Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 17: Georgian Jim Crow, 2021

Republicans today know that blocking access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes.

Historian Jason Morgan Ward explains the precedents for Georgia's new voter suppression law in Georgia’s Voter Law Is Called ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ for a Reason New York Times 03/31/2021.

The Republicans' current stream of voter suppression laws and related chicanery is the same basic approach used by the enemies of Reconstruction after the Civil War to justify the disenfranchisement of black citizens. The disenfranchisement was de facto. The 14th Amendment flatly banned denying people the right to vote based on race.

So they used direct violence and threats along with laws and electoral practices that drastically reduced the number of African-American voters. This is important, because one Republican defense of the current round of voter-suppression laws is that they are not like the practices in former Confederate states during the Jim Crow era because none of the current laws specifically ban African-Americans from voting. The post-Reconstruction voter suppression didn't do that, either.

As Ward writes of voter suppression then and now:

The methods in the fight against voting rights have a common objective — an electorate narrowed along predictable and demonstrable fault lines. Many present-day proponents of voting restrictions are quick to distance themselves from the racist aims and attitudes of their forebears, but the most durable and enduring attacks on voting rights have long cloaked their goals in race-neutral language — at least in writing. [my emphasis]

And referring to the combination of violence and legalistic suppression of votes through most of the 20th century, he refers to former Georgia Gov. Eurgenen Talmadge in the 1940s:

Mr. Talmadge egged on supporters who intimidated and attacked Black voters, but his most enduring and effective tactics look much more like present-day voter suppression tactics. As the Emory researcher Hannah Charak has documented, Mr. Talmadge quietly collaborated with sympathetic local officials on illegal registration purges and blanketed the state with “challenge forms” that white residents could use to dispute Black votes.

Voter suppression tactics like literacy tests and Georgia’s infamous county unit system delivered racist leadership like Mr. Talmadge (and his son) while withstanding legal challenges and Supreme Court rulings for decades in part because such measures commonly avoided mention of race. [my emphasis]

The linked article on the county unit system summarizes its effect this way, "In effect, the system of allotting votes by county, with little regard for population differences, allowed rural counties to control Georgia elections by minimizing the impact of the growing urban centers, particularly Atlanta."