re looking for the complexities of it. And we’re not here trying to teach what’s right or what’s wrong. We’re really how can you delve into the complexities of issues and the topics that we deal with the series that we’re getting ready for the first night is going to be around the concept of civic engagement in general, as you all know, we have elections coming up and November with a few kind of important choices that people will be making. And so we see this kind of opportunity to bring community members together and be able to understand what are the implications to either being involved in that system or deciding not to be involved in that system? I always concerned civic engagement. Civic Engagement is voting. And based on that I didn’t want anything to do with civic engagement. I thought voting was a waste. Understand, it’s important that as a union, those types of things, we’re voting electing people that aren’t going to represent me that aren’t going to represent my country, and don’t even care about me or my concern. So why would I be at all interested in being on this bus? What am I going to say on the day of judgment? If I’m involved in electing someone that ends up doing as moral religious person, if I end up electing someone that’s gonna end up creating chaos that’s going to be responsible for the murder that’s going to be responsible for incarceration into slavery, people in other parts of the world, right. So these are some of the ideas and thoughts that were going through my mind when I was thinking of engagement. What I didn’t realize it’s like the sister was saying, that’s not what civic engagement civic engagement isn’t on the voting. Right. It’s being involved in having a love for your community, seeing things that you see that you don’t, that you think to be change, and doing something to change them. So again, going back to my original views, as far as voting, I wasn’t like an anti coder. But if somebody if I was walking along campus, this is just two years ago as a professor, and they’re like, Can you sign this? Are you are you registered to vote?

I said, No, I don’t believe in political voting system. But then, as I began to get involved in the larger kind of concept of civic engagement and work with other organizations, I got invited to an event the ACLU put on in Sacramento. That was around incarceration. I think, actually, when we were in the lobby that we went up there, and I’m like, Look, they’re talking about the same issues that we’re talking about. At that same time, there was a prop proposition called prop 47. The proposition didn’t change some of the arcade because it didn’t it didn’t attack the system directly, as much as it could have. But it was heavy for me. The first time that I was actually actually the first time that I I might have voted when I first turned 18 because my mom pregnant, right? But since 18, That was the first year that I ever voted. And that was the only thing I voted for.

But the the the word white supremacy of the of the republicans is so offensive to most black people that it’s like a bridge too far. Right, which works, which is what safely keeps the black people as Democrats. It’s one of the reasons why democrats take take black voters for granted. Right, right, like, what do you come up right? And then because basically half of the country has to choose one of these things. In the democratic coalition. We got all types of folks of all types of all types of political persuasions, people who, who are radicals who ultimately like go to vote and they vote for Democrats, right? So often, don’t talk about it.

Listen, like I want to be clear.

There’s a, there’s a I’d love to have this debate, but we don’t have time for it.

Right? In a winner takes all two party system. I’m not like when the choice is Trump and whoever the democrats going to be voting for that democrat organizer. I’m voting for which terrain of struggle do I want to be? Do I want to be because I’m organizing 24, seven 360 days I’m gonna be voting up organizing for the electorate during the election after the election. Is it more advantageous for my long term political position and for my community, to organize under a Trump presidency, which is what we know would be or some run of the mill democratic neoliberal president, right. That’s what I’m debating. And I think it’s a legitimate thing to decide what you want to do. But what you’re not saying is to me when I go I’m not saying I like this person. I believe in them. I’m placing my political thinking

So what are your thoughts? Should black people vote? Under what circumstances? What’s your theory for best leveraging the vote? I’d love to engage in some dialogue in the comments below. As always, thank you for watching and if you’re so inclined please drop this video a “like” and consider subscribing. Until next time I’m Darius Spearman.